39: Connecting With People (Building Bounce: Ch 7) | S4E39

(00:00) Stephanie Warner: Welcome to Season four, episode 39. Hello, Father

(00:04) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter.

(00:05) Stephanie Warner: I love being on the trail with you. And you know what? Today we are getting into an exciting topic and I feel the need to give a quick shout out to the Heart- Focused Community, I almost said, conference, course. The Heart-Focused Community course is coming so soon and you can join the waitlist to be among the first to know it. And the reason why this is particularly pertinent to this episode, is because we are talking about connecting with people in this episode. So all the joy.

We have been developing the FISH courses, Freedom, Identity, Spirit, and Scripture, and now Heart-Focused Community. And this is our Deeper Walk discipleship path, it’s very exciting. If you have liked the prior courses or even if you didn’t, you don’t have to go in order. If you’re like, oh Heart-Focused Community, yeah, I want more of that. Now you know, there’s a wait list.

(01:08) Marcus Warner: And we don’t mean to scare off the introverts. I keep thinking of my introverted friend who’s got the t-shirt that says, “It’s looking awfully peopley out there.”

(01:18) Stephanie Warner: Hey guys, I am an introvert fun fact, so it’s okay

(01:24) Marcus Warner: Yeah, you’re an expert and community is still important to introverts, isn’t it?

(01:29) Stephanie Warner: It is. The context of today is in our emotional resilience. And you know sometimes you also need to recover from people. It’s all around. All right, I’ll let you guys peruse more on the community course. I’m sure I’ll bring it up later, but we’ve been working on it. I’m excited for it, and it’s coming. Onto the topic of the day. We have been going chapter by chapter in this series through the book Building Bounce, by Marcus Warner and Stefanie Hinman. And in case I haven’t said it for a while, I am not Stefanie Hinman and she is epic.

So the goal of this series is to help you grow your emotional resilience so you can thrive on your deeper walk with God. And for this series, we also have a free downloadable guide that will help you with discussion questions and group time. Or even if you just want to spend some time reflecting as you’re reading through it personally. So that will also be in the links in the description. You can find that there. Let us dig into Chapter 7, “Connecting with People.” So again, the ABCs of building bounce is kind of the framework for the book. We’ve been through A which is for appreciation. We looked at quieting and appreciation. B is for beliefs and now C is for connections. And so in this episode we’re going over connecting with people and in the next episode we’re going over connecting with God, and it’s going to be great. So Father, anything you want to say about connections in general and then I really want to get into the importance of it.

(03:15) Marcus Warner: Sure. I first realized the importance of connections when I was struggling with anxiety in a season in my life. I began to notice that it went away while I was with people and being relationally connected to them. If I was in a small group and I was really engaged with them, my anxiety would leave my body and I wouldn’t even feel it anymore. Occasionally I would go out and have a conversation with an interesting person about something and it would have my complete attention and focus. And what I realized was that the relationships were keeping me in the relational part of my brain and getting me out of that anxious part of my brain.

And so that was the first time I realized that huh, I’ve been battling anxiety all day, and for that last hour and a half that I was with his person or these people, I didn’t have it. That was the first time it became obvious to me that there is something to connections here and knowing just enough brain science to put it together. I was like, it’s probably because anxiety takes me to the back of my brain and being relational keeps me engaged in the front of my brain. And that’s what resilience is all about. How do I recover from the back part of my brain to the front of my brain? How do I develop joy pathways so that I don’t stay stuck back there? And If my goal is to be in the relational part of my brain, it only makes sense that it might be important to have relationships. So that was for me, when that really came alive.

(04:53) Stephanie Warner: Could you just linger, or give a little bit of a note for relationships and connections in the Bible?

(05:06) Marcus Warner:  The word relationship doesn’t actually occur in either Hebrew or Greek.  There is no Hebrew or Greek word for relationship, but there are all kinds of metaphors and all kinds of stories. The core metaphor in the Bible for relationship, is walking. That’s why my first conference sermon as president of Deeper Walk was on the Genesis genealogy. I was kind of walking through the idea that hey, there’s only one person who didn’t die in this genealogy and it was Enoch. What’s unique about Enoch?

All the rest of them end with “and he died.” But you get to Enoch and it doesn’t have that because he’s taken away with God. And it says twice in his little two sentence biography that he walked with God. And then you get to Noah, the next character and the one thing it says about him is he walked with God and we see the same thing about Abraham. You get the idea like, okay, this is what’s important, he wants us to walk with him. Going to Micah 6:8 and he says, what does the Lord require of you? And you get at the heart of it that he wants us to walk humbly with him.

All of these things just keep coming back to this idea that even in the New Testament walking in the spirit is a walk with God. The other core image I think that really gets to relationships is eating. Eating. And so like in Revelation 3:20, I stand at the door and knock, if you come in, I’ll eat with you. And again, I learned this from Dr. Wilder. He pointed out that we tend to bond to people who feed us. And so in the garden, God wanted to be the one who fed Adam and Eve. And to some extent, once they left, they had to go feed themselves.

There is something to that. Even in resolving eating disorders, there is a relational element to things like that. Because a lot of times what we’re doing is we’re using food to replace the relational craving that we’re having. In fact, in all addiction recovery there is a relational element, we are using whatever we’re addicted to to replace the relational craving that we actually have. And so the Bible doesn’t use the word relationship specifically, but I like these two metaphors particularly, eating with God, and walking with God.

(07:34) Stephanie Warner: Well, and you see those physically played out with groups of people doing that together and with God. So it’s all interconnected. So yeah, let’s link it. You brought up some emotional healing stuff. Let’s look at how connecting with people is crucial to emotional health. Why is belonging so important?

(07:55) Marcus Warner: So the way God designed our brain, the deepest craving that we have is for relational connection. So if you go back down deep to the nucleus accumbens and the thalamus, at the very core of the brain at its deepest levels, and what it’s craving is a connection with someone who’s happy to be with me. And so from there, we get the idea that I crave connection. And whether you call it attachment, whether you call it bonding, whether you call it relationships, I’m craving connection.

And a particular kind of connection. I want to be connected to somebody who is happy to be with me. And so one of things this does is it brings us directly into confrontation with the idea of shame. Because shame is the idea that you don’t want to be with me. Like, I don’t bring you joy. You’re not happy to see me. And so shame is a real relationship buster. And so in our chapter, we take a little bit more time on shame than some of the other emotions. Because it’s so directly connected to this idea of something that gets in the way of this deep craving to be connected with someone who’s happy to see me.

(09:02) Stephanie Warner: Well, and we can keep getting into that. You especially linger in there and your first principle of the chapter is vulnerability. Looking at, what is vulnerability? Why is it important, connecting with people?

(09:18) Marcus Warner: So connecting with people leads to what we call belonging. Belonging is that you are my people and we have a connection, we have the kind of connection that actually gives us an identity. And so if I have the kind of connection that creates an identity, that’s belonging. The way that I grow that kind of connection with somebody is I have to be able to be vulnerable with them or I don’t feel truly connected. What creates this kind of belonging is when vulnerability meets empathy. So if I open up and I say to you, I am really struggling with this.

There is this thing about me that is broken. There’s this thing about me that is not good. There’s something about me that I’m not sure that you were going to like. And I can be open about this thing. Like, I don’t know if you’re going to like this about me, but this is going on, and you’re still happy to see me, even though I share this thing. That is where vulnerability is being met with empathy. Shame makes us not want to be vulnerable.

Because shame is pretty sure that if I let you know about this thing that I don’t think you’re going to like about me, I will lose the connection, and I desperately want the connection. And so this causes people to hide. It also causes people to wear masks. And the problem with masks, I like to say, is that they work. I can put on a mask and I can pretend to be somebody. And you can be attracted to the mask that I’m wearing and become very deeply bonded to the mask. And all that does for me is make me feel more alone than ever because yeah, you like me, but you like this image that you have of me.

You don’t actually know me. So this is a problem celebrities have a lot. People see their outward facing image and they’re in love with the celebrity image, but the celebrity feels more isolated and alone than ever because nobody really knows their heart. Nobody’s really connected to them. And everybody thinks they want to be connected to people, but it’s work. It’s harder than it sounds like to actually be an empathetic person.

(11:41) Stephanie Warner: And also to be an authentic person. There’s some people that one can be easier than the other for different people. Can you dig more into authenticity and appropriateness?

(11:58) Marcus Warner: Yeah, we look at some of the levels to this and what is appropriate and when. You can go to extremes with this and there are some people who just keep everything so close and they never share anything about themselves. And as a result of that, they don’t feel deeply bonded to anybody. They feel very isolated and alone because they have not been vulnerable about anything.

On the other hand, you get people who are way oversharing and wear everything on their sleeves right from the beginning, and they can drive people away. Because folks are like, uh-oh, here comes an hour long conversation I don’t think I have the energy for because this person’s just going to do an emotional trauma dump on everything that’s going on in their lives. And so you do have to find a little bit of balance here of what’s appropriate in the situation. And so when we talk about vulnerability, it can work both ways. I get some people who are afraid of it.

And I get other people who are like, I try to be vulnerable, but nobody will listen. The problem with that in most of the cases I’ve seen is that they are often oversharing too quickly and in the wrong context. And so what I’m looking for is what’s appropriate where. Even in a church small group setting, a church small group setting is not a recovery group. And so I’m not necessarily in mixed company at a small group thing, going to talk about my battle with pornography and how I did that week right now. I need a place to do that. I need a place to be that vulnerable and open up with the whole thing, but I’m going to do that in a different setting, not there.

And part of the reason I do that is that I can overwhelm the people who are listening and not all of them have the maturity to deal with what I am sharing. And so that’s why we have to understand that there are levels and there are appropriatenesses to this. And it  is not that you have to hide it forever, but you’ve got to find the right people to share it with at the right times, and not just make it the first thing that you lead with in every setting that you enter.

(14:16) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. So you’re addressing, if I have this issue, don’t lead with it.There’s also a maturity factor in terms of, who is safe to share it with, in what context, and  how much. I think later we could talk about some continuum of trust. When we’re talking about vulnerability, we’re not saying you must be vulnerable with every person at the same level at every time. We’re saying there’s a level of, is this person mature enough to handle this amount? And it doesn’t even have to be about trauma. It can just be about your life, is this person mature enough to handle this? And is this the correct context or situation? And so they’re varying levels.

(15:10) Marcus Warner: I remember once that I was having dinner with one of my best friends and at the end of it, I didn’t even realize I’d spent the whole time just talking about myself. I had never shown any curiosity about him. And so in a sense, what that does is it leaves the other person feeling used. Like, you don’t really care about me. You just wanted to dump all of this stuff. And so that’s why we’re talking about this. He was a person I could trust and he was somebody who had the maturity to handle it, but it wasn’t the appropriate occasion for all of that. It’s like we were there to have a mutual connection, a back and forth.

There can be a lot of factors of this. You talked about the Heart-Focused Community course coming up. We actually do have a session on vulnerability in that course where we talk about the levels and kind of giving them some definitions. So that’s coming up soon.

(16:10) Stephanie Warner: Is there anything else you want to talk about in the vulnerability empathy side of things or else we can move into? In this chapter, you also talk about four relational skill sets.

(16:22) Marcus Warner: Yeah, let’s go into the skill sets.

(16:223) Stephanie Warner: Okay, let’s go into the building relational trust on a continuum because we’re already kind of talking about that. Can you just lay out the many levels of trust?

(16:37) Marcus Warner: I sometimes think of this with the word Max. I don’t think this is in the book, but it’s like there’s minimal sharing, there’s authentic sharing, and there’s extreme sharing. And so that’s Max, minimal, authentic, “x-treme.” I do know extreme starts with ‘E’ for those who are wondering. The point is that there are places where you don’t want to share. And Jesus models this. In the end of John chapter 2, there’s an interesting verse that says, many people were putting their faith in Jesus. It says, but Jesus did not put his faith in them.  Jesus hid his identity on purpose from people for the majority of his ministry because he knew they couldn’t handle it.

They knew they wouldn’t deal with it right. It was on purpose what he was doing. And what it tells us is that, yeah, no, you don’t always have to be completely open and vulnerable and share everything authentically in every occasion. Even Jesus didn’t do that. Sometimes you have to be careful about who you’re sharing what with because those people are not safe.

And those people could actually be dangerous with the information that you’re sharing with them. Now, eventually, Jesus was authentic and he was extremely authentic with them. He says, someday you’re going to see me sitting at the right hand of the Father. I am the son of God, that was extreme sharing. They killed him because they weren’t safe, but he knew that they weren’t safe. He also knew it was time for the crucifixion and all this to happen. And so he triggered it by sharing. You hear a lot these days that you should just always be authentic and you should always be open and you should always lay this out there. And I’m like, no, there’s actually a time and a place for these things.

(18:40) Stephanie Warner: Well, and it’s  like a dimmer switch. We’re not saying there’s a time to be inauthentic. You can still be yourself without being like, and here is every facet of myself, or here is every secret I have. We’re not saying, yeah, sometimes just wear a mask and don’t be yourself. That’s not what we’re saying.

(19:00) Marcus Warner: Right. We’re saying that there’s a time to share and a time not to share. And there’s a level to how much sharing you want to do. And so the general rule of thumb here is how deep of a bond are people looking to form with each other? So I’ll go back to the old eighties movie, you know, “The Breakfast Club”.  And they all start off as judging each other and not liking each other and they end up deeply bonded. But what is it that created that deep bond at the end of this movie with these kids who were in detention? And the answer is, they had a common enemy. They bonded over that. They didn’t like the guy overseeing them.

But two, they also became vulnerable with each other. There is a scene where they all start sharing some secrets about themselves. And those secrets are handled with empathy and with gentleness. So that I feel like, I know you better than I did before and I feel like you’re somebody I like being around more than I did before. So we now have a growing attachment. And then they had to give some definition to it. How attached are we? How much bond is this? And let’s face it, there are people who bond too quickly and too deeply with people they shouldn’t be bonding with that quickly and deeply. Which is like bad relationships.

People who jump into relationships they shouldn’t be in because they’re over doing this. So that’s an example of somebody who’s being too extreme too quickly with the wrong people. And that’s why at this point, rather than laying out all the principles for what guides it, because I’m not sure I even know what all those principles are…We’re just acknowledging the general idea that I should always just be my authentic self and let the chips fall where they may is not necessarily good advice.

(20:52) Stephanie Warner: So we are preaching that we want trust, we want relationships, we want to be vulnerable, and we want to be empathetic, but just within the context of healthy boundaries and being safe. So let’s move on to the next tool, which is C.A.K.E. Yum! We are turning on our relational circuits with this tool or assessing maybe why they’re off. This one you unpack in your book, Habits of Joy-Filled Marriages with Chris Coursey, and it’s really helpful.  You mentioned curiosity earlier when you were talking about being in that conversation with your friend and you realized, I didn’t express any curiosity. So curiosity is one of those things that will help you turn on your relational circuits or assess where they’re at. So, pass to you, CAKE.

(21:56) Marcus Warner:  I first developed the acrostic C.A.K.E as Jim Wilder and I were writing rare leadership together and  I’m listening to him talk and I’m trying to take all the things and put it into something simple that we can transfer. And what came out was CAKE. The original acrostic ended with E as envelope conversations, but I realized that is its own tool. So after Rare Leadership came out with that in there, I changed it. So even the second version of Rare Leadership changes CAKE to a different ending. So we now end with E as eye contact.

I then had somebody who specializes in working with autistic people telling me that rule doesn’t apply for autistic people. I’m like, great, good to know that too. In the majority of relationships the way that this works is that we bond through our eyes. And so if I want a really deep bond, then my right hemisphere controls the left side of my face. And since my identity and joy center are in the right hemisphere, that means my left eye looking into your left eye is like the deepest connection, if I want to see what you’re really thinking. You even notice people have crooked smiles. It’s usually because part of them is happy to see you, but part of them is thinking and working on problem solving. And so the problem solving part of their brain is flat while there’s another part of their brain going up.

(23:26) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, or if you get your picture taken and you’re like, I was thinking about being happy.

(23:31) Marcus Warner: I was thinking about being happy so I got this crooked smile, and that’s what’s going on. You see this with musicians a lot because they have to be thinking about what they’re doing because they’re doing really technical stuff, but they’re trying to have a happy face while they perform. And you can end up with this crooked looking face. That was a big sidebar just to say that left eye to left eye, right? There’s something to that in terms of really making a connection with people. So eye contact is really important because you can communicate a lot with people through eye contact.

(24:09) Stephanie Warner: And if you notice that you’re not making eye contact with people, then a lot of times that can be a sign that you are…

(24:17) Marcus Warner: I didn’t really think much about it until I got married and I realized my wife was routinely saying, why aren’t you looking at me? And I’m like, oh, I didn’t even realize I wasn’t looking at you, but now that you mentioned it. Sometimes you find out it’s actually hard to make eye contact with somebody because you are so in problem solving or enemy mode that eye contact becomes difficult. And when you’re in enemy mode and you make eye contact, t’s more of, I’m going to defeat you through this eye contact. I’m going to stare you down and I’m going to win this battle of eye contact.

So even that needs a little caveat, I suppose. So all this having been said, CAKE stands for curiosity, appreciation, kindness, and eye contact. Dr. Wilder was explaining that a lot of times in counseling you’ve heard these stories so much that you actually know where this is going, and you’re just letting them finish. You know where this is going and it’s easy to lose curiosity and even become a little bit bored if somebody just kind of goes on and on about something.

And this doesn’t only happen in counseling. It’s like, we’ve all had this experience where I know what the problem is and I know what the solution is, I’m just waiting for you to finish talking. Blah, blah, blah. And so what happens when I go into the problem solving part of my brain, my relational part of my brain begins to shut off and I stop being relational with you. And I’m now starting to treat you like a problem to be solved.

And so Jim was like, well, what I learned to do was to break eye contact with that person and look down. And he said, I would pick lint off of my pants. But what I was actually doing is I was trying to find some curiosity or some appreciation. And once I found some curiosity or appreciation, I’d stop picking lint and I’d make eye contact again. And I wouldn’t say anything, right? But he said, no one ever caught me doing it. He’s like, nobody ever noticed that he broke eye contact and started picking lint.

It was just his little way of trying to keep his relational brain engaged with them for their sake as much as for him. He wanted to be relationally present with them. And so when he noticed himself drifting and not being relationally present, this was his solution for it. So you break eye contact, you find some curiosity, you find some appreciation, and you reconnect. And then, “voil’a,” you find it much easier to be kind when you do that. So that’s kind of the idea.

So test number one is, do I even want to make eye contact and do I have any curiosity? And specifically we’re talking curiosity about how someone feels and curiosity about what their perspective is. And as I thought about this, when I don’t have curiosity about how someone feels or what their perspective is, it’s either because I don’t care what their perspective is or it’s because I think I have them all figured out already. And neither of those are messages I want to send. Because the first one is I don’t care about you.

And the second one is I have judged you and I have already condemned you. And so it’s a problem either way. And so that’s why this is so important for us to learn how to stay our relational selves with people and not just focus on the problems or we will quickly send the wrong message to them, whether we intend to or not.

(27:54) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. Well, and on that note, since you talked about eye contact and it not being something where you’re staring people down. The counterfeit of curiosity would be sarcasm. Like, I’m curious. Are you always this dumb? That’s not the relational circuit working.

Honestly, there’s lots more we could say on all of this. If you have noticed that you have lost curiosity, appreciation, or the desire to even picture what it would look like to be kind to someone, that’s a pretty good sign your relational circuits have turned off. Or they could be dimming if you’re struggling with it. And so finding those things and thinking about those things, how would I be kind to this person? What do I appreciate? Reminding myself, what do I appreciate about this person? These are ways that you can get your relational circuits back on. And so we’ll leave it there for that tool. I know we’re running short on time.

(29:0) Marcus Warner: Yeah, honestly, I don’t think we have time for any other tools, do we?

(29:04) Stephanie Warner: I feel like we mentioned VCR in a prior episode and then said, we’re going to unpack that in another episode.

(29:13) Marcus Warner: It takes some time to unpack that, I don’t think we have time today.

(29:18) Stephanie Warner: It would. Okay. Let’s… Maybe we can unpack it a little bit in the next episode. Sound okay? Okay. All right. I will then just close it with another thanks. Thank you to everyone who is on the trail with us. We love being on the trail with you and we hope that this is really, really equipping and encouraging to you. Thank you. Father, any final thoughts for this episode?

(29:50) Marcus Warner: You know, even having this episode’s been a good reminder for me about a lot of really core basic stuff that sometimes you let drift away. And how important relationships are in our lives and how important it is to be a relational and authentic person, without putting ourselves in danger with the way that we do our relational authenticity. But also doing it in a way where we do make authentic connection possible. I just encourage people to remember the balance, but to continue to work on the skills that make you the most relational you can be.

(30:33) Stephanie Warner: Alright, see you back next week.