Celebrating Breaking the Pattern of Not Asking for Help & More.
Conversations with Georgie #25
Happy Tuesday afternoon on this medium-summery day⛅. It seems we had our summer in June only 😟. This letter is an attempt to capture my thoughts, feelings and experiences from the last 6 ish weeks and convert them into ideas, reflections and stories that might get us closer connected. Enjoy a 5 minute read (maybe with with my favourite drink ☕). I love replies! 📧
👇Feeling alive and colourful (in all the ways) during adventures at Nowhere, a Burner event I attended in July.
👋 Hello Friends,
It’s been another rich month-ish fuelled with adventures, internal reflections and disappointment.
Yes, you read that right! Disappointment - an emotion I don’t feel like to feel. 😞
I’ve been facing the reality that I can’t do it all and don’t want to. This month I’m celebrating breaking the pattern of not asking for help, and learning to let go of the potential I see possible. I’d rather keep working to make something work, than give up. A gift and curse, I’m realising….
I wonder what emotion you most resist? And what mechanisms you have in place to stop you feeling it?
I’ve written about other things this month too, so feel free to scroll down to whatever you’re most called to.
1. Thinking About… Connection as a Garden🪴
2. What I am Celebrating 🙌
i. 🆘 Breaking the Pattern of Not Asking For Help ii. 🩷 Friendship
3. Announcing… My Upcoming Programme
4. Consumable Delights 😋
i. 🎵 Music - Beirut by Ibrahim Maalouf ii. Film - Good luck to you. Leo Grande
5. A Parting Thought📝 - by Maya Angelou
Thanks, as always, for reading (and responding!). 🙏
Sending (Virtual) Hugs, Love & A Warm Smile,
Georgie 🤗💜
1. Thinking About… Connection as a Garden 🪴
Since Peter and I ran our last UCL session, I’ve started to think about how might we use this analogy of cultivating a garden to help us think about human connection…🪴
- 🌱For plants to flourish, they need to be potted well at the beginning with the right nutrients. We focused a lot of our attention on the first week the students arrived, carefully designing a set of experiences and interventions that ensured that students felt safe to break through the barriers of superficial conversation, and homophily not just once but multiple times. It’s harder to break unhelpful norms once you’ve built them.
- 🧑🌾 All gardens need gardener(s) to flourish. Who is the gardener when it comes to human connection? Who is actually taking responsibility and actively thinking about the problem? Through consistent interactions over the year with the university, we always kept human connection top of mind. What gets attention, tends to get prioritised.
- 🌼 Flowers take time to bloom, and not bloom all at once. Connecting doesn’t produce results immediately. You might most experience the value of connection when you’re stressed at midnight, stuck on a group assessment and need someone to help you rewrite your code, or when you need someone to help you practise for interviews, or as a shoulder to cry on when you fail the weekly tests. We helped the students understand the different kinds of value they could bring each other and kept inviting them over the year to break out of their friendship circles and keep diversifying who they connected to.
2. What I am Celebrating 🙌
This section is an experimental way for me to practice the challenge of self-celebration, feel into the experience of pride and gratitude for good things happening in life. Hopefully, it will encourage you too to outwardly celebrate achievements in your own life!
i. Breaking the Pattern of Not Asking For Help 🆘
I have a tendency to take on too much, in the name of trying to fulfil the potential I see possible in the world.
Recently, I became hyper-aware of this problem when my relationship to a project I loved contributing to started to fill me with resentment, stress and fear. As I noticed blaming thoughts arise outwards, I instead tried to turn my focus to myself in a compassionate but direct way…
How are my beliefs and behaviour contributing to me feeling overwhelmed?
We contribute to the patterns that exist in our lives, consciously or unconsciously. It may not be our fault, but it is our responsibility to seek to change these.
The answer came quite clearly. Looking back over my life, I’ve always worn multiple hats with no-one having real visibility of them all. And I’ve never been an advocate of giving up - both a gift and a curse.
No-one really understands what I have taken on, and because I am just problem-solving and not voicing my challenges, it is really hard for people to know that I need help or how to help me. And I’m not voicing these because I have a story that is easier to get the stuff done myself than have to rely on others. It also protects me from an emotion I don’t like to feel - disappointment.
It is a not a sustainable way to live. Nor a joyous one. I realised I needed to change my pattern by finding a way to share my honest experience, in an owned but also a vulnerable way. I feel reasonably strongly that I will always find a way, so admitting that I can’t do something feels quite vulnerable.
It took me a couple of drafts to find the words, and help along the way. It was especially valuable to hear feedback from a friend who said:
‘I simultaneously admire and want to challenge the level of personal responsibility you're taking in this message. I think you're being hard on yourself and careful with others, but it does feel authentic and real… I have a curiosity about how it would be to write this message purely from the heart, without worrying about using all the right communication tools, self-awareness, and a vision of hope.’
A beautiful reminder that asking for help doesn’t need to be perfectly polished, but in fact the opposite is true - it's a protection and control mechanism to ensure the outcome rather than surrendering to the process.
I imagine that feels scary not to just to me, but maybe also to you?
I re-drafted the message, and feeling tightness in my stomach, decided to let go and send it a group of friends involved in the project.
Within minutes, people responded with care and appreciation for my honesty 🤗. Relief.
A dinner was organised, where I was witnessed shared my challenges so people started to understand more. More relief and gratitude came as some initiatives and actions were proposed and owned by individuals. It is a little too early to say that it is sorted, but I am also starting to face the reality that even with help, the potential I had imagined might not be realised. And that is okay. Giving up on some visions might allow space for other beautiful things to come through.
I’m feeling proud of taking the first step(s). I can feel that this marks an important moment in my future of co-creating with others; realising it is okay for me to lean in and ask for help, and getting used to letting go of the outcome.
ii. Friendship 🩷
Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends’.
-CS Lewis
July provided me with a beautiful opportunity to live with one of one my closest friends, Haneen. Ending months of friendship-by-calls, voicenotes and brief encounters across the world (she was nomading) and deepening our friendship through quality time - my love language.
Being able to hanging out with each other spontaneously and joyously, created positive ripples throughout other parts of our lives. My routine inspired her to build a routine that supported her self-care, which in turn helped her work performance. We held daily space for each other to digest our respective daily emotions and thoughts as they arose. She got me laughing many times every day. I felt seen, and was able to laugh at myself much more (on the second evening she came home to find me gardening in the dark with my Iphone torch… because I couldn’t wait to redesign my balcony 🪴!). I felt less need to go out and we spent more time in, just chilling.
Building on last month’s letter about designing life for relationships, I started researching about how physical proximity really is so fundamentally important. When I think back to some of my most socially connected happy periods at school, university, in the Universities Officer Training Corps at university, I saw the same people every week if not everyday. Without much scheduling, connection was the norm. And it made me happier.
One study that found that friends living within a mile of each other are 25 percent more likely to feel happy. It is also clear that friendship has life-sustaining properties and has been shown to improve physical health as well as mental health.
It seems like the benefits are endless so I especially enjoyed reading You'd Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don't You? and digesting the writer’s theories on why this is such a problem: We’re Not Socialized to Prioritize Friendship, The Friends, They’re Scattered, It’s the Housing Market, Stupid, Job Lock, Many States Aren’t Safe — For So Many Reasons, You Actually Do Kind of Have This, But It’s Still Slightly Out of Reach, We Seek Solutions Within the Family Unit — Not Outside of It. Although based on the USA, I see and feel the challenges of most of these theories here too.
I think I share a fantasy written by Matei in an Atlantic piece Live Closer to Your Friends:
Sometime during the pandemic lockdowns, I began to nurture a fantasy: What if I were neighbors with all of my friends? Every day, as I took long walks through North Vancouver that were still nowhere near long enough to land me at a single pal’s doorstep, I would reflect on the potential joys of a physically closer network. Wouldn’t it be great to have someone who could join me on a stroll at a moment’s notice? Or to be able to drop by to cook dinner for a friend and her baby? How good would it be to have more spontaneous hangs instead of ones that had to be planned, scheduled, and most likely rescheduled weeks in advance?
Right now I’m leaning into this new-ish idea of the 15-minute city. Access matters. What if everything we really needed often was within 15 minutes - include work, school, child care, groceries and maybe even health care? And friendship?
👉 What are your experiences of proximity in friendship - living in a city or perhaps even outside of it? How often do you spontaneously cross paths with friends? Or is everything pre-scheduled?
3. Announcing… My Upcoming Programme
I’m excited to put back on my trainer hat 🎩 in September, for the next in person and virtual intake for the Transformational Conversations Programme 🔥. I’m still in touch with participants from previous courses, and remain delighted how much of an impact it continuous to have, not just on individuals’ conversations but on how they experience life. Everytime I receive a testimonial like this I feel full of pride and it only inspires me to run more!
It is really hard to distill this workshop into a few sentences but I will try as it has been transformative for me. I've come to notice the importance of having a life full of curiosity and being free to explore and identify multiple dimensions within a conversation is unreal. I am left blown away by the experience. I have learned so much that I hope to not forget. Please take this course, do yourself a favour and everyone you know and meet will appreciate it. This is a must have skill.
If you’re curious about how to develop the meta-skill of conversation, then come along to a 90-mins virtual taster over the next few weeks: 15th & 21st August, 6th & 11th September.
Programme Dates:
🇬🇧 3-Day In Person Workshop + 4 Week Online Group Coaching: 6-8th / 6-30th Oct
💻 Virtual 6 Week Programme: 26th Sep - 31st October (Tues evenings, UK time)
👉 Full Programme Information Here - please check out the slides.
✅ Apply -please complete this 4-min form. I'll get back to you to arrange a short call so we can explore and discuss if the programme is right for you.
4. Consumable Delights 😋
🎵 i. Music - Beirut by Ibrahim Maalouf (🙏 to Oliver for exposing me to this beautiful artist). I’ve been listening to his album as I write this and every track is ridiculously rich.
🎦 ii. Film - Good luck to you, Leo Grande (🙏 to Joshua for recommending). A really fun and thought-provoking film about a retired school teacher (Emma Thompson) hiring a young sex-worker for some sexual adventures.
5. A Parting Thought📝
When I’m writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we’re capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I’m trying for that. But I’m also trying for the language. I’m trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for what it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and the delicacies of our existence.”
– Maya Angelou, via Liberal Arts
This quote encapsulates why I love language and conversation so much - it helps me get closer to the nature and truth of experience.
Celebrating you in your various becomings! The 15 min city ideal is so real. Ps: Beirut album is so great 😍
Wow-- so many good thoughts and reflections. Especially to show the treasure that's created when you take the time and effort to follow/work-through an initial seed of an idea into its various implications and nuances. Great, but also challenging, to read.