#573: From Courtroom to Community: Strengthening Your Support Network, with Kat Vellos

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser:

Hi, I’m Zack.

Stephanie Everett:

And I’m Stephanie. And this is episode 573 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today I’m talking with Kat Vellows about how you can make friends as an adult,

Zack Glaser:

You know, where you can make friends as an adult. You like this Segue Lab?

Stephanie Everett:

Yes. That is a good segue. Come meet new friends.

Zack Glaser:

Well, we like that it’s a Diverse Minds, diverse people, but it is people that are also kind of in your same boat. They’re running small law firms. Some of them are doing it on a shoestring budget. Some of them are a little more advanced and have gone through the stuff that you’re thinking about already. But Con is a, it’s a conference where we really get some stuff done, but I guess, honestly, I probably shouldn’t tell people about it. Stephanie, what’s Lab Con?

Stephanie Everett:

No, you were doing great. It’s just that, right? It was originally designed as our unconference, and it’s two and a half days where you can step back, step away from everyday life and your team and the busyness and not just think about your business, but actually get started on building pieces of your business that you need most. I think that’s what’s cool about it is we give people working time with our team there with support there, and so it always looks different. But last year, instead of just talking about social media videos, for example, and content, we had a group of people take their phones and mics outside and start recording content. So they came away with actual content ready to post,

Zack Glaser:

And they were taught how to think about lighting and microphones and things like that by somebody who had been doing a really good job, somebody in our community who had been doing a really good job of that on the fly. And so I think people got a lot of good stuff, but we also have moments to think, big moments to sit there and say, okay, now is the time that I can think. What do I want from my firm? I mean, we have big ideas cards. We literally have cards that say, what’s your big idea? And think about what’s your vision, what’s your values, what you really want out of your firm. But so we don’t say that just because we enjoy talking about lab Count, which we do. But it’s coming up here. When is it this year?

Stephanie Everett:

It’s right at the end of September. So September 28th through October 1st. It’s in Atlanta. We’re coming back to Atlanta to where I live at the Emory Conference Center, and it really is for our members that are in our lab community, but we always open up some special spots for special guests. So if this is something you’ve been thinking about, you’ve heard us talking about it and you’re like, I don’t know, Stephanie and Zach, you guys sound pretty cool, but is this really my community? Is this really going to be helpful for me? This is your chance to kind of dip your toe in the water, take a test drive, come meet our team and us. And I guarantee you’ll get more out of the two and a half days than you expect. And then

Zack Glaser:

If

Stephanie Everett:

You want to join, obviously we’d welcome you, but it’s just a good chance no matter what to come work on your business.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, it’s a good time to sit there and mean you were going to say, or I thought you were going to say that you’ll get more than you put in, but you get what you put in the, but you have a lot of time set aside to put in, and we do some special things. And really you meet some really, really good people who are all thinking the same things. I love this lab community that comes together and it’s an unconference because we’re not talking at people. You’re not on stage. I’m not on stage talking at people and saying, you should. It’s a community of people kind of working together to raise all the boats.

Stephanie Everett:

Exactly. So if this sounds interesting to you, let’s have a quick chat and see, and I can give you all the details. So just email [email protected]. There’s also a webpage you could go check out, and I don’t remember the url, so we’ll just put that in the show notes. But definitely just reach out and email me and let’s have a quick chat and I can tell you more, and we’d love to have you join us.

Zack Glaser:

Well, now here is our conversation. Well, I guess Stephanie’s conversation with Kat Vellos about making friends.

Kat Vellos:

Hi everyone. So my name is Kat, and I am the author of this book Here. We Should Get Together The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. And My work is all about helping people foster friendship and community typically in places that are not built for connection, which is unfortunately, most of them, unfortunately, most of our cities and neighborhoods and blocks and buildings were not built for social cohesion. And so a lot of my work is about helping people cultivate better friendships within the environment of that friendship, but also connecting more to their neighbors and community despite the challenge that that place may pose for them.

Stephanie Everett:

Yes, yes. I’ve been really excited about this conversation. I moved recently. I mean, I say recently it was 2020, so now it feels silly to say recent, and I am still struggling to feel connected to this new to me community. I still feel like sometimes I drive across town to go back and see my old connections. And it’s been hard as an adult, it’s hard to make new friends. Can we just say that?

Kat Vellos:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I started doing this research on adult friendship in 2015, so I’m not someone you need to convince of that challenge. I wrote a whole book about it because it is hard for a lot of people, and it is a challenge, particularly when folks feel like, oh, it’s just supposed to happen magically, organically. I shouldn’t have to put effort on this. And it’s like, well, do you expect that for anything else in your life, whether it’s your romantic relationship or your fitness or your nutrition, does that just happen magically too or do you actually put effort into it? And so it is like anything else in adulthood, if we want it to be improved, we need to put attention on it, put some effort towards it.

Stephanie Everett:

Yes, that makes sense when you say it, but it’s probably just not something we stop and frame in that way. And again, I feel like the answer to this question is probably obvious, but just so we ground everybody, why are friendships and connections so important?

Kat Vellos:

Well, I’m curious, why are they important to you personally? I mean, you said you’re willing to drive back across town to see your friends there. I mean, what makes it important to you?

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I am pretty sure I’m an extrovert. So I mean, part of it is whenever I’m around those folks, I just feel energized. I feel whole, right? I feel comforted like, oh, I was with my people. Sometimes I can confide in them or I just laugh with them. There’s some friends that I love to get together with because I know we’re going to belly laugh harder than I have really with anybody else. So it’s all those things that feel important.

Kat Vellos:

And I think a lot of people would agree with you. They want to be with the friends who lift them up, who they can confide in, who they can explore any kind of thought or feeling with, and they know they’ll be heard and understood or accepted. Our friends bring so much value to our life, and we bring value to their lives as well. And so it is something that is important for every person to feel like they have access to and to also acknowledge that people have different needs for these things. So when we talk about connection or friendship or loneliness or community, there’s not a one size fits all thing. I describe it very much like appetite for a meal. People are going to get full at different times, especially you mentioned being an extrovert, an introvert might need a little bit less time or might want a little bit smaller group. And so it’s very personal and everyone needs to kind customize their actions around what works best for them, not comparing themselves to what other people do and saying, well, I have to have it the same way they do.

Stephanie Everett:

In your research and your book, you talk about that you’ve discovered that in today’s world, adults, we have more ways to meet up with people and keep in contact, not just people who live close to us, but I imagine with the internet and social media and all the things we can keep up with people who live really far away, and yet you found that people have fewer close friends and less fulfilling experiences and friendships than ever before I, and I wonder if you could talk about that and why is that?

Kat Vellos:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, as you mentioned, with having as many different technological tools for having friends on the internet, it always was a little bit of a beef to me that that’s the only word that, aside from LinkedIn who’s like, oh, these are your connections. But every other social media tool is like, oh, as soon as you start following this person, they’re your friend. And it’s like, well, that word actually means something. And we don’t have enough words, I think in English to signify the different meanings that come with different levels of platonic connection. I try to encourage people to use the word acquaintance when appropriate and not feel like that’s a diss to somebody. That’s a legitimate level of relationship is like we’re acquaintances. And so words mean things, but the word friend is asked to carry so much weight. And it often can be confusing for people to realize, well, is this person my friend?

Are they not my friend? We’re friends online, but we’ve never had a conversation. And vice versa, you might have met once at a gathering and they’re an acquaintance, but you’re like, can I reach out to them spontaneously? It’s very vague, it’s very unclear. And when we have many, many followers or friends or online friends or acquaintances, it can feel like, well, there’s a lot of people to keep up with. There’s a lot of people to potentially reach out to, but a lot of vagueness around who to do that with. And so I think that that is one of many things that can make it difficult. And then particularly with people who we are quite certain are our friends, whether they’re nearby or farther away, sometimes it can be difficult simply because of busyness. I talk about four main challenges in the book that my research sort of uncovered, not sort of clearly uncovered as the main things that we’re typically getting in the way of people either cultivating a new friendship and deepening it or taking an existing friendship and having it last for a long time.

And those four main challenges were busyness, hyper mobility, relationships, and parenting, not because those are bad things, but because they take a ton of time. And then also difficulty establishing intimacy. And so these are things within the environment of the friendship where it’s like a lot of people say they have a ton of acquaintances, but they don’t know how to make a new friend, best friend, and they don’t know how to convert an acquaintance into a best friend. And so it’s important, like I said at the beginning for each person to figure out what is the thing that is a challenge for you? Which of these apply and what is it that you’re really hoping to get out of your friendships? And then you can take action to respond to each of those challenges to make it better. And each one of those chapters in the book gives you a ton of actions. You can take a ton of reflections and exercises you can do to help you get past that challenge.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I mean, it really resonated. Reading your book with me, one of the first things was people say, I don’t have time to make new friends or to invest, I guess, in these relationships. And that really resonated for me. And I know probably for other listeners, we tell ourselves, we’re busy running. We’re so busy. I mean, we’re busy. We use that word a lot, but we’re running our business and like you said, maybe we are parenting or we have these other family obligations like, oh, when am I supposed to actually go and hang out with people or connect with people, even though I know, I mean, I make that excuse for myself. I mean, even though I know I get so much joy when I do drive across town and go hang out with some of my folks from the old neighborhood, I’m like, oh, that’s going to be an hour there in traffic and then an hour home. And oh, I kind of start telling myself a story and then I convince myself not to do it. But I suspect you have some different advice for me I should probably listen to.

Kat Vellos:

Yeah, I mean, I can certainly empathize with what you mentioned, the struggle, particularly if you’re having a one hour trip in one direction before even coming back, that’s a lot to work with there. And so there’s a couple different ways to deal with this. One thing that often comes up when somebody comes to me say for one-on-one coaching to improve their friendships and community is one thing I ask about is what’s your relationship to time? How much is busyness an issue for you? And if somebody does say busyness is an issue, often what we have to work on before we can get to friendship is like, okay, well, let’s look at your time and let’s see where you can find time for friends. One of the things that I talk about in the busyness chapter in the book is about the way that everybody has 24 hours in a day, whether it feels spacious or whether it feels busy. One of the ways that people lose time is in their streaming subscriptions. So for example, even if you think you don’t watch a lot of tv, you’re like, I just watch three or four times a week, a couple hours a night, maybe a movie or a few episodes of a show. Well, if you watch two hours of TV four nights a week, that’s 17 days a year that you’re spending watching tv.

And so I know you don’t think about it that way.

And so if you look at your time alloKation, you can probably find some time to get together with a friend or to even do small actions to keep in touch with a friend. The other thing that you mentioned was feeling like you have a very busy life, maybe parenting whatnot, but there’s ways to include friends in the things that you both already have to do in your day-to-day life. Friendship doesn’t just have to live in the sequestered box away from the rest of your life. So if you have to go to the grocery store every week and your friend has to go to the grocery store every week, maybe you can do that together. Or if you know that your kids can have a play date while you have a grownup conversation, there’s ways to meet more than one need at one time, particularly if you are in close enough proximity to get together face to face.

And then the third thing I’ll say about this, particularly around proximity. So I talk about in the book the framework for what makes a friendship most likely to thrive, and I call it the seeds of connection. And it includes four things. There’s four seeds, one is proximity, the other is frequency. The third is compatibility, and the other is commitment. And so you can’t decide who you’re going to be compatible with. That’s kind of up to chemistry. But if you’re mutually compatible with someone and you’re in close proximity and you have high frequency, you’re more likely to be able to make a commitment with each other. But you can commit to people who are farther away, just like you mentioned with your friends who live an hour away. But the proximity piece is what often makes it easier for people to maintain their friendships. And it’s why a big part of my conversation with folks has shifted in the last year or two to helping people cultivate hyper-local friendships and community merely because it is far easier to maintain a connection with someone who lives a couple doors down than someone who lives a couple hours away.

Stephanie Everett:

I think that’s a great place for us to kind of shift because, so we’ll just keep using me as an example working. Sure.

Kat Vellos:

Thank you for being willing to be the Guinea pig here.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, no, I love it. So I live in this new to me neighborhood, and I’ve met a few people, but it feels hard. And I know you also talk and actually give real strategies to people of how do you go out and make these new connections. And I know your book is honestly filled with so many of them, so I really recommend it to people. And so I don’t expect you to cover all of them here, but maybe what’s a couple of top strategies of somebody is like, okay, I know I need to work on this. I want to invest. I want to have some friends in the neighborhood. But now I’m like, okay, how do I even get started? What do I do?

Kat Vellos:

Right? Well, there’s two things you can do and one is more active and one is more passive. So different strokes for different folks. You can take it either way. If you’re more of an active kind of go-getter person, simply start by introducing yourself to your neighbors, not just waving anonymously on the sidewalk and then averting your eyes and ignoring each other, but actually introduce yourself to your neighbors. And it doesn’t have to feel awkward. It’s as easy as saying like, Hey, I’ve seen you. We keep passing each other on the street. I’ve lived here for a while and I’ve been wanting to get to know more of the people who live around here. My name is Blank. What’s your name? How long have you lived in the neighborhood? And it’s really nice. A lot of people do welcome that sort of thing. And then once you go beyond introductions, you can then look at inviting people to get together.

Literally, we should get together. It’s like invite them to a little end of the week, happy hour. If you have a porch or a stoop or some kind of a park nearby or any kind of outdoor gathering, you can get neighbors together for something easy like that, even if it’s just a pizza movie night, whatever works for you. And then something that’s a little less active, you can consider it more of being a participant rather than the initiator, is take a look at the things that are already happening in your neighborhood and go to them, be an attendee. Be a participant, whether it’s a local class that’s happening, whether it’s a volunteer opportunity, whether it’s a block party, whether it’s your block or a few blocks away, you can still go to a summertime block party, see what’s happening in your block, in your neighborhood, in your area, and start becoming a regular face at those things. And that’s a really good way to build community with the people who are more likely to initiate that sort of get together.

Stephanie Everett:

You also talk in the book about conversations and how we can move to deeper conversations, which as I was reading it, I had the thought that this applies probably in our personal lives, but even our professional lives for our listeners, we’re often encouraged, you need to go out and network and you need to meet people, a source of how you’re going to get business and referrals. And then everyone’s like, oh, I don’t want to have to go work the room of the local happy hour thing and hand out business cards. That just doesn’t, I don’t know. Some people are great at it, other people they just want to hide in the corner or just avoid it altogether. But what are some tips you can give to people around asking better questions so that we can start to have different types of connections with people?

Kat Vellos:

So I created an entire downloadable card deck series on my website called Better Than Smell Talk. It’s based on cards that I’ve used when running gatherings with folks, and it’s also, all 300 plus of those questions are in the back of the book for free. So help shelf. The important thing here is that not every question is right for every moment. We often default to the typical small talk questions, which are like the script everybody knows, and it’s because that’s relatable and it’s easy, and it’s right. They’re safe questions. It’s an easy way to warm up. But if you want to take it beyond that, there’s a couple ways you can do that. So one is to be naturally curious. Practice your natural curiosity, ask follow-up questions about something that somebody may share with you, or you can even, honestly, I don’t love small talk questions, particularly for starting new friendships.

And so you can ask somebody something that’s a little bit more, so if we just met at a potluck or something and I wanted to get to know you more, I might say, so what kinds of things are you into, Stephanie? What do you like doing in your free time? And the answer to that could be anything. You could tell me, you’re into Dungeons and Dragons, or you could tell me you’re into sewing your own clothes, or you could tell me you’re into learning to speak Spanish. Whatever it is, it’s a way for you to tell me something that’s meaningful to you. And if I then practice natural curiosity, asking follow-up questions, learning more about that I learned something that’s meaningful to you, which might be more important, that just like, oh, where were you born? Or Where’d you go to college? That doesn’t matter.

These are just demographic questions, right? And so having open-ended curiosity is a really good place to start. And the other thing too is that’s not necessarily a deep, deep conversation, but it shares something meaningful. And I think that’s what people want to have in their conversations is something meaningful. And then if you’re getting to know each other better, let’s say we were really developing a friendship and you really did want to have a deep, deep heart to heart conversation. There’s ways to open that up by checking with a friend and saying, I really want to talk to you about something that’s been on my heart. I don’t really have someone else to talk about this with. I’d love to get your perspective. I really value the way you see the world, and you’re very wise and funny, and I just would really appreciate your thoughts.

Can I share something with you? And then you can tell them, and then the way that they respond to you will help. Is this somebody who wants to go with you into deeper territory? Do they put one toe in and immediately leap back out to something light or try to brush it off? That will tell you, this person does not want to go into intimacy with you. But if they lean in and they really give you their open heart and their open mind and their curiosity and their empathy and care, that’s a really good sign that this person maybe has the emotional maturity to meet you in the kind of relationship you want to have.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, I was just thinking when you said that if someone said that to me, and it reminded me of someone who did say something similar to that to me

Recently, she was working on a resume and was like, Hey, I really value your experience and your thoughts, and will you help me with this? And I was just like, yes. That’s amazing. So even it’s just a good reminder that people would really love to hear that if you’re like, wow, I really respect your opinions, and I’d love to ask you about this topic. You probably don’t say that very often. Yeah. Well, it occurred to me maybe that some of those questions that you have in that card deck would even be good with our team members, people that, and we talk about a different level. This is maybe, I don’t want to say risky territory, but people are, we want to know our team, but sometimes we’re like, oh, we use that word friend in a really vague place where, what level of intimacy can we have with people at work? And especially if there’s a direct report relationship. I know sometimes people are worried about that. How much can I share or should I share? And people are all over the spectrum on that. So just curious

Kat Vellos:

On, oh, I have a great idea for that one.

Stephanie Everett:

Oh, yeah. Well, I’d love to hear it.

Kat Vellos:

So I love creating tools and resources. Folks can find them on my website at We Should get together.com in the shop. And one of them is the Better Conversations calendar. It’ll give you 12 months. And there’s a few different renditions of this. There’s a connection jet pack, which they both have questions for workplace settings as well as non workplace settings. The BFF builder does two years of this as well with monthly, daily prompts. And what’s a really good way that feels safe to use this in a workplace context? And I will say, I have had customers who’ve told me that they’ve used it in their workplace with their team, with their classroom in any kind of setting, not only with their friends. So it’s great for a lot of facilitators use it. You can use it in a lot of different settings. But one way to ensure that it feels really safe on both sides is like, let’s say you have some direct reports and you download the calendar and you say, Hey, I want to try using some different warmup questions in our one-on-ones and team, I have this great resource.

Here it is. It’s 12 pages of, it’s drawn like a calendar. It’s not like 12 pages of reading a singles based Word doc. It’s not like that. And so then you can say to the recipient, you can say, go ahead and circle 10 or 11 of these that you would love to talk about and let them choose which ones feel appealing to them, safe to them, interesting to them. And then that way it’s not just like you foisting that thing on them that they might be like, oh God, I don’t want to talk about that question, but I really love this one. It’s like, let them choose. There’s hundreds of prompts in the calendar, and so you can say maybe at the start of each month in your team meeting on your one-on-one do, if we have a weekly one-on-one say, you can say, let’s do one or two of these a week, circle four or eight of these and we’ll use them together. And then it becomes a co-creative game, right? It’s like you’re both participating and you can both say like, oh, I want to do this one, but not that one. And then it feels more open because there’s a consent that’s

Stephanie Everett:

Given

Kat Vellos:

To have that conversation. And that’s something I think is really important too. I think everybody has the right to opt in or out of any conversation they do or don’t want to have. And if you could get that check ahead of time, then it’s just going to go a lot more smoothly.

Stephanie Everett:

Yes. That is great. I love that. I can’t wait to go check that out and use that with our team. We’re always looking for new questions too. Our teams,

Kat Vellos:

They

Stephanie Everett:

Kind of like it, so we kind of rotate around who gets to ask the warmup question for the meeting. So you never know what we’re going to get. But I love the idea of having some new prompts and asking the team members to come up with those ones they like.

Kat Vellos:

Yeah,

Stephanie Everett:

Well, remind us where we’ll make sure in the show notes that we put a link to your book and to your website so that because there is, I mean, I am not kidding you guys when I say the book is filled with ideas and strategies and prompts to help you kind of get going. And I know for me, this definitely is an area where I want to invest some more time, if I’m being really honest. I feel like sometimes when you take, you do these different exercises and you take stock of what’s working in your life and what’s not. There’s lots of parts of my life that are working well, but I do feel like I’ve allowed this part of my life to get a little neglected, if I’m being honest. I still have some close connections, but then there’s some people that I’ve left drift away and I don’t like that I, and I want to make some new friends, especially some people that live close to me. I feel like that would be really fun to have some close connections around here. So I’m really encouraged and inspired by your work, and this is my public statement that I’m going to go do better going to go work on this.

Kat Vellos:

And a good way to get that conversation going is to send your, whether it’s you or anyone who’s listening to this, send this episode to a friend and say, Hey, I would love to tell you how much you matter to me as a friend. This is something I’d love to talk about with you. Here’s a short conversation. I’d love for you to listen to it, and then let’s have a chat about it. Tell me how it lands with you and what it makes you think about.

Stephanie Everett:

All right. I’m going to do it. Well, thank you, Kat, for being with us today and for all the great resources you’ve provided to us. I’m excited.

Kat Vellos:

Thank you so much for the invitation to be here today, Stephanie, and good luck out there, everyone building your friendships and community. If I can help in any way, let me know.

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