From the podcast Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle, Social Wealth Strategist, a practitioner who designs connection at work.
Opening
You have probably been told to exercise more, to sleep better, to eat well. Has anyone ever handed you guidance on your friendships? For most of my life the answer was no, and that is exactly the space my guest stepped into.
The idea
Dr Kiffer Card is a researcher focused on the social and environmental factors that shape human health, and the Scientific Director for the Canadian Alliance for Social Connection and Health.
He joined me to talk about something genuinely new, recommended national public health guidelines for social connection, the first of their kind in Canada and, as far as the team knows, in the world.
He described the rigour behind them, more than 49 evidence briefs and reviews, more than 60 interviews with key populations including marginalised and equity seeking groups, and a Delphi study with leading experts in social psychology and community design. Out of all that came twelve guidelines.
Six are written for individuals and they cover the structure of your social network, the function of it, its quality, making social connection a priority and using technology wisely. The other six are written for communities, and the split matters. As he put it, social connection is an unusual public health behaviour.
If you want to change your diet you can mostly do that alone, but connection is different.
“Social connection isn't something you can do on your own. It takes a community, it takes people”,
he said.
That framing stayed with me because it moves connection out of the self improvement aisle and into something we build together. He also shared findings that reshape how we think about the effort involved.
Around half of the variation in loneliness appears to be inherited, which means a great deal of our vulnerability sits outside our control. Our social cognition, the way we think about our relationships, is the biggest factor shaping our wellbeing, and it can be worked on.
He offered practical design ideas too, from four to five people being the number a brain can genuinely attend to at a gathering, to reciprocity as the marker of a healthy relationship.
Loneliness showed up in our conversation as a signal, a nudge pointing towards an unmet need, and the guidelines are the map for answering it.
What I took from it
I came to this conversation curious and left it feeling quietly hopeful. When I moved to Canada from the UK in 2021 I learned how much of my social world had been invisible to me until it was missing. Nobody ever taught me how to tend it.
The idea that a country might publish guidelines for connection the way we publish guidelines for nutrition felt like permission to treat my relationships as deserving of the same care as my diet or my sleep.
I also loved his reminder about reciprocity, which came through strongly in my research, with leaders expressing how tired they get of always being the instigator. Rather than talk about it, they will sometimes just stop, and the relationships naturally fall away.
Three things to try this week
- Pick one relationship that has gone quiet and reach out this week with something small, a message, a voice note or a coffee invitation. The guidelines treat connection as something you tend, and tending starts with one contact.
- Notice the give and take in one friendship. If you are always the one initiating, do not read it as rejection, use it as data and have the conversation Dr Card described, where a single honest exchange can change the whole nature of a relationship.
- Plan your next gathering for four to five people around one activity. He explained that a brain can only genuinely attend to that number, so smaller and more focused often meets everyone's needs better than bigger and louder.
Watch and go deeper
The player below carries our full conversation, and watching it gives you his examples in his own words. You can watch the conversation in the player below. To learn more about the guest, visit Canadian Alliance for Social Connection and Health.
You can also find the guest on Dr Kiffer Card on LinkedIn.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks.
Go deeper with the research
My own research with more than 1,200 leaders keeps meeting the same truth, that connection responds to attention and design rather than luck. If that idea pulls at you, you can go deeper into the research behind this work .
What would it look like if the place you lived treated connection as seriously as it treats diet?