Connecting with our people is vital to the human psyche. The question is: How can we nurture this connection without losing ourselves? How can we use this connection to fill us instead of drain us? Great ideas and examples of exactly how to do this in this episode!

MM552 – Connect with Your People

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of Motivate Me!

It’s Me! Time here on Motivate Me! and we are working on coming back from flat.

Before we start, let’s get into the right headspace. Let’s engage in the idea that this is time where YOU are the priority. Let’s take two slow, deep breaths to get us centered. Just follow me.

Today’s focus is: Connect with Your People

Today we’re going to talk about the importance of connecting with your people and its role in helping you reclaim your passion. How doing this can help you get your head and heart back in the game!

First, let’s talk about why we should connect with our people, and then we’ll talk about how.

Every action we take in life is done out of either fear or love. Fear is what holds us back and love is what propels us forward.

Connecting with friends and family is all about love and it serves multiple purposes.

For one, it clears our conscience. It clears our conscience because we know that our friends and family are doing well, because they know we care, because we are pulling our weight in our relationships. It keeps us grounded, and it’s good for our soul because caring about others is a form of service.

We have to have a clear conscience if we’re trying to achieve our own goals. I don’t know about you, but if something or someone’s on my mind, I can’t focus to meditate or read or write or create anything. However, when I sit down with a clear mind and feel good that I put effort into my relationships, I’m much more creative and productive.

It’s similar to when we talked in another episode about how much easier it is to focus on our wants and needs when our other responsibilities have been met, like how when the house is clean, the family is fed, and the day job is in order.

Now, there’s two types of relationships we’re reaching out to when we connect with our people: one is those people who fill us with all the feel-good hormones, and the other is those that drain us. The thing is, sometimes we have relationships that are draining and we aren’t willing to walk away from them. That’s fine, I’m not here to lecture you on your relationships. I’m here to say that you need to do whatever it takes for you to free up your headspace.

For many of us this means making sure we’re playing our part in our relationships. And if some of these people are the kind that bring you down, that’s fine, just mentally prepare yourself for those people and know that you need to keep an emotional distance. It’s not that you don’t care about them, it’s that you don’t allow them to consume you. Chances are, these are the relationships you most need to nurture in order to keep a clear mind.

Either way, back to you! So, if you’ve been following our steps for Season 4, you’ve been journaling and writing and playing with your craft. You’ve gathered some materials that will help you explore your passions more, and you’ve been making yourself a priority. That’s awesome, and I really hope you’ve been working on this for yourself. Now it’s time to take some of that time and reinvest it in your relationships because doing so will refill you.

The quandary is: How do I make time for everyone and everything in my life and still have time and energy leftover for me?

Well, here’s a list of some simple ways you can stay connected to your people, ways that have a big impact but don’t create a big time commitment for you or them. Please don’t get me wrong, there are times when we can sit on the phone or FaceTime with friends and family, but there are also ways we can achieve a similar outcome without depleting our precious personal time.

After we discuss this list, I’m going to share a fun and unexpected ending of what happened after I took one of these ideas to task!

6 Simple Ways to Stay Connected with Your People

            1. Send an actual card or letter. This doesn’t sound super inventive, but in this day and   age it is pretty uncommon. The note can be handwritten or typed, it’s a nice gesture, it’s something you can do any time of day, and it feels nice to receive. I suggest adding a fun   sticker to the envelope or hand drawn picture, and you can also address it in a way that will make the person smile, like Jess Hottie Casiano, Justin Da man! Silva, Kelly             Awesomeness Trombley. These are actual examples… I have many more!

            2. Drop off a homemade meal or dessert. To me, it’s a small amount of effort to send a     big amount of love. And, it’s really not that time consuming to put a couple of portions of a meal you’re already making into a container and run it over to a friend’s door.

            3. Send a gift from Amazon. If you have Amazon Prime, shipping’s free. I just sent a

            pool net to my friend for her boat… she’s always leaning over the boat to scoop garbage

            from the river. What little item could you send to a friend? A funny T-shirt you know

            they’d love, a specific color of nail polish? One time a grieving friend was visiting and she took comfort in my slide-on sneakers, I surprised her and shipped her pair. She felt the love.

            4. Hide a gift for someone to find. I hid a Tennessee ornament under the Christmas tree at a friend’s house last year, since we’d both just moved here. Recently, she hid a NJ   ornament that was in her house in my bag. So small, but so big, right?

            5. Pass along news articles or tag people in things you see online. I shared an article about sharks with one friend and tagged another in a hat I knew she’d love. They felt so seen.

            6. Send a low-commitment text. A low-commitment text is one that doesn’t take much time to read or respond to.

This is the story I wanted to tell you about. I’m close with many of my nieces and nephews and no matter how crazy life gets, I try to make sure they remember that I’m here if they need me, that I care about what’s happening in their lives, that I’m interested in all they’re striving for. But at the same time, I don’t want them to feel like I’m putting expectations on them. So, a few months ago, I sent a simple text to three of my nieces and three of my nephews that said: “On a scale of 1-10, how’s things?”

Now, I’m expecting simple answers, I would have been happy with just a number in response, to be honest, but what I got was quite the surprise. My first niece said she didn’t know how she was doing yet, that she’d let me know as soon as she got out of the job interview she was about to walk into. (She told me later that she got the job, and she also shared with me that her fiancé had just been diagnosed with Covid.) A second niece responded right away with, “I’m in class what’s up, what do you need?” She’s fine but wants to know what she can do for me… while working full-time and going to college full-time. And my third niece sadly said she was only at a 5/10 because she’d been struggling with getting accepted into a master’s program.

Then I heard from the boys.

My first nephew responded that he’s at an 8 or 9 out of 10, only because he can’t live on his college campus due to Covid. But then he opened dialogue with me and seemed genuinely interested in how life’s been treating me. My second nephew asked if he could FaceTime me because he’s out in L.A., he wants to show me his new apartment, and he wants to tell me a long sorted story about an agent who wants to sign him. Then he sent me the song he’d just recorded. And my third nephew, well, he said he’s at a 5/10 because he feels he “doesn’t need to be wonderful all the time.”

Hahaha.

Wow. Right? One simple text that I sent to six people I care about, and I got a window into their worlds and they got to see that I care. I remember that I was working at the kitchen table the day I did this. I remember that doing this sidetracked me for a small period of time. And then I remember putting my nose to the grindstone feeling contentment in my heart and connection with my people.

What can you do that will give you this same sense of contentment? Who do you need to reach out to so you can quiet your subconscious?

We would love to hear your thoughts. Join us in our Private Facebook group: Motivate Me! Support System and checkout MotivateMePodcast.com for anything else.

I am going to leave you with some truth talk from me to you: Connection with others is probably the greatest need of the human psyche. We can allow this need to drain us or to we can allow it to fill us up. The thing is, there are many aspects in life we cannot control, but this is not one of them. We can get creative in how we reach out to those we love, we can put some planning into building these relationships, and if we do this, we will feel fuller than when we started and excited to get back to achieving our own goals.

Remember, you Motivate Me!

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