From the podcast Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle, Social Wealth Strategist, a practitioner who designs connection at work.
Opening
Some people walk into a room and feel the lighting, the mood and the unspoken tension before anyone speaks. My guest has built her work around that way of experiencing the world, and around the leaders who live it.
The idea
Rachel Radway is a coach and facilitator based in California who specialises in high sensory leaders, and the author of a book on high sensory perception.
The trait is global, present in roughly 20 to 30 percent of the population, with around 70 percent of those people introverts, and it means perceiving more, other people's energy, sound, light, temperature, smell, all of it, and often being wired a little differently.
The most common thing she hears from the women she works with is that they feel alone with it, that their brains do not work like other people's and nobody around them is reacting the same way.
So she built the GRIT Collaborative, a small mastermind named for grace, resilience, intuition and trust. Its first session taught her something every community builder should hear.
She knew every woman in the room individually, warm, kind, empathetic, and yet
“It really just takes time, especially when you have a group who are primarily introverts, to build up that feeling of psychological safety”.
Silence.
What she learned is that psychological safety is not transferred by the facilitator, it is built over time, especially with introverts, and you have to hold the space and create ways for people to become human to each other before depth arrives. Her own connection rhythms are instructive too.
She lives in a small town, prefers one to one contact, and deliberately schedules real conversations with friends spread across the world every few days.
On digital life she is clear about her boundaries, no video calls after six in the evening, and a preference for actual phone calls over the exhausting back and forth of texting. Her closing gift was about reconnection.
She told me about a client who had lost touch with a dear friend and feared reaching out, and her advice was simple, get out of your own way, because chances are the other person will be thrilled, and put yourself in the place of the receiver imagining the gift of a letter at the door.
What I took from it
I recognised myself in parts of this conversation I did not expect to. Like Rachel I have moved more than fifty times is her story, not mine, but the intuition part landed, that sense of reading a room and feeling energies that others seem not to notice.
What I valued most was her honesty about the silent first session. I have brought wonderful people together in circle and watched the silence happen, assumed my warmth would carry the room, and learned the same lesson, that safety is built, not bestowed.
Her letter writing advice also arrived at exactly the right moment for me, and I have since used it more than once.
Three things to try this week
- Send one reconnection message this week to someone you have been afraid to reach out to, and imagine them delighted rather than awkward before you press send.
- Post one letter. Handwrite a short note to a friend or family member and put it in the mail, because receiving it is a gift they did not expect.
- Give your group time. If you bring people together and the first session is quiet, do not conclude it failed, design the second one and let safety accumulate.
Watch and go deeper
The player below carries our full conversation, and watching it gives you her insights in her own words. You can watch the conversation in the player below. To learn more about the guest, visit Rachel Radway.
You can also find the guest on Rachel Radway on LinkedIn.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks.
Go deeper with the research
Connection skills like these can be learned and practised, which is the foundation of the work you can read about at the research behind this work . Whose letterbox could use your handwriting this month?