From the podcast Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle, Social Wealth Strategist, a practitioner who designs connection at work.
Opening
Most of our friends look suspiciously like us, similar age, similar stage, similar playlists. My guest has arranged her life differently, and she says it has changed everything, including her health.
The idea
Nim de Swardt grew up in a tree house in the rainforest of North Queensland, Australia, became a photographer whose camera was her passport to human connection, and went on to live across four continents and travel to more than 64 countries.
Today she is an intergenerational connection expert and the co-founder of Reconnect, a deck of conversation cards born from eight years of research.
Her argument is that we are living in the most age diverse moment in human history while doing almost nothing with it, and that connecting across generations is scientifically shown to improve our health at every age. Her own life is the proof.
She describes having an unofficial board of directors, a board of modern elders who offer counsel that no social media post could provide, and she is quick to name the exchange as two way.
“I have an unofficial board of directors in my life, a board of modern elders”,
she told me.
and she gives back her energy and her innovation in return. Her corporate story shows what that looks like at scale.
At thirty she was the youngest direct report to a seventy year old CEO of a sixteen billion dollar company, and together they built a global programme of mutual mentorship across the organisation, her innovation and speed meeting his wisdom and experience.
She studied with Chip Conley and the Modern Elder Academy, and even taught their first intergenerational wisdom sharing workshop in Mexico.
The cards grew from the same insight, that in Western cultures we have lost the art of sharing stories across the ages, and that a simple physical deck gives people permission to go deeper.
She has watched a whole conference room ignite when strangers were handed one question each, and she watched me play the deck with my own mother during a visit, hearing things we had never asked each other before.
What I took from it
I felt seen in this conversation in a way that surprised me. Like Nim I have lived across continents, and like her I am learning that the return matters as much as the journey.
Her board of modern elders made me count my own, the older friends and mentors whose counsel has steadied me through moves, career changes and raising children far from family.
Playing her cards with my mum, who was visiting us in Canada, remains one of my favourite memories of this whole podcast, because we asked each other things twenty years of love had somehow never asked. Intergenerational friendship, I realised, is not charity in either direction, it is mutual wealth.
Three things to try this week
- Adopt one modern elder this month. Identify one person a generation away from you whose counsel you respect, and invite them for a coffee with one genuine question ready.
- Play one question at your next family meal. Ask each person, including the elders, something you have never asked them, and let the story run.
- Offer your wisdom downstream too. Mentor one person earlier in their journey than you, and notice that the exchange runs both ways, exactly as Nim describes.
Watch and go deeper
The player below carries our full conversation, and watching it gives you her stories in her own words. You can watch the conversation in the player below. To learn more about the guest, visit Nim de Swardt.
You can also find the guest on Nim de Swardt on LinkedIn.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks.
Go deeper with the research
Intergenerational friendship is one of the richest forms of Social Wealth I write about, and you can go deeper at the research behind this work . Who is the modern elder you have not asked yet?