Boosting Bonds: Simple Steps to Strengthen Your Social Network

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Hi there,

We are living in stressful times. There’s no doubt about it. It’s an undercurrent in almost every interaction with others.

If you’re not feeling it, someone in your family is.

If your family’s not feeling it, someone in your neighborhood is.

If your neighbors aren’t feeling it, someone at your work is.

There’s just no escaping it.

You can put yourself on a news diet (highly recommended), limiting your exposure to headlines.

You can use an egg timer to limit the amount of energy you allow yourself to stress out about all the things.

You can just try to ignore it all by dropping into your highly curated social feeds.

But the onslaught of headlines announcing the ruptures to the status quo keeps coming fast and furious. (Pssst, you’re not alone in noticing: the shock and awe is by design.)

In anxious times like these, our social connections and close friendships provide us with the kind of anxiety- and uncertainty-reducing energy we so desperately need.

That’s the beauty of our connections: they provide insulation from outside stressors and a collective uplift within our small networks.

The world can be going to hell in a handbasket, but if you have a few close friends to find comfort with, there’s nothing you can’t withstand.

But when these social connections are found to be lacking (at best) or outright missing (at worst), we suffer.

We feel an acute sense of loneliness, no matter how many other people are in the room with us, because loneliness is that feeling of dissatisfaction with our social connections.

And this loneliness hurts.

But loneliness, like any other feeling, is transitory. It doesn’t last. And so while we’re feeling it, we can use our innate sense of curiosity as a tool to decipher why we’re feeling the way we do so we can fix the root problem.

The solution to your puzzle of loneliness starts with figuring out why you’re dissatisfied with your connections.

More on this after a word from our sponsor.

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Finding the Source of Your Loneliness

Let’s talk about the solution to figuring out why you’re feeling lonely and why you’re dissatisfied with your social connections. It starts with knowing the current state of your connections. .

If you’ve already assessed your state of connections, you’re already on the path to figuring out why.

Still haven’t done the assessment? Never fear! Here’s a different tool you can use to map out your connections, which will especially appeal to those who love a 2x2 matrix.

It comes from Sahil Bloom’s recently published book, The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.

It’s called the Relationship Map, and it utilizes a 2x2 matrix to map out your friendship ecosystem. The two axes of the map are frequency of contact and fulfillment of connection. I’ve illustrated the map below and explained it after the image.

To create your own Relationship Map, recreate the matrix on a blank piece of paper. Then, take a moment to think about each core relationship you have and ask two questions about it:

1. Is the relationship supportive, ambivalent, or demeaning?

2. Is the relationship interaction frequent or infrequent?

Next, place the name in the associated quadrant.

Keep adding names until you get to the end of the list of people you can remember without consulting your email inbox or message list or address book. These are the people consuming your mental energy to track them and the ones most useful for the exercise.

Got the map of names out of your head and on the paper? I’ll let Bloom explain the implications of each zone and his own experiences with the Relationship Map:

I think Bloom’s own experiences with the Danger Zone and Red Zone are self-evident and guide us to know what to do next with the names there.

Let’s focus on the Supportive side of the matrix and, more specifically, on some of the ways we can take small steps to increase the frequency of interactions with these people.

Ways to Interact More Frequently with Supportive Connections

(This list builds off the Give it Just Ten Minutes issue of the Network Wrangler)

1. Create a Walking List. Create a list of contacts in your phone app called your “Walking List.” These are people that you know you want to stay in touch with (Green Zone). When you’re out walking and have time, call them!

2. Send Your Shared Memories. If you have an iPhone, use the Memories feature, which resurfaces your photos from the past (how the algorithm works, I’m not sure). When you see a friend in one of your photos, send the photo to them with a “we should catch up!” note.

3. Share a Virtual Cocktail Hour. You can indulge in the benefits of a shared drink even if you’re not in the same geography. I started a weekly “Drinks with Dad” during COVID times when my father and I would hop on ZOOM every Monday night at 9pm to catch up on the week’s activities with a drink in hand. No agenda other than chatting about what was top of mind. We got over 100 of these sessions in before he passed away in 2023. Given the sad statistics of how often (little) we see our parents as we age, I’m so very grateful he and I bucked the trend. Now I talk with my mom every Monday night, and we’ve never been closer. You can start with just a single virtual cocktail hour and see where it goes from there. But don’t put it off: we tend to take tomorrow for granted when we shouldn’t.

4. Create a Regular Check-in Schedule. It’s really easy to say, “See you soon.” It’s much harder to make the intent stick. When you enjoy someone’s company, it means they’re on the “Supportive” side of the Relationship Map, and that’s your cue to schedule a repeat visit. I’ve made it a habit that whenever I say or hear, “Let’s do this again,” I create an entry on our calendars for it. I usually pick a date a month out because a) it’s far enough out that finding room on calendars is pretty easy, and b) it’s soon enough that we’re trending toward a more frequent connection schedule, which keeps us in the Green Zone.

Have more ideas on keeping connected? Do you have something you think could help others? Just hit reply — your email goes straight to my inbox and informs future issues of the newsletter. 🙏