Fostering Social Connection – Episode 54

In this episode, host Beth Cougler Blom talks with Pete Bombaci, founder of the Genwell Project, about the power of human connection and Canada’s newly announced social connection guidelines. They explore why social well-being is crucial for our health, happiness, and longevity—and what facilitators can do to foster connection in their workshops, meetings, and daily lives.

Beth and Pete also talk about:

  • The story behind the Genwell Project and its mission to promote social health
  • What the social connection guidelines are and why they matter
  • How facilitators can create spaces that foster belonging and inclusion
  • The role of workplaces in encouraging meaningful human interaction
  • Practical ways we can all strengthen our social connections, both inside and outside of workshops

Engage with Pete Bombaci, GenWell

Links From the Episode

Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast

Connect with Beth Cougler Blom

Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions

Show Transcript

[Upbeat music playing]

[Episode intro]
Beth 0:02
Hello and welcome.I’m Beth Cougler Blom and this is Facilitating on Purpose. In this episode, I’m so pleased to present to you my conversation with Pete Bombaci. Pete is the founder of the Genwell Project. It’s a human connection movement that has a mission to make the world a healthier and happier place by educating people about the importance of face-to-face social connection. When I saw that some folks in Canada here have announced the world’s first social connection guidelines, I knew I had to have Pete on the show. Because who better to play a role in fostering social connection than people who facilitate groups such as we do? We have a role here. And I’m super excited about it and I hope you will be too.

Beth 0:50
I had a great time chatting with Pete, but not only was it an interesting and fruitful conversation, it’s so relevant for the time we’re living in right now. And I hope it spurs you on to do something to reach out to someone else today. Here’s my conversation with Pete Bombaci. Enjoy the show.

Beth 1:11
Pete, so great to meet you in this conversation. Thanks for coming on to the show.

Pete 1:16
Beth, great to be here and thank you for the opportunity to share the message of GenWell.

Beth 1:20
I’ve been looking forward to this conversation all week. I won’t go into it too much, but the week that we are recording in, today’s March 6, we’ll say that—I don’t often say the date we record—but this week particularly has been tricky for Canadians and some of us know why.

Beth 1:36
But the fact that I was going to meet you and have this conversation about something that I think we can be really proud of that’s happening in Canada and just have a conversation about connection and social connection, I’ve been, I’ve been really looking forward to this. [smiles] So, let’s go. I’m glad you’re here.

Pete 1:52
I couldn’t agree with you more. I think it’s been a challenging week and we can all benefit from a little more human connection.

Beth 1:57
Absolutely. So tell us about the social connection guidelines and tell us about your company, GenWell. And I mean, just set the scene for us. How did you get involved in this and what’s happened that you can announce—or just was announced in January?

Pete 2:12
Geez, you didn’t start off with small questions, Beth. Like, we gotta go here! [smiles]

Beth 2:13
[Laughs] No, it’s like the global picture here! And short, [laughs]. No I’m just kidding.

Pete 2:18
Yeah, no. And and thank you again. Like honestly. So I in 2016 launched Canada’s human connection movement, and it’s called Genwell. GenWell stands for generating wellness through the power of human connection. And our mission is to make the world a happier and healthier place by educating, empowering and catalyzing Canadians around the importance of face-to-face social connection as a proactive step that we can all take for our health, our happiness, our longevity, and for the betterment of society.

Pete 2:49
You know, ultimately we’ve educated people for over 50 years on the importance of eating well and exercise, sleep, water, don’t drink too much and don’t smoke.

Pete 3:00
And yet the research now suggests that our social connections and our social health, which lead to better mental, physical and societal well-being, are as important or more important than all the things that we’ve educated people on for 50 years. And yet we’ve never told anybody. And so, you know, in 2016, you know, inspired by a story, a summer blackout in 2003, which I’ll dive into quickly. But that day, 50 million people on the eastern seaboard of North America lose power for three to seven days. I went to a friend’s house that night and at 9:00 at night after—there was a BBQ going on in the back of the house.

Pete 3:39
I went onto the front porch and the street was packed with people. And I just assumed that this street, everybody knew each other. Because I lived on a busy thoroughfare at the time. And so I walked out on the street and I said, Don, I wish I lived on a street like this, where everybody knew each other and the people all looked at me and said, “We don’t know each other.”

Pete 3:59
And it was right at that moment, Beth, that I thought to myself, well, this is crazy. How come we have to wait until we’re in the middle of a crisis before we talk to the people that we live beside? And then eventually I heard this from people in classrooms and workplaces. And everywhere I heard people saying, yeah, I met my neighbour or I talked to my classmates or I talked to the people in the cubicle that I worked beside or in the office across the hallway.

Pete 4:25
And you start to realize, Oh my gosh, like we just aren’t talking to each other anymore. And when I did the research, Robert Waldinger, Harvard. When you know, you see John Cacioppo or Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone or you see her, Julianne Holt-Lundstad. And the work she was doing, you start to go, oh my gosh, we’re spending less time with the people who could actually make us happier, healthier lives longer and make the societies we live in better.

Pete 4:54
And yet, we’re not telling anybody. And that was really the inspiration behind launching GenWell in 2016. And to be honest with you the first six years, nobody would talk to me. I couldn’t get a meeting or a conversation with business leaders, politicians, mental health leaders, nobody wanted to talk about. And then this little thing called the pandemic came along. And all of a sudden on the other side of the pandemic, everybody started to wake up that, you know, we need each other and we need each other more than ever before.

Pete 5:25
And so that was the original inspiration and flash forward here, eight years later, 8 1/2 years later and Canada just launched the first set of social connection guidelines globally. And that is not unique to Canada because we were also the first country to launch physical activity guidelines in 1971, and we also launched the first set of food guidelines back in 1942, both of which were also launched after crises in which people recognized the need for these healthy guidelines in society.

Pete 5:56
So lots of connections, lots of stuff that led to it, but Canada once again leading the world to try and build a more connected world where people thrive.

Beth 6:06
I love that. And just thinking about that leadership that we’ve provided over the years. Yeah, it’s a great thing that we can all be proud of and like, can’t wait to hear more about these social connection guidelines. It’s not something that just you’ve been involved in with your organization though, right? There’s a number of partners on this project to kind of make this come about?

Pete 6:25
Well, the way this the way this all transformed or transitioned or how it all came to life is…[chuckles] And I have to give a big shout to Dr. Kiffer Card, he’s a Michael Smith-funded researcher at Simon Fraser University. I met Kiffer about five years ago through Twitter, so I had been running GenWell for three or four years and I saw this guy tweeting about social connection—or something around social connection.

Pete 6:54
So I reached out to him, had a conversation and Kiffer, who is a gem of a human being—immediately, he’s become the chair of our scientific advisory panel—he is the person who wrote the grant that received funding from the Canadian (CIHR) Institute for Health and Research in Canada, who funded the research that led to the development of the social connection guidelines.

Pete 7:19
First year of the research was funded by GenWell and so it was our ideation around using social connection, creating the development of the social connection guidelines that inspired really the grant being written and having funded the first year. GenWell was at the heart of actually developing these guidelines. But as the process went on, led by Dr. Kiffer Card, they had over 120 researchers around the world that were part of the group that actually considered over 40 different potential guidelines that could have been given.

Pete 7:57
And they landed on six individual guidelines and six community guidelines. And although I can’t probably name them off right now, the general, you know, direction of these guidelines is—and remember, these are…like all guidelines, you start with a real baseline statement and over time as people develop a consciousness and intentionality around that particular habit that they will become more specific and more directive so that people understand what they need to be doing in order to build healthier social connection and social health in their life.

Beth 8:33
I was looking at the guidelines yesterday. Obviously I knew I was going to talk to you, so kinda doing a little bit of my homework there, but I do appreciate that there there aren’t 500 of them. You know, just to have a few individual ones, a few community guidelines. It really is easy. It looked like they were written in plain language [chuckles] as well, which I love. I think anybody could look at them and get quickly what you’re trying to do there. But tell me you know, as we think about the audience that’s listening here.

Beth 9:00
People who teach, people who train, people who facilitate. You know, why should we pay attention to these guidelines and what do you think is the most important thing we can do around them?

Pete 9:09
You know, we’re built on a behaviour change model. The entire movement is basically we educate, we empower and we catalyze. And the reason that we developed the entire movement that way is because what we really need to understand is, you know, 50 years after developing physical activity guidelines, we have an obesity crisis. And, you know, sitting is the new smoking.

Pete 9:31
So apparently just educating people isn’t the solution to the problem. And so as we think about how do we get people to create new habits, number one is we need to educate them, so they need to understand no only the negative consequences, but the positive consequences. You know, one of the things I do think that we’ve done even to this point is already put stigma around loneliness. And in the education around loneliness, I think the crisis is actually that we don’t understand loneliness.

Pete 10:02
You know, loneliness is not a mental health issue. Loneliness is not a crisis. Loneliness is the reaction of your body and your brain to the fact that you are feeling disconnected from other people. It’s frankly no different than being thirsty or hungry, and therefore if you think of it in those terms, you go well when I’m thirsty, I get something to drink, and when I’m hungry, I get something to eat. And nobody makes fun of me. They might judge what I eat, or they might judge what I drink.

Pete 10:28
But at the end of the day, this is how we should be understanding loneliness. And that loneliness can be caused—you know, many people think about it through a lens of a senior who might be physically isolated from other people, whether it’s mobility or other challenges that they might be facing. But let’s understand that we can face feelings of loneliness because we go through a divorce, a job loss, illness, injury, death of a loved one.

Pete 10:54
You know, there’s probably a thousand reasons that we can experience feelings of loneliness and that can happen from age 5 to 500. And so when we start to recognize what loneliness is, what causes loneliness, and what we can do to solve for it, we start to normalize it, to recognize, oh, my God, we really all can experience this.

Pete 11:17
And frankly, we’re all part of the solution. Because I would suggest to you that what we’ve done, even over the last 50 years when it comes to mental health and physical health, we’ve really been about empowering the individual to say, you do a mindfulness or you go for a walk, or you do breathing techniques. You do this. And what we’re saying with social health. By definition, it takes a minimum of two people to do it, but most importantly is recognizing that when it comes to social health you need two people, so we need to come together.

Pete 11:51 We need to do this. The solution is in community and that’s why we educate people in groups, in classrooms, in workplaces, in a community, at a community event. Because when we do it together then we can look at each other and recognize that that we are responsible for our mutual well-being. And that we often say that self-care doesn’t need to be done by yourself. And I think this is really about building on that sense of we are all in this together.

Beth 12:21
I’m glad you mentioned loneliness because it was something that struck me I think as I was reading the materials and listened to you on a different podcast you were on. And it occurred to me that I think we can experience or people who are in our groups can experience loneliness even in the group. You know while they’re attending a workshop, while they’re attending a conference. I wonder if you agree with me. Like, can people feel lonely if they’re in a group when it hasn’t been intentionally designed for social connection?

Pete 12:52
Absolutely. Not only in a group, but in a home, in a workplace, in a classroom. I actually believe you know, again, when we talk about physical isolation, I think we can all understand that if you haven’t had anybody come to visit you in weeks you can feel chronically or persistently lonely. But what we need to understand is what you just described there, Beth, is that when we talk, we talk about disconnection, which is the opposite of belonging. And you know, our research from 2023 suggested that 52% of Canadians feel lonely every week.

Pete 13:26
And so that’s not because we’re all physically isolated, that’s because we don’t feel like we are seen, valued, and heard. We don’t feel like we’re included. We don’t feel like we belong. We don’t feel like we have a community. And so that can happen in every part of life. And when we’re chronically feeling that or persistently feeling that it’s the same negative health, mental, physical health issues that can result. And that’s where I think the real big wake-up call is for people is we need to find the ways to make everybody feel like they’re part of whatever the situation is that we’re setting up.

Beth 14:02
Yeah, it’s twofold for me or maybe threefold because there are those of us who are facilitators and we’re trying to combat our own loneliness, or trying to figure out how to connect with other people who are in our field.

Beth 14:13
There are also the people in our groups that we’re trying to figure out how to bring them together effectively, but then there’s the participants themselves and I wonder if we can look at it that way as as well. You know, when you’re not the facilitator, you’re simply just going to somebody else’s workshop or somebody else’s meeting that they’re leaving are there things that we want to see participants doing to increase connection among the group? Because we always say in facilitation, it’s not really just our responsibility to create this thing we’re doing here in a meeting or a workshop. It’s really, everybody’s responsibility to do something in the room. I hope. [laughs] At least that’s how I look at it! So can you talk a little bit about what we can do, just thinking about those aspects?

Pete 14:55
Well, when I think of the different warm-up techniques we might have where we get people to actually connect as human beings first before we talk about what we’re going learn or what we’re going try and solve for. I think when we actually help people connect and get to know each other, I think that’s really a starting point in any group, whether it’s a business, an organization, a sports team. At the end of the day, we are all far better off when we get to know each other as human beings first before we get into the work of what we’re here to do.

Pete 15:25
And so I think that’s the critical part which is saying, what are you doing to make people feel that sense of connection, inclusion, belonging, community? All those words that we use to describe that feeling of being seen, valued, and heard.

Beth 15:39
The accessibility and inclusion piece has come up. I see that in one of the guidelines. I think it might be under the community guidelines as well. Can you talk a little bit about that? It sounds like it’s been very intentionally thought about by the group that created the guidelines.

Beth 15:55
Is social connection accessible to all of us equally, or do we have to think about that a little bit more deeply?

Pete 16:02
That’s such an interesting question and I have a couple thoughts on it. You know, I think as a society, what we tend to do is we tend to go to the people that are suffering or struggling and we tend to say, Here’s how you need to change. And we say, You need to get better. In this case, we would—when I launched this movement initially, if you think of, you know, equity deserving communities one was seniors.

Pete 16:28
And people would say, OK, well, you’re a seniors program so I’m assuming you’re going to go and educate seniors on how they need to be more social? And my response was, well, isn’t that like kicking a horse when they’re already down? You know, if the senior understood loneliness and they understood how to solve it, and they probably have a—you know, I don’t think we articulated it as loneliness.

Pete 16:55
Or the solution to loneliness. But they probably already knew that they felt disconnected and they just needed to figure out, you know, what could I do? Or maybe they had the barriers there that they couldn’t solve it for themselves. I think whether we think about, you know, accessibility, whether we think about D, E, and I, we know, we have to stop going just to the people that are struggling or feeling left out and saying to them, All right, pal, here’s how you’re going to be more connected.

Pete 17:22
We’re going to teach you the skills of how you can connect with other people. I actually believe the bigger issue is why we built this movement as a population level movement to educate 41 million Canadians as a starting point as to why social Connection is important for all of us, so that we become more conscious and intentional, and when we’re in a room where we see somebody who might have some accessibility issues. Or somebody who we might acknowledge who may feel not included. Because you can look at them.

Pete 17:55
I think of the high school dance where there’s a bunch of people sitting on the wall on the outside. Hey, what prevents us all from walking over and saying, hey, Beth, how you doing? I love your sweater. You know, hey, why don’t we? Would you like to come over? We’re talking about something here. I think of it always in the workplace. You know, I used to work in an organization where nobody in the accounting aisle would ever say a word. But if you spoke to them, if you started the conversation, you wouldn’t leave the aisle for the next three hours because they all wanted to talk to you.

Pete 18:27
And that doesn’t take a lot of effort. It takes consciousness. You know, I love this. This is what I do. I love people. I love connecting. And when you are conscious of what that difference can make in another person’s day, their week, their month, or their life, then we start to look around and we start to see the people in everything we do. And we say, well, I could say hello to that person. And I could wish that person a beautiful day. And I could say, thank you for, you know, that coffee, or I could say, and that works in our homes, on our streets, in our stores, everywhere we go.

Pete 19:03
And frankly, I believe this is what has happened. We’ve created this disconnect society, whether we see it across cultural lines, political lines, financial lines.

And if we all just started to be more conscious and intentional around our connections, I know today we’re talking about more facilitating and how we work in that realm. But I see this from a much broader societal level that we all need to do it, not just for work, not just as networking or all those things, but each and every day, because we may change somebody’s life and never even know it just through a conversation.

Beth 19:38
You mentioned before the behavioural aspect of it. I mean, you’ve got the guidelines, they’re written down. I mean, there’s that educational piece, but if we’re really trying to change people’s behaviour, I’m thinking about people…like maybe we’re the same, Pete. We’ve just met, but I have a feeling like we are both the person that’s going to go talk to the person at the conference or the, you know, I’m a participant in someone else’s workshop, I am going to turn to the person beside me [chuckles] and open up the conversation. That’s just who I am.

I don’t have a problem with that. But what about, and I like to say that facilitation is accessible to all of us. I mean, you don’t have to be an extrovert to be a facilitator. There’s, it’s accessible to everyone to do this role. So some people might feel more comfortable than others to be the one to reach out and to kind of extend. So, so how do we change people’s minds? How do we change people’s behaviours? If they’re not naturally that kind of connector person, but they could be, how do we do that?

Pete 20:33
So here’s my perspective on this, Beth, which is we will not change the world overnight. Let’s understand that we have been, you know, I talk about educate and empower. Empowerment to me is even giving people the truth and the facts around connection. Like those who talk to strangers—in Canadian research, those who talk to strangers once a week are up to three times happier than those who don’t talk to strangers. You know, those who know their neighbour are up to three times less lonely. They spend one to four hours a week connecting with neighbours are less lonely. And yet we in our society have almost built up this belief that we shouldn’t talk to strangers. And neighbours, you know, pre-pandemic, only 50% of Canadians knew one neighbour. And so we are in the process of changing these habits.

Pete 21:24
And so, you know, when we talk about the work that we do, we talk about the education piece, which we’ve touched on. The empowerment comes from giving them those facts that say, you can do this. I’m sorry that you were trained not to talk to strangers since you were a little child. Because I’m now telling you that the facts show us that when we talk to strangers, it makes us more optimistic, more trusting, happier, greater sense of inclusion, belonging, community support, safety, you know, the list is lengthy.

Pete 21:55
And it’s almost everything that we as a society are craving right now is that sense of, you know, being part of something bigger than ourselves. And so, you know, that’s the empowerment piece. And then the catalyzing is you have to give people the opportunity to practice this on an ongoing basis.

Pete 22:12
So we have a series of campaigns that we run throughout the course of the year that are intended to be catalytic occasions. And we do it for a couple of reasons. Number one, because we live in the most fast-paced, distracted and pressure-filled world in history, we need to give people the opportunity to take action collectively. Because if I’m busy and you want to connect and you call me and say, Pete, let’s hang out, and I go, sorry, Beth, I’m way too busy. Well, then you can’t solve your social health without me. And it’s the same with our neighbours and our friends and our family.

Pete 22:47
And we need to make ourselves put down the phone, close the computer and make time to connect. And the analogy I like to use on this, Beth, is I use the Halloween analogy. Look, if I tried to sell you on the concept of one day a year, I think we should put on costumes. We should knock on people’s doors that we don’t know. And we should take candy from strangers. If I tried to sell that to you today, you’d go, are you crazy? That’s just the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. Well, we agreed to that 100 years ago because we saw the benefits of getting outside, knowing our neighbour, the kids having fun. That was really powerful. But today, we focus on the candy and who’s got the biggest animatronic outside their homes. We forgot it’s about connection.

Pete 23:34
And so what we’re trying to create with these catalytic occasions throughout the course of the year is we’re trying to create events where we go, look, and our message is we don’t do anything.

Pete 23:45
We, like Halloween, are trying to inspire Canadians to do it. So who are you going to connect with? Are you going to have a neighbour over for coffee? Are you going to have a barbecue? You know, are you going to have a street-long potluck? I don’t care what you do. My ask is that you do something to be part of the solution to a more connected world.

Pete 24:03
And that’s really where that behaviour change process happens. But it’s going to take time because, you know, there’s probably 20 or 30 percent of the country right now who probably wouldn’t even consider the idea of connecting with other people. And at the other end, there’s Chatty Cathy and Talkative Tom who show up to every community event. And for us, what we’re looking at right now is that 50, 60 percent of people in the middle that I think with the right education, with the right opportunity, the right reminders and the right motivation are all saying, well, if you tell me that this will make me feel happier and I might live longer and that I’ll enjoy it and I might actually have purpose because you’re telling me that if I talk to somebody else, I might change their day or their life. Well, then why wouldn’t I want to be a part of this? And that’s really what we’re trying to do is inspire a nation to build greater social connection.

Beth 25:00
It seems like those catalytic events, [laughs] I shouldn’t say it like that sounds kind of dire, the things you’re doing, the campaigns throughout the year, it really is letting people know that they can practice every day, you know? Like I’m thinking, oh, we can talk about what happens inside workshops, but outside workshops, we’re all going to the grocery store, we’re all maybe walking to get the mail or things like that. And so it really is accessible to all of us to do these kinds of things, hey? Turn to the person in the grocery store lineup and say something as a practice if we want to do that?

Pete 25:37
It’s so funny. I almost chuckled, Beth, because don’t tell anyone but I don’t actually want you to wait until our campaigns to start doing this. [Beth laughs: Exactly!] I want you to start today.

If everybody started talking to one more stranger today—by the way, the research shows first off that it’s almost 100% of the time when we talk to a stranger, both parties are happy that it happened. So that’s research out of the UK and out of the US. We haven’t done that in Canada, but when you hear that, and yet 20% of Canadians speak to strangers every day, 43% of people speak to strangers a few times a week, and then over 50% of Canadians don’t make it a regular habit to talk to strangers. Just imagine if we could inspire each of those groups to do it a little bit more and what we could achieve just by having a hello.

Pete 26:30
And when we go to the dog park, don’t talk to the dog. Talk to the owner, because too often we know the dog’s name, but we don’t know the owner’s name. And all these little things that we can be doing everywhere we go that can make a difference, not only in my life, but in your life as well.

Beth 26:47
Can we talk about virtual spaces versus in-person spaces? Because I mean, that’s so relevant to the work that, I mean, I’m sitting here in my home office, I spend a lot of time here, a lot of us do, and I do connect with people all day long in Zoom and Microsoft Teams and other places, but I’m trying to be conscious.

I have a facilitators group that I lead as well, and I’m trying to be conscious this year particularly, not just because I learned about the social guidelines, but because I was ready to do it more as well, to get back in person with people and to schedule events and so on. But what’s the difference between the connection that we have in virtual spaces versus that connection where we get out in person with each other? Do you know the current research on that?

Pete 27:29
Yeah, you know, it’s and I’m glad you asked the question, because there was a piece of research that came out of Montreal at the end of the global pandemic, that shows that face to face interactions have nine times the brain activity. And we also know that 80 to 90% of communication is nonverbal.

Pete 27:45
So just the fact that we can talk to each other, doesn’t mean that we are connecting the way we do when we are sitting across a coffee shop, and we’re, you know, having a coffee. And at the end, we might stand up and we might shake hands or high five or hug each other, you know, and it’s that slow walk out of the coffee shop where we say, so where are you going next, Beth? Oh, you’re going over there. Somebody lives. Oh, my God, you know, my name, my neighbour is—

Pete 28:10
Because when you and I finish up this call today, what normally happens is, hey, Beth, we’ll talk to you later. And I hit end and gone. Like there is no that that soft spot at the start of the conversation and the soft spot at the end, is where a lot of the connection actually happens. And so, you know, we can all work at that as facilitators to make sure that we create those moments of connection at the start and the end, but it just happens so much more naturally, when we’re doing it in person, because—you know, and I do fear for young people who probably have not even had the experience of, hey, what is it like to walk into a meeting and actually put your arm around somebody and say, nice to meet you today, Beth!

Pete 28:56
What kind of kind of coffee do you like? Oh, yeah, you want a latte? Done. You know, who may look at that with fear or anxiety, versus those who, you know, lived in the work world pre-pandemic, or like, oh, my God, that’s how I thrived. That’s how I loved building connection with people so that we had we didn’t just do business together. We actually, you know, built relationships.

Beth 29:19
Okay, so let me ask you this. What do we do when we’re working with our clients and some of our clients are government clients who have taken people out of the workplace and put them in home offices and so on and so forth. And there’s a lot of good things about that, but it does mean that they’re more inclined to want virtual meetings, virtual workshops, and so on. It’s really hard to get our clients, I think—I mean, maybe it’s my own experience only—but I’m hoping someone else is going to resonate with this out there. That, how do we get people to really listen and say, no, we actually have to get the group in person. At least sometimes. We can’t do it all online. Do you have anything for us that we can use as a convincing tactic there for our clients, including governments? I mean, they’re working at cross purposes, maybe they’re putting out social guidelines, but also putting people into the homes.

Pete 30:08
Absolutely. And let’s be clear, I don’t know if the right hand and the left hand are talking to each other [Beth laughs: That’s right!] when we got guidelines that, you know. And the guidelines, just so we’re clear, the guidelines have been now created and presented back to the government. So the guidelines have not yet been accepted by the government.

And because we’re going through a government transition, it may take another year, maybe longer. And so these guidelines are really, you know, to me, as you know, part of the inspiration behind the development of them is it’s our opportunity to now bring this forward as Canada’s human connection movement who’s out there educating 41 million Canadians to say, hey, before the government accepts these, let’s all think about how important social connection is.

Beth 30:55
Yeah. And it’s our chance to lead from the middle, basically, right? Like we’re going to lead up.

Pete 31:00
Absolutely. Even Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone, just wrote another book, and I saw him speak down at Harvard about a year ago, and he said, look, at the early 1900s, we faced this same situation that we face today, which we were living in a very disconnected society. And what changed is individuals stood up. Individuals said, well, I’m going to start something on my street, or I’m going to start something. I’m going to start a lodge, or a community, or a club, or whatever it was. But it took individuals, and a buddy of mine just referred to them as the doers, we need to find the doers that are willing to step up in streets, homes, communities, classrooms, workplaces, that say, well, I’m not going to sit by and watch the world come collapse. I’m going to actually say, well, who loves to bike, who loves to read books, who loves to watch movies? How do we all play our role in building back that more connected world where we all thrive?

Pete 31:57
And I think to your point, leading from the middle, it’s like, if you know about it, then make it a priority in your life. Because as we share this information with the people around us, I think we can change the world one face-to-face conversation at a time. But to your comment earlier, Beth, here’s what I would say. First off, for everybody that is working remotely, I think what we need to do is get this information into their hands to say, digital technology is a wonderful supplement to the human interactions that we need each and every day.

Pete 32:28
So whether it’s sharing GenWell or sharing our campaigns or sharing the guidelines, make sure that each of us is playing a role in disseminating this information so everybody understands that human connection is essential. And whether that happens because—and by the way, I have a personal perspective that we’re all going back to the office. I don’t think many of us will go back five days a week, but we are all heading back to the office. And I think that’s going to happen for a couple of reasons, as I think we do lose collective effort, we do lose innovation and collaboration, and we lose that sense of connection and community and belonging and inclusion that happens when we see each other.

Pete 33:12
And it’s a bit of the one plus one equals three when we’re in a room together and we can brainstorm on things and we really enjoy it. So I think there is, we need to recognize that, you know, if we move three hours away from the office, it might be time to start looking for a job that’s closer to home or sacrifice whatever it was that you, you know, work for or move back, one of the one of the others. But I think what we need to recognize is two things. Number one, yes, we need to come back to the office. It may not be five days a week. But number two is every employer has a responsibility to educate their people about this information. You know, whether you see it through the lens of engagement or productivity or health and well-being of your employees or, you know, empowerment in returning people to the office because they’re more conscious.

Pete 34:01
But I think we also need to say that if you’re working out of the office, you also need to be conscious. You touched on it, and I’m guilty of it as well. I work in my basement many days of the week, and I probably work in my basement far too long. And at the end of the day, that’s not healthy.

Pete 34:18
And one of the things that we talk about when we do our social health workshops and workplaces across the country is there’s a study out of the UK that said pre-pandemic 60 percent of the people that we saw every day were not people that we intended to see that day. And that was when you drove the car to the office and you got in the parking lot, you said hello to a couple people. And then you went out for lunch or you went for coffees and you walked along the street and you ran into an old friend or all the…those moments of connection fill us up. Because they’re not what we intended. And we have those casual collisions those are part of us feeling seen, valued and heard.

Pete 34:54
And when we’re in our basement every day, you know, I know when I come up to the coffee machine in my house here, there’s nobody else standing there. You know, it’s a pretty lonely journey to and from the coffee machine. And it’s far better that when I walk from my cubicle in my office and I pass by, you know, 12 people sitting and I said, hey, guys, how are you doing? What’s going on? You know, and then you got to the coffee machine and you chatted with four other people who are also getting coffee or stopping by for a snack. We need to understand what we’re missing when we stay remote all the time.

Pete 35:28
And we make people more conscious around this. I think we have a real opportunity for people not to look at going to the office, which such —I do believe that many people don’t want to go back because they think the workplace is trying to suck the life out of us. And it’s also workplaces need to recognize you shouldn’t just be bringing people back to work in their cubicle. How are you creating a culture of human connection where you’re proactively building the connections that help people thrive as human beings and as employees, not just focusing on how I get you to do more work for us?

Beth 36:02
Yeah. Oh, that’s that’s the money shot right there. [laughs]

Pete 36:05
Yeah. If that’s what you’re trying to do, I guarantee you that person is going to be looking for another job in this new world that we live in. Because you see so much fight for work-life balance.

Because we’ve all worked for that employer, I hope everybody’s had the chance to work for the employer who demonstrated they care about you. And when you care about somebody, they will run through walls for you. They will work late, they will do weekends, they’ll do events, they’ll do whatever. And so I think this really is a management mentality shift that says, look, it’s not about having them sit in a seat. It’s having you care about them as human beings. Because if you care about them as human beings, they’ll be the best employee you could ever have.

Beth 36:48
Okay. You’ve said so much there that I want to jump off from. So the management piece, the employer piece, I hope there’s people out there listening that are, you know, they, they run some sort of employment shop or an agency and they’ve got employees and they’re going to do that thing. But then there’s also the consultants of us that are solopreneurs or working alone, or there’s, you know, just a few of us in the biz or that kind of thing. And, and there’s that leading up piece again, hey?

Beth 37:11
We have to educate our clients about why we want to do the in-person workshop, why we want to do the in-person meeting. And actually maybe even draw some boundary lines there that we won’t do certain things online anymore or whatever.

Like there’s a strength there perhaps that we need as, as consultants, hey? But the other thing you were saying before about maybe some of us have experienced that. I mean, I’m, I’ve said before in the podcast, I’m a middle aged woman. Like I, I have been in those workplaces that cared about me as a person more than just as a cog in the wheel.

You know, I’ve had that, I’ve seen it. I’ve had the water cooler chats. Some people haven’t. So there’s the onus on each one of us as individuals. If we work in an organization that is trying to call us back, I guess, to say, no, actually there’s tons of good stuff about being back in the office or being in a physical workshop room or whatever. So there’s, there’s kind of onus all around, hey, about what we can do with our particular role and situation?

Pete 38:07
Absolutely. I see it even in the presentation. I’ve taken it out now, but I used to say, through a mature employee lens, we’re like, well, what do I need to go back for? I’ve got my relationships.

I’ve got my client connections. What do I need to go back for? Well, who was the person who took you out for coffee? Who was the person that showed you the ropes? Who’s the person that you connected with, who got you going? And then also from a mentorship standpoint, what could you be doing for young people today? Because we’ve gone through this period of focus on my only way to judge my success in life is the size of my bank account. And we see what that has done. We’ve got a mental health crisis. We’ve got a lot of people lacking purpose in their life.

Pete 38:55
Maybe it’s because we were focused on the wrong things. And maybe that young person gets you involved in an activity that makes you feel 10 years younger. What are the benefits that we can experience as an older employee? Or actually, as a young person, let’s not say I’d rather sit in my 500-square-foot condo in the city and that I’d actually rather go to the office so that I could build relationships. And whether it’s about proximity bias and getting promoted or being considered, whether it’s about relationships, friendships, whether it’s about activities, getting out at night, all those things that as people who’ve lived through this before, that’s where many of my friendships and my connections and my opportunities to go and experience life came from, were those early years being in the office and going, it’s five o’clock. What are you guys doing? Let’s go do something. And so I think we almost need to educate this next generation to say, hey, you may not know all this, but it’s going to take time. And we need to be willing to give our time to help them thrive as human beings.

Beth 40:06
One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about around working with groups is that we can so easily and we have been so easily just getting into a workshop, the boardroom or the training room, the four walls, kind of generic painted beige environments, or a Zoom meeting, and there’s only so much we can do. We think about crafting environments, wonderful environments in virtual spaces too, but we just haven’t done enough of the special experiences, the things that, you know, we can do a little bit in virtual spaces, but we really need to get out in the physical world and make experiences together more special.

Beth 40:49
I mean, I’m not being very eloquent here, but I’ve been thinking, I guess maybe it’s because I’m middle age, I’m thinking, you know, do you just go to work and go home? And for me, that’s just a few steps away, right? Because I’m in a home office! [Laughs] And then you watch a little TV at night or do whatever, you know, play a game or do whatever you’re going to do, interact with family. But what’s the special experience that comes along that really is meaningful, is memorable, and we’re not getting enough of those.

And those are those pearls on the necklace kind of thing of a life, right? That, you know what I’m saying? Like it can be so beige so much of the time. We need more!

Pete 41:29
Beth, when was the last time somebody said to you on a Friday afternoon, hey, Beth, let’s go for, I’ll say a beer, drink a glass of wine, whatever it is. And you probably went, oh, God, it’s been such a long week. I have no interest in it. And then they called you back a second time and said, hey, I’m going to be outside your house in 10 minutes. I’m picking you up. And you went, oh, my God, I can’t stand this person for doing this to me. But OK, I’ll go. And then when you rolled in at 11:30, after you had a beautiful meal, you had four or five hours of great conversation with your best pal and maybe a couple drinks along the way. And you came in, and maybe you went to bed right away, and you woke up the next morning. And you looked at your husband, and you said, honey, and your husband says, hey, how did it go last night? And you went, honestly, honey, it was the greatest night I’ve had in a very long time.

Pete 42:25
Because I just got a chance to be myself with the people that make me feel like me.

And that’s all it took. But what we need to understand post-pandemic is there are many people that are still not back to the same social skills and habits that we had pre-pandemic. And so when we don’t go to the gym for two years, going back to the gym can be painful. And social connection is no different. If we don’t practice it, we lose confidence. We lose habits and routines. How many businesses have I worked with who said, pre-pandemic we used to have Friday morning coffees, and we used to have lunch every couple of weeks. And we used to do this and this. And there was a walking group and a book group and a movie group. And then, oh, nobody ever started those again after the pandemic.

Pete 43:17
Oh, jeez, that’s what we need to get back to is we need to create these habits and routines that allow people to put it into their calendars so that they don’t miss it. And I think it’s almost like we just need to re-prompt people. Get back to the habits and routines that actually gave people the permission to say, oh, well, everybody’s getting together to do this? Oh, then I’m in. I’d like to do that as well.

Pete 43:43
And I think oftentimes nobody wants to put their hand up and say, well, why don’t we start this? And I do a lot of workshops now about social connection and workplace. And every time I say, is there anybody in this room that would love to lead something in this organization? There’s always 10 hands that go up. And I’ll go around the room. The last one I did, somebody said, well, I love to kayak. And I’d love to invite everybody that would like to kayak to come out and I’ll actually train you. We can rent kayaks and we’ll do it. We had like 20 people in the room put up their hand and say that they’d love to learn. It was a very diverse room. And how beautiful is that? Maybe you’re going to teach a new Canadian how of kayak, but there was 20 people right away whose hands shot up. And so oftentimes we’re sitting on these skills and these experiences that people crave. And all we just need to do is kind of give them an opportunity to say it, bring it out. And then all of a sudden, magic can happen.

Beth 44:40
Okay. So in that situation, you had a whole bunch of people raising their hands saying, yeah, I want to do this. I want to lead this thing. But sometimes we don’t have a lot of those hands being raised.

So there’s kind of, I don’t know. And we have a pie chart of the population going on. Some of us are doing this stuff all the time. Like I lead a community of practice. I’m always coming up with weird ideas of how to get people together. And I reach out a lot to other people. So I’m not the problem [laughs] in some respects.

Pete 45:08
Yep.

Beth 45:08
I wish I could get that kind of middle group. You know, there’s certain people are never going to do it at all. I think no matter what we do, because, and that’s fair. I think we should probably say too, we’re okay with some people not being the ones to reach out because that’s difficult for them. They have a neurodiversity or whatever, right? Like we’re never going to get all of the people reaching out. But what about the middle people? Like how do we change the behaviour of the people that maybe wouldn’t be the first ones to lead something or to reach out, but we want to just shift. What’s the metaphor? We want to just move the needle a little bit with that middle group of people so that frankly, some of us who do all the organizing don’t get burned out being the ones doing it all the time. Like it’s not just my ideas that should be coming forward here. Do you know what I mean?

Pete 45:55
Oh, do I know what you mean! [Beth laughs] You know, when I was when I was younger, I was you in the sense that I used to organize a lot of things. And I think part of the reason why I launched this movement was because I was so frustrated, you know, with all the times I would send out the crazy idea like you, Beth. And you’d see people one of two things wouldn’t respond, which you’re like, all I’m asking you to, you know, just click accept or click, I can’t make it or just give me an answer one way or another, or be saying I’m in and then at the last minute, all of a sudden, it’s like, Oh, well, you know, 60% of the people didn’t show because we weren’t we’re again, I hate to tie it back to consciousness and intentionality,

Pete 46:38
But until we educate the broader population as to the importance of social connection. And I know that sounds crazy that we have to actually do this. I hear a lot of people say, well, don’t we intuitively know this? And I would say, well, intuitively, yes, but with intuition, I would suggest that 10% of the population does it on a regular basis. So apparently, it doesn’t work, it doesn’t, it’s not going to drive the level of connection that we need. So when you say how do we get that middle group, as I mentioned before, you know, you got Chatty Cathy and Talkative Tom, which will put you in that category, we’ve got the 30% over here who right now, if you said, you know, social connection is important, and you should get somebody out and connected, they’d look at you and go [makes a strangling sound], don’t talk to me.

Pete 47:27
But to your point, there’s 60% of the people in the middle, who with information, so educate, empower, catalyze, so I’m giving you an excuse, I’m giving you the information, I’m giving you a reminder, and now I’m even giving you occasions. And I think that combination over time, you know, we’re nine years old, but I still believe that probably 10-15% of the population might know we exist. We’re now in conversations with the Mental Health Commission of Canada, and CAMH, and lots of mental health organizations that five years ago wouldn’t talk to us, but now recognize the connection between our work and their goal, which is reducing mental health issues. And really, it’s about seeing it through the lens. If you look at our community partners on our website, you’ll see that it’s got mental health organizations, young and old, it’s got seniors organizations, domestic violence, bullying, it’s got organizations, homelessness, food insecurity. Because at the end of the day, when we have supportive networks in our lives, it helps us cope with any challenges that we’re facing, it helps us find solutions to those challenges, and ultimately, it builds resilience.

Pete 48:42
And you know, the crazy thing, in a world where we’re in a pretty complex world right now with lots of pressures and stresses and challenges, and people saying and doing things that we find hard to believe, we need to build resilience through human connection.

Pete 49:01
And so when we have those connections in our lives, it builds confidence, it builds security, so that we know that we can deal with anything that comes our way, or that we have people that we can lean on if we struggle. And so I think in a world, and I think in the most recent research out of the US, when they asked Americans how many friends they had, the most common answer was zero.

Pete 49:25
And one of the outputs of loneliness or a lack of connection is increased fear, racism, hate, violence, extremism. Because when I don’t connect with people, I lose empathy and compassion for other people. And so in this disconnected world, that’s not just south of the border, that’s north of the border as well, do you think you can see a little bit of that happening in our society as we spend less time connecting and more time, and I don’t have my phone close by, but more time on that thing that’s feeding us with a continuous loop of negative information in most cases, or at least the information that reinforces our biases.

Pete 50:09
And so at the end of the day, I think we can see what’s happened to us. And what we’re trying to do with GenWell and in conversations like this is counteract some of the stuff by giving people the truth and the information and the opportunity to say, hey, maybe we can all be a little bit better. And maybe we can all do it just by starting by saying hello to a stranger or talking to your neighbour, hosting an event, getting some people together, whatever way you want to do it, we don’t care. But it’s just reminding people how much we need each other.

Beth 50:41
And you’ve given us the messaging, that why piece that employers can use, that we consultants can use when we’re talking with clients. Like it’s that missing link, I suppose, to say, we want to be in person and here’s why. Here’s why we all need it.

But friends can do it too, you know? A friend just texted me this week and said, you know, can you go out for that walk? And I was like, oh, I forgot about that walk. And I said, I literally said to my daughter, I don’t really want to go out for that walk right now, but I will because I know I need it. So it’s like, we all need that little push to get out the door, hey, wherever that’s going to lead us.

Pete 51:16
Absolutely. And we run an event in January called Red January. And one of the pieces of research that I love about it is I think we’re 64% more likely to maintain a new habit when we do it with somebody else. So to your point about your friend reaching out to say, are you ready to go for that walk? Are you still up for it? When we have, you know, we call it a buddy system, we call it accountability buddy, so many ways in which we’ve referenced it. But understanding the psychology is that when you know your friend’s outside waiting for you and they’re in boots and a big coat, ready to go for a walk, and you’re sitting inside in your snuggly bed, but you promised them that you’d go for the walk. How much more likely are you to go, ah, geez, I can’t let my friend down, I better get out there and go for the walk.

Pete 52:02
And so I think understanding some of the psychology is really important for us to actually understand so that we go, ah, so if I’m more likely to do it, if I do it with somebody, maybe I can find a friend. And so while we’re working out, we’re talking to each other. While we’re going for a walk, we’re shooting the breeze. While we’re doing X, Y, and Z, you know, we’re benefiting from the human connection as well as whatever the activity is. And I really do believe, Beth, that this is the problem that we have created for ourselves as we’ve talked about the play-based childhood, not recognizing it’s not the play, it’s the connection. The book club or the wine club, we go to the book club, we talk about the book for 30 minutes, and then we talk about everything but the book for the next hour and a half. We go to the wine club and we talk about wine for five minutes, and then we go, so how’s your week been? And I think we just weren’t conscious that it was actually the connection that was the value, not the wine, not the book, and not the game. They were just the catalyst or the conduit to building the human connections that make us all happier and healthier.

Beth 53:11
Well, I think and hope this conversation has been that consciousness raising conversation. I mean, we talked a little bit about facilitators and workshops and meetings, but we really talked about life and I appreciate that. I think it’s, of course we all know it’s a much broader issue than just where we work and who we see at work and so on. So I appreciate we’ve, we’ve gone broadly with the conversation.

We’re going to put your links in the show notes so people can find the social connection guidelines. Thank you so much Pete for coming and chatting with me about them today.

Pete 53:43
Thank you, Beth. Great to be here.

And again, just, you know, on your last point there, is let’s remember that even as we help facilitate other people, that we need to maintain that connection ourselves, because if we’re not feeling socially connected outside of doing the work, then we can’t bring our best selves to the job that we’re doing every day.

Beth 54:03
Nicely said. Thank you so much.

Pete 54:05
Yeah, thanks, Beth.

[Episode outro]
Beth 54:08
It was a real pleasure to talk with Pete about such an important topic that actually does touch each and every one of our lives right now. The importance of our social well-being and the things that we need to do to be able to connect with each other and why. Why that is so important. I think that why piece was really interesting to hear him talk about.

Beth 54:31
Now I’m looking at the community guidelines right now and I just wanted to briefly go through them because there’s not that many, there’s only six. And I want to just talk briefly about each one of them so you have a sense of what they are and then you can go off to the website yourself and take a look, okay?

Beth 54:48
So the first one is promote awareness of the importance of social connection. Now this one to me says, whether we’re working in an organization or we’re working for ourselves and we have clients, we need to be able to have conversations about why we want to put in elements of social connection into our workshops, into our courses, into our meetings. That it’s important and we need time for that. And there’s a why piece there that if you’re not doing it already when you’re having those conversations in your design stage, that it’s probably a good idea to add in.

Beth 55:23
The second one is to foster healthy social and emotional development. And this one’s all about developing and implementing age and community-appropriate social and emotional education activities. So if we look at any of our workshops that we’re offering, any of our meetings, we definitely have to look at the group we have and develop social connection activities that are within that experience that are going to be relevant for the group. And I don’t know if you listened to the last episode that we had with Theresa Southam, but she mentioned the element of choice. And I want to bring that in here as well. So offering participants choice in what they do to connect with each other at a workshop or offering participants the choice not to participate sometimes can be really important things.

Beth 56:12
So how are we going to foster healthy social and emotional development and make those safer spaces in our workshops and in our meetings?

Beth 56:20
The next one is number three, make social connection a priority in policies and practices. And so this can be at the organizational level, but it also can be just you as a facilitator and the things that you are going to want to make sure that you do in your own work, in your own facilitation practice. So that’s kind of a little ‘p’ policy. It’s not a big ‘P’ policy like you’d have in an organization, but it comes back to maybe something like your teaching philosophy statement that you’ve written or your philosophy statement about being a facilitator that maybe you have. Why are you doing the things you’re doing and how are you doing them as well? And have you written some of those things down?

Beth 56:59
Number four is called design environments for connection and invest in social events, activities and programs. And this is all about looking around at the built natural and social environments and how they can play an important role in facilitating social interactions. So this means to we facilitators that even the room that we hold things in can either support social connection or it can take away from it. Getting people outside into nature can support social connection in the middle of a learning experience. So just think about the environments that you are intentionally creating in your sessions and how they might support or even detract from social connection.

Beth 57:41
Number five is about improving accessibility and inclusion for all people. It was great to see this included in the social connection guidelines. You know we talk a lot about this on the podcast. So there are definitely other episodes that you can go and dig into on Facilitating on Purpose to learn more about how to improve the accessibility and inclusion in your sessions. But just always be questioning whether the things that you’re creating are going to be possible and inclusive for all people to participate in in your sessions.

Beth 58:13
Lastly, we have number six, to measure and make progress towards improving social well-being. So this, again, it could be at the organizational level to allocate funding or at the community level to monitor progress. I know here in Victoria, BC, we have a report called Vital Signs. And one of the elements in that report is about belonging and engagement. It’s about participation in civic life and the well-being of our community. Victoria’s grade last year was a B minus and I wonder what you think your community’s grade would be as it relates to belonging and engagement? Something to think about for sure and something to think about our own things that we’re doing to contribute to that, either in our work or in our life.

Beth 59:01
So those are the community guidelines of the entire set of social connection guidelines. Go to the link in the show notes that I’m going to give you to go see them in more detail and also see the individual guidelines as well. But generally they just give us so much to think about and jump off from, whether we’re looking at our facilitation practice or our life as well. You heard me in the episode. I think I thought that Pete and I were going to talk a lot about facilitation and maybe things we can do in workshops and that kind of stuff. But we ended up just talking about how we should be in our life. And that was actually one of the most exciting things for me in this episode. And I hope it was for you as well.

I really want to thank Pete Bombaci again for being with me and sharing this important topic on the show.

Beth 59:48
On the next episode of the podcast, it’s a solo one with me. I’m going to be talking about how I approach podcasting as a facilitator and thinking about and talking about some of the micro facilitation skills that I might be using while preparing for and having the conversations and doing all the things within this podcast.

Beth 01:00:09
There’s all sorts of things that I do as a facilitator that I didn’t actually quite realize myself until I sat down and started to think about it and write some things down. So join me next time for Podcasting as Facilitation. I’ll see you then.

[Show outro]
Beth 01:00:24
Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too. To find the show notes, give me feedback or submit ideas for future episodes. Visit FacilitatingOnPurpose.com Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy facilitating!

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