Hello, my lovey!
As you know, I am Mel Trumble, creator of ZFG Living, where you can learn how to utilize your resources (the F in ZFG) in a way to serve yourself so you can better share your strengths. Your time, money, energy, care, concern, your brilliance, all of you are your currency. Just as an airplane’s oxygen mask goes on yourself before you help others with theirs, ya gotta recognize your value and use your precious fucks for YOURself, YOUR goals.
Where oh where can you find me, I hear you wail—fear not, my clever hominid lovey! I am @trumblemelissa on IG, trumblemelissa on the Twit, zfg living on FB. Natch you can connect with me on www.zfgliving.com to get into the bloggery and such–there’s also a link to my book there.
I help brilliant people build joyous and authentic life journeys—I’m all about upping resilience and self-awareness using your individual resources so social skills, anxiety, personal connection, all the fuckery and shenanigans that trip us up can be moved the hell outta the way.
I’m all bout helping my loveys live joyously and authentically.
Walk with me as I share a tactic I use to deal with socializing, whether in a professional or a social capacity. This is only a couple minutes to rock out. Just as discipline is a simple concept, so is connecting with people. Both can be hard to put into practice and it gains ease with time.
Remember, it isn’t social talent—it’s social skillzz and they can be learned, practiced, and integrated into your formidable toolbox for dealing with humanity. By humanity I refer to your journey as a human as well as how you deal with other humans. Please serve yourself by letting me know what affect you will adopt to ignite those social skills this week.
Share this with your friends who can use this cuz it’s ridonculously helpful. It will help them with finding some joy in dealing with humanity. Let’s get into it!
What is your biggest struggle building connections with other people? Perhaps anxiety kicks you in the teeth, or interactions drain your energy (shout out to my fellow introverts—I see you), might you expect the interaction to be negative (self-fulfilling prophecy, anyone?). Gimme a clue if it’s something else—throw me a reply, puhleeze.
The most effective way I have found for glossing over my trifecta of anxiety, introversion, and propensity to pop off with wild comments is simply this:
1. Put on an approachable face and LISTEN. Listen to what others are saying.
2. Make eye contact every so often.
3. Ask questions so you better understand (yes, even if you don’t care).
4. Rock some empathy and try to see the situation through their perspective.
Default judgments are not helpful when connecting to people. That puts a wall up, prevents connection.
5. Mind your facial expression. Your Spock-esque demeanor may not present as neutral. ~Ahem~
If your affect shows you want to shoot a flaming arrow into your foot rather than listen to another minute of someone’s thoughts ~quelle surprise~ they know it.
Your disdain may not be for the person (just the flawed logic) but it just reads as disdain. Healthy people who could up your joy factor won’t come around for seconds of that.
And remember, we serve ourselves when we connect with others, especially those unlike ourselves.
Broadening our ability to see events and individuals through more than our narrow slice of experience, that’s the magic of living, right there!
In doing so, we also flirt with seeing ourselves through others’ perspectives. Interacting with people in an effort to understand their thoughts while not applying your beautiful reason and logic may McSuck at first. If you stick with it and make it a habit, personal relationships will blossom–no self betrayal in being open to how others arrive at conclusions with which you disagree.
The goal here is to build relationships. Having a network allows us to lean on the hive mind of our peeps, cuz **Guess What** others know more about some things than we do.
Hubris exits stage left.
To sum up, if you want to improve your interpersonal connection, if you believe your life could stand more joy, rock this!
Develop an affect that is welcoming.
a. Season with CDE sub f:
i. Contact, lovey, eye contact
ii. Defer judgment
iii. Empathize with them,
1. Figure out why they think how they do
We find what we seek, so let’s seek us some joy!
Hugs,
Mel