(This advice column is a public service by me, Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. I’m a certified connection coach and have been facilitating community groups for almost twenty years. I regularly speak and lead workshops on the topics of adult friendship and cultivating healthy work teams. If you’d like to work with me, reach out on my booking contact form. If you have a question that you’d like answered in a future blog post or newsletter, instructions are at the bottom of this post.)

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I've been thinking a lot lately about how cultivating connection takes effort and sometimes we refer to this effort as work.

We say, “yes, it's hard work to maintain our friendships in adulthood” or, “yeah, it's hard work to make friends in adulthood.”

And something I've been thinking about this is the conceptualization that we have around making it work versus thinking of it in another way, partially because we live in a time where work and feeling overworked is something that a lot of folks struggle with.

And as a thought experiment, I was really considering the ways that we might be able to be a little bit more expansive and a little bit more easeful with ourselves and how we think about the effort involved.

So we don't need to turn making friends or maintaining friendships into another kind of “work work” or another way to burn yourself out.

I encourage you to think about moving in the direction of connection with the same ease with which we move in the direction of a piece of chocolate cake.

So if there is a piece of chocolate cake and we wanna get closer to it, We don't stress over the effort it takes the articulation of muscles that we have to employ in order to put our body and our mouth closer to that chocolate cake.

We just make it happen and our focus is actually on the enjoyment that is awaiting us when we get to the cake. We don't notice the inches or steps or or feet in between. We just feel the joy of the cake and we do that by focusing on how delicious it's gonna taste and how we're gonna get a lot of endorphins in our brain from eating chocolate.

We don't focus on the effort that lies in between us and the cake. We just feel the joy of the cake.

And with friendship, one way to try this is by focusing on the joy of connection as you allow yourself to drift closer to the people whose presence lifts you up.

Let your awareness shift from focusing on the steps in between you and that friend you want to connect with.

Instead, focus on the satisfaction and the love and the laughter and the empathy and the warmth that you're gonna feel on the other side of the effort it takes to get closer to it.

So rather than focusing on those steps of effort — while they are necessary! — see if you can focus instead on all the good, yummy, delicious stuff that's on the other side when you get to be connected with those friends or making those new friends.

So that's something to think about this week. Just a little tidbit you reflect on. I would love to hear if this resonates with you. If you have any feedback or thoughts, feel free to reply or message me anytime. I'd love to hear about it.

XO,
Kat