Opening
Connection is a skill, and like any skill it rusts when nobody uses it. You can spend two comfortable years working through screens and then feel your stomach tighten at the thought of a room full of strangers. Candice Neveu noticed the rust, and decided to practise her way out of it.
The idea
Candice Neveu is a success coach for mid-career professionals, and we met around her TEDx talk at Royal Roads University, which TED later featured and which has drawn tens of thousands of views. She returned to university herself in mid-career, so her coaching is rooted in lived experience rather than theory.
Her TEDx journey began with an intention to become more visible and to connect with more people, though the invitation itself arrived as a surprise she nearly felt too shy to share. Four months of immersion with eleven other speakers gave her something she had not expected.
Writing her own story meant revisiting the formative experience of returning to school as an adult. The talk went live while she was at a Van Gogh exhibition with her daughter, deliberately away from her computer, and her phone filled with texts as the views climbed.
The insight I keep returning to is about practice. Twenty years of working online made the distributed world comfortable, but Candice discovered that her in-person skills had weakened without her noticing.
“those skills had weakened over a couple years of just rusty use”.
Rooms of strangers now ask for deliberate practise again.
She rebuilt her community deliberately, finding her people among fellow coaches, joining business circles of women at her level, and keeping a decades-old friendship alive through video messages that carry the small currency of each other’s lives.
She treats being in unfamiliar rooms as a skill to maintain rather than a temperament to envy, and she is equally honest about the double edge of community, how comparison can creep in and pull your attention away from your own internal measure of progress.
What I took from it
Candice described my own last two years with uncomfortable accuracy. Building The Communiverse from home, I have grown fluent in virtual rooms and occasionally hesitant in physical ones.
I returned to university mid-career myself, so her TEDx story felt like a mirror, right down to the four months of immersion that changed the speaker as much as the audience.
My plan now is to treat unfamiliar rooms the way I treat research, as something to enter regularly and with curiosity rather than performance. Her warning about comparison inside supportive communities also landed hard.
I have watched study groups curdle exactly as she describes, with one person’s result quietly rewriting everyone else’s sense of enough. The fix she offers is simple and worth repeating. Check your inputs, share your bit, and leave when the energy stops being yours to carry.
Boundaries, she kept returning to, are mostly clear communication about where you can actually be found, which is itself a small act of connection rather than a wall.
Three things to try this week
- Put one unfamiliar room in your calendar this week, a talk, a class or a community meeting, and stay long enough for one real conversation.
- Rebuild one peer connection that is not a client or a colleague. Message them with something specific you remember and appreciated about their work.
- Notice where your in-person skills feel rusty and practise that exact muscle, whether it is introductions, small talk or asking for help.
Watch and go deeper
Candice lights up when she tells the TEDx story, and the moment her views climbed is worth watching. The full conversation is in the player below.
You can explore Candice’s coaching at Candice Neveu.
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