Thanks for signing up to all the new readers! Also, thanks to those of you who filled out my feedback survey. Everyone is really enjoying the diagrams & visualisations that help bring these ideas to life (thankfully, the guest post below is full of them). Also, people seem to agree that the newsletter is just the right length. I’ll incorporate more about how these ideas apply in different contexts (e.g. career) and practical steps people can take to nurture their existing relationships. Thanks again for your support!
Without further ado, here are some nuggets about how networks shape your wellbeing, relationships and community to help you actively cultivate yours.
Wellbeing
Turns out that understanding networks helps make you smarter! One of my favourite blogs, The Visual Captialist, included Network Building in their post 12 Ways to Get Smarter in One Infographic. They highlight 8 network mental models that they believe are the most useful and beneficial to master. Thankfully, most of them are included in the Concept section of The Reliants Project.
Relationships
“A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet”
Will Rogers
Except for family, we all start off as strangers. Unless we introduce ourselves, the magical moment when this changes is the introduction. In my latest podcast episode I talk with Connor Murphy. Connor has spent most of his career building both digital and institutional networks. He is currently building a tool to serve people he calls ‘Connectors’, initially by helping them make better introductions. We talk about:
Cultural differences around how people connect
How the Future of Work will make our personal networks much more important
That LinkedIn isn’t really a network and doesn’t capture any metrics for us
What four-letter word Connectors share (hint: it starts with an H)
Common pitfalls we experience during the introduction process
Community
In this guest blog post for The Relationships Project, I suggest that a network perspective is essential to addressing social problems. We still under-appreciate how we are shaped by all the relationships that the people we know (and don’t know) have with each other.
“Inspired by Madeline Church’s analogy of a network as a net, I find it helpful to visualise social capital like a safety net. The more knots in the net, the safer it becomes for members of the network. Those knots can be individuals, institutions or collaborations that have relationships with other organisations in the community. This increases accountability, cohesion, redundancy and trust within a network.”
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About The Reliants Project
Reliant is my word for a person that someone depends on, an essential component of our social networks. With each edition, I’ll share useful nuggets about how networks shape your wellbeing, relationships and community to help you actively cultivate yours. Whether you want to cultivate your relationships, make better introductions, or activate networks to make an impact in the world, let me help you reach your goals.
You can find more about The Reliants Project here.