From the podcast Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle, Social Wealth Strategist, a practitioner who designs connection at work.
Opening
You can be followed by thousands and have no one to call on a hard day. My guest spent five years building a global community, and then set out to understand why so many of us still feel like spectators in our own connections.
The idea
Monika Jiang is a writer, facilitator and community builder who spent five years building the community at the House of Beautiful Business as it grew from a conference into a global network.
Watching thousands of members seek belonging taught her that the hunger runs deep, so when her chapter there ended she followed her curiosity into the feelings we usually keep quiet, and began creating spaces where people can speak honestly about what they feel.
She has hosted gatherings in Berlin, Lisbon and Madrid, including one with thirty two men that showed her how much such spaces are needed. With her co-host she opened a circle around masculinity, and the conversation carried itself, the men arriving at one state and leaving in another entirely.
She also brought research into our talk, describing work on boys and young men showing that around the age of seven or eight many begin to learn that closeness with other boys is not manly, and she recommended a Belgian film called Close that depicts that confusion.
Her learnings about our digital lives are the ones I return to most.
“when you're going on social media, map the people, even just the 12 to 15 people who are really important to you, and look them up first”,
she told me.
because the feed will not show you your closest people anyway, and half of them will not have posted.
She pairs that with a harder question, what if we centred our lives more around friendship, and what if we let friendships end honestly rather than fading out, naming the change so that space opens for new people.
Her deepest insight came from her own epiphany, realising she had been so occupied with work that she had lost the sense of who she was without it, and that the loneliness underneath was partly the absence of herself.
Coming back to the relationships that matter, she says, began with coming back to who she is.
What I took from it
Monika's story felt like a mirror.
When I finally went deep into my own feelings after moving to Canada during lockdown, I came out the other side understanding that I had been missing a version of me that had gone quiet, and hearing her describe the same epiphany made me tear up a little.
Her map your people practice has genuinely changed how I use social media, because I look for my twelve to fifteen first now and often close the app afterwards, richer for it. I also hold her question about ending friendships honestly.
I have let too many fade without a word, and I am practising a better goodbye.
Three things to try this week
- Map your twelve to fifteen. Write down the people who matter most, by name, from memory, and then let that map guide where your attention and your messages go this week.
- Look your people up first. Next time you open a social app, search for one of them and engage there before the feed takes you anywhere else.
- Practise one honest pause. Sit with a question you have been avoiding, take a walk with it, and let the answer arrive in its own time, the way Monika describes.
Watch and go deeper
The player below carries our full conversation, and watching it gives you her story in her own words. You can watch the conversation in the player below. To learn more about the guest, visit Monika Jiang.
You can also find the guest on Monika Jiang on LinkedIn.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks.
Go deeper with the research
Mapping your people is the first practice of designing a social ecosystem on purpose, and the frameworks behind it are at the Social Health in Professional Leadership Certification . If your feed disappeared tomorrow, would your people still know how to find you?