The Lingua Franca of Connection: My Teachings Abroad

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Hi there,

I’m putting the finishing touches on this newsletter while sitting in a lounge at Frankfurt Airport. It’s another gloomy February day outside the windows with overcast skies and temperatures hovering just above freezing.

Where I’m typing indoors, it’s warm and toasty as the aroma of coffee and baked goods intermingle with the hushed conversations in so many languages that are not English.

I’m on a layover on my way to Sweden and then Finland. I'm here to teach female Nordic tech entrepreneurs how to build connections and networks in the USA to help them expand their markets to America.

If I’m being honest, as I pulled together the slides for this class, I’ve had second—and even third—thoughts about recommending that they make connections to the USA in its current state of uncertainty.

In the end, though, my class will focus on expanding their personal networks by creating new connections at a deeper level than they normally would think to go.

I’ll be teaching them how to be the first to humanize their interactions so they can lead their conversations to that deeper level at which we’re all wishing we could connect.

I’ll show them that although there’s a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt saturating the headlines on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, hundreds of millions of caring people do the right thing and want to connect with others in their tribe.

If nothing else, I’ll be strengthening the ecosystem supporting female entrepreneurs across the Nordics which is the right thing to do regardless of what’s happening back home.

One of the many reasons I enjoy traveling to Europe is that I get a chance to practice my language skills with real people in real settings. I speak Spanish fluently and French almost as well, and then I drop down to friendly-tourist-level Italian, German, Japanese, and Portuguese. I’ve got a month’s worth of Duolingo Swedish primed to use over the coming weekend, and I can’t wait to try it out.

It should come as no surprise that I got my college degree in Linguistics when I started learning all I could about the universal underpinnings of languages and how we communicate with each other.

I have been intrigued by the way we talk and connect my entire life, especially since the invention of the Internet and all the social platforms empowered by this connectivity.

We’re social creatures. We’ve lived in groups since the beginning of civilization when we first lived in tribes, then clans, then villages, and towns, and cities.

We’re constantly and consistently surrounded by opportunities to connect with others, and in ways that are becoming better understood by sociologists and neuroscientists and therapists, these connections sometimes blossom into friendships.

No one teaches us how to be friends.

Yes, we’re taught how to be friendly and kind and caring for others: all the ingredients that make for good social citizens.

Being consistently friendly, kind, and caring to the same person or group of people creates a foundation of trust on which a new friendship can be built.

And new friendships are something that happen very slowly and then all the sudden.

The many successful bids for connection and appreciation happen over weeks and months until they finally reach a tipping point, at which point the person crosses the threshold from acquaintance to friend. And it’s a beautiful thing when it does.

Friends meet our need for a support system more than what our family can provide.

Even better, we get to choose our friends; they are not defined by family ties or geographic proximity.

What’s more, our friend circles are unique to us: no one else on earth has the same number or type of friendships that we each have.

If we plotted our friendships on a graph to visualize our shared interests, relationship endurance, depth of connection, presence of love, and interdependence, no other friendship graph would look the same as ours.

And since our friendships constantly evolve, no two friendship graphs drafted during different points in our lifetime will look the same.

How amazingly beautiful is that?

And it all comes down to being friendly, kind, and caring.

I hope you find time during your weekend to interact with your acquaintances and nudge them a little closer to becoming your friends.

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Lastly, I’ve been contemplating the importance of something Esther Perel's said recently: “Digital tools, once designed to connect us, now mediate nearly every aspect of our lives, replacing presence with convenience and spontaneity with predictability.”

I spent the first decade of my career at America Online, bringing millions of people online by creating new and interesting ways to connect people in online communities, and I feel a pang of guilt for having enabled this chain of events.

We know that human connection is not dependent on an internet connection.

But this means we have to be out and circulate where other human beings spend time.

It’s not just for our own sake.

We consistently underestimate the joy we bring to others through spontaneous connection: talking to a stranger on the metro, making eye contact with a person in line at a café, engaging in conversation at the grocery store. These small moments shift our perception of the world and our place within it.

And we need to not be on our screens.

And we need to be unencumbered by our headphone-isolated sound bubble.

And we need to be looking people in the eye with a smile on our face.

Are we nurturing the right relationships for the next four years? For the next ten years?

The best relationships - whether friendships, family, or partnerships - don’t just happen.

They’re built through intentional effort.

And these days, whether we’re in Europe, America, or any other part of the globe, we need to be putting in the effort to connect with others.

 If we’re going to succeed in building the kind of world that will be kind and caring and supportive of everyone, we need to do the work to connect at a deeper level.

Success means nothing if we have no one to share it with.

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What’s been your experience connecting with others? Do you have something you think could help others? Just hit reply — your email goes straight to my inbox. 🙏