My Uncle Harold would often say, “I’m the luckiest person in the world.” His marriage to my aunt was not ideal, but he reaped tremendous joy from his connection to our extended family. It was clearly important for him to belong, to give love and be loved, and to accept and be accepted in return. He was the patriarch of the family, like a benevolent Don Corleone.
When I had a relationship that was, let’s say, highly inappropriate for someone my age, he wrote me a letter with a dime attached (yes, kids, that’s truly how much a pay phone call cost in those days) and told me to call him if I needed to, day or night. He made me and everyone else whose life he touched feel like the most important person in the room, and he loved and was loved like no other.
My uncle is top of mind for me these days, as I’ve been thinking about how easily I get disconnected from the world around me when I get caught up in my to-do list: running my business, going to the cleaners, making the bed, paying bills, and grocery shopping. What slips to the bottom of that list? The most basic and universal need of all: social connection. It’s vital to my health and well-being—and it probably is to yours, as well.
Author Brene Brown says that we’re biologically, cognitively, physically and spirituality wired to love and be loved, to be accepted and to belong. When those needs aren’t being met, we suffer. According to one telling study, lack of social connection is a greater detriment to health than obesity, smoking, and high blood pressure – which puts me, a solo-preneur life coach, at risk for not just loneliness and depression, but also for disease and even death.
Even if you’re not a solo-preneur, you could well be at risk, too. Ironically, our culture and society value independence, inner strength, and career success. In effect, we pride ourselves on not depending on anyone. Worse, when we find ourselves thirsty for a deeper connection, we turn not to real, live people, but instead to social media or other numbing agents such as TV, a bottle of red wine, or—yes—even more work.
Somewhere along the line, we bought into the idea that needing others is a sign of weakness. The sad result is that we bury or mask our vulnerabilities, thereby denying our most fundamental needs, expressed by Brown as the need to belong, to be accepted, to be loved, and to connect.
We don’t feel we can risk exposing ourselves or living our truth because we’re afraid we’ll be judged, ridiculed, or even thrown out of the pack that we so desperately want to be a part of. So we play it safe. We talk about superficialities like the weather, squelch our true opinions and thoughts, deny our truth, and skirt the surface of social interaction without meaning or deep connection. We become less than we really are. Our lives and our spirits become smaller.
Of course, I made an effort over the years to get out of the house, have lunch with friends, take a hike in nature. But I found that those activities weren’t really satisfying my hunger to connect with like-minded women who wanted to talk about real stuff – stuff that makes you dig deep and share parts of yourself that don’t always see the sunshine.
I wanted to talk to women about what makes them get out of bed every morning, what songs they sing out loud in their car when no one is listening, what they would tell their younger self now that they’re older, wiser, and have some experience under their belt. I wanted to get beneath the surface nicety-nice layers to see other women and be seen by them. Because that’s what genuine connection looks like: being seen, feeling like we belong, being accepted, feeling loved. I can talk celebrity gossip or the drought with the best of them, but I want to know the woman that one day will be eulogized and be able to say, “She was real, I truly knew her, and she was awesome.”
This is why Kelley Wolf and I created “I’ll Have What She’s Having.” I’ll Have What She’s Having is a unique dinner experience made for women by women. It’s an evening completely devoted to engaging in more meaningful dialogue and maybe making a few friends in the process. We’ll tell stories, we’ll laugh–we might even cry–but mostly, we’ll connect. And it is our intention that, like my Uncle Harold, you will walk away feeling as though you just spent a night with family and you’re the luckiest person in the world.
Save your seat now for our next “I’ll Have What She’s Having” on June 28 in Calabasas, California.
Get all the details here.