We’ve written about the importance of making and maintaining friendships in adulthood and the benefits of face-to-face interaction.

After reading one of these articles, maybe you tried to get your friends together to do something.

Perhaps you threw out a text to them, and the resulting conversation went something like this:

You: Hey, that new pizza place just opened up. Let’s get together for dinner there next week. What night would work for you guys?

Friend 1: I’m free Saturday night!

Friend 2: Reese has a basketball game that night. 

You: What about Friday night?

Friend 2: I’m going out for my and Cheryl’s wedding anniversary that night. How about Thursday?

You: I’ve got Boy Scouts that night. 

Friend 1: Thursday wouldn’t work for me either. How about Wednesday?

Friend 2: I’ve got to work the late shift that night.

And on it went until the discussion devolved into a vague commitment to try to get together some other time. 

Not only is it hard to corral your friends for a simple hang out, but if you belong to any civic or church groups, you’ve likely encountered a similar difficulty in getting people together. You plan an event for which hundreds of people might potentially attend, but only a handful show up. Folks just have all kinds of other conflicting events going on. 

A lot of ink has been spilled on what’s causing the decline in in-person socialization in the West. Technologies like television and the internet have undoubtedly played a role. But an oft-overlooked factor is that in our modern, hyper-individualistic world, people no longer have schedules that sync up. When everyone is living in their own timeline, there are fewer shared areas that overlap, and getting together becomes increasingly difficult to do. 

The Soviet Nepreryvka: A Case of Top-Down Social Discoordination

There’s a telling lesson from history on what happens to individuals, families, and society when there’s no longer a shared calendar or schedule: In 1929, the Soviet Union adopted a continuous workweek plan called nepreryvka. The plan aimed to increase the productivity of factories to speed up industrialization. 

First, they rejiggered the calendar so that a week only had five days instead of seven. Next, workers were assigned to five different color groups. Each group was assigned a weekly work schedule where they’d work four days and have one day off. Which days were work days and which day was an off day differed between each group. On any given day, 80% of the population was at work, while 20% was at home.

While this arrangement allowed factories to run non-stop, it also had immediate social consequences. Friends, family members, and even husbands and wives were often separated into different color groups. Socializing became nearly impossible because everyone had different schedules. Clubs and church congregations began to atrophy, friends stopped seeing each other, and families became distant and stressed. From the point of view of the Soviet commissioners, this disruption of organic social life was only another benefit of nepreryvka: keeping people atomized made them easier to control. 

By 1931, the Soviet Union gave up on nepreryvka because production began to slow down, likely due to a plunge in morale amongst rightfully resentful employees. But the social damage had been done. Those two years of schedule discoordination created tears in the fabric of society that took a very long time to mend.

Western Hyper-Individualism: A Case of Bottom-Up Social Discoordination

In the modern West, we see a similar thing happening as happened during the Soviet nepreryvka. Instead of some giant bureaucracy jacking up everyone’s schedule from the top down in the name of collective efficiency, our social discoordination is coming from the bottom up, as individuals choose different schedules to make a living or pursue interests, often for the sake of personal efficiency.

Due to the changing nature of work, the traditional Monday to Friday, 9-5 job is no longer the norm. Many people not only work during the day but also in the evenings and/or on weekends. 

Not only does modern work create syncing problems, but the abundance of choices in leisure and extracurricular activities (for both children and adults) can keep people apart as well. Whereas a hundred years ago, maybe the only game in town on Wednesday night was a meeting at the Freemason lodge, now someone might be at a CrossFit class, movie, church youth group, or any number of their children’s sports games. 

Oliver Burkeman wrote about this issue in his book Four Thousand Weeks. He pointed out that what usually keeps people from getting together with friends isn’t an outright lack of time, but the simple inability to sync up schedules. 

How to Mitigate and Manage Social Discoordination

This challenge of social discoordination is a stinker of a problem to solve. Here are some suggestions that have worked for me and that I’ve seen work in other people’s lives, which can at least help manage and mitigate the issue: 

Accept that getting together with others is going to be hard. The expectations you set for something play a primary role in how you experience its result. If you’ve got it in your head that getting together with people should be fairly easy to do, when it isn’t — which is very often the case — you’ll end up feeling frustrated and resentful. Instead, accept the fact that any kind of socialization in the modern world will include friction and take effort and won’t always work out. When it does work out, count it as a great win. When it doesn’t, just shrug it off and try again some other time.

Create a set, recurring date for get-togethers. One effective way to mitigate social discoordination is to create a shared schedule with your friends and family by setting a recurring date for get-togethers. 

People often can’t fit in an event with only a week’s notice, but when an event is recurring, they can start planning their calendar around it.  

A few years ago, I belonged to two different social groups — one a scripture study group and the other a book club — that got together regularly by using this practice. With the latter group, we met the third Wednesday of every month at 6 p.m.; with the other, we got together every other Thursday at 8:30 p.m. We all agreed to the schedule and stuck to it and were able to plan the rest of our lives around it. It worked wonderfully for a couple of years. (Both eventually disbanded due to people moving. Sad!)

We’ve seen success with this tactic on The Strenuous Life. Early on, we noticed that local chapters had trouble planning and organizing meet-ups because members couldn’t sync schedules. So we introduced the idea of “Strenuous Saturday” and designated the third Saturday of every month as the official day for meet-ups. Groups don’t have to have their meet-ups on the third Saturday of the month, but setting that as the general norm certainly helped make events easier to plan and more frequent. 

The recurring events you set don’t have to be things that you do weekly or monthly. They can be annual traditions too. Maybe every year you throw a Memorial Day BBQ for your friends. They always know it’s coming, and always know to save the spot on their calendar for it.

Try a 2-hour cocktail party on a Tuesday night. People’s weekends are pretty booked up. On Wednesdays, some people have church youth group. Thursday nights are a great night to attempt to get folks together — people are already transitioning into the weekend mindset but aren’t as busy as they are on Fridays and Saturdays. But if you really want to plan an event where the preponderance of people will be available to attend, Tuesdays are where it’s at. Tuesdays are dumb. Hardly anything goes on on a Tuesday, and a fun social event would be an accessible and welcome break from the norm. 

You could plan any kind of get-together for a Tuesday, but to maximize the fun and effectiveness of the event, you can’t go wrong with a “2-hour cocktail party”; Nick Gray goes into all the details of how to execute one in this episode of the podcast.

Get rid of the “maybe” mentality. Manners expert Thomas Farley says that “we’re living in the age of maybe.” We get invites to weddings and parties and never commit to yes or no because we think there might be something else going on at that time that will conflict (and that we’d rather do). This makes planning an event harder for hosts and social initiators, which makes them more reluctant to plan future events, which makes in-person get-togethers more and more infrequent. 

Instead of saying “maybe” to social invites, make a firm commitment to either yes or no. If you say yes to an invite, stick to it, even if something else comes up. 

Embrace “Downton Abbey” sociality. There have been other times in human history when logistical factors prevented people from socializing very often. On the Western frontier, people who lived on far-flung homesteads sometimes didn’t see any non-immediate family members outside of a long trek to church on Sundays and very occasional visits from extended family and friends. It was the same deal in many rural areas up through the 20th century. 

In Downton Abbey (hey, don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it — it was a good show, man), the characters live in homes and manors spread out across the English countryside. Set in the early 1900s, when automobiles and telephones were coming on the scene but not yet common, friends and relatives could go weeks and months without seeing each other and communicated largely by letter. In the show, when characters do have the chance to meet up, they tend to blurt out their deepest feelings for each other, without much preliminaries. Some of this is, of course, the product of screenwriters who are looking to condense and gin up the drama. Yet it also feels authentic to what these kinds of interactions would have really been like; when it might be weeks before you’d see someone again, when you did see them, you’d skip the idle small talk and get right to the nitty-gritty. 

In our own age, we’ve returned to a time of Downton Abbey-esque sociality. We “talk” to people more often via text than we see them in person, and we can go quite awhile between the times we interact with them in the flesh. When we do get together, then, we might take a page from the post-Edwardian era and really make these meet-ups count, spending less time on trivialities and more time on the deeper things we’ve been thinking and feeling since the last time we rendezvoused. 

The post The Challenge of Social Discoordination appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

How do you come to know yourself?

You can journal. Attend a retreat. Sit on a rock and think.

But perhaps the most underrated tool for gaining self-knowledge is participating in any long-term relationship — particularly one in which the escape hatch has been double bolted by the exchange of public vows.

With most relationships, we only show people certain parts of ourselves. We encounter coworkers, family members, and friends in a pattern of meet and retreat; we assemble for intervals short enough to keep our best face forward, before withdrawing again to our separate spheres. 

In a marriage, spouses do not get together for discrete purposes of fun or functionality. They’re together in everything. All the mundanities of daily life. All the stresses of professional and personal setbacks. All the varieties of bodily functions. There are no true timeouts, no chances to literally or metaphorically step away to powder one’s nose.

Duty-bound to make it to the other side of every conflict, spouses are thrown back on each other again and again.

Through this process of full-contact confrontation, you not only get to know your partner, but discover a heck of a lot about yourself. Marriage holds up a mirror in which you can see how you act and who you are more clearly. The layers you’re able to artfully disguise from the world are exposed, leading to the repeated realization: “Oh, so I’m like that, am I?”

In showing us ourselves from every angle, marriage can pack the introspection-generating punch of a hundred self-help books.

In reflecting back all our dimensions, marriage can offer the opportunity to recognize and strengthen the parts of ourselves that are underdeveloped.

In giving us a good hard look at ourselves, marriage can represent, as Joseph Barth once put it, “our last, best chance to grow up.”

The post Sunday Firesides: The Maturing Mirror of Marriage appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Influence comes down to a person’s level of authority. When someone is perceived as having power, status, and worth, others readily follow them and comply with them.

Authority isn’t just a matter of position. It’s also a personal quality.

When people attempt to develop their influence or authority, they tend to focus on learning social skills and changing their behaviors around speech and body language.

But my guest would say that authority isn’t about what you learn but who you are, and that once you establish the right lifestyle and mindset, influential behaviors will emerge as a natural byproduct.

Chase Hughes is a behavioral analyst who trains both military operatives and civilians. Today on the show, Chase unpacks the five factors that measure someone’s level of authority and produce composure, a state which resides between posturing and collapse. We talk about how so much of authority comes down to having your stuff together, why you should become your own butler, and what Andy Griffith has to teach about leadership. We also talk about the things that kill your authority, and how not to be influenced by false authority.

Resources Related to the Episode

• Chase’s books:
  • Six-Minute X-Ray: Rapid Behavior Profiling
  • The Ellipsis Manual: Analysis and Engineering of Human Behavior
• Chase’s app
• Milgram experiment
• “The Social Psychology of Imitated Jaywalking”
• Chase’s Authority Self-Assessment Matrix
• AoM Article: The 5 T’s of Mastering the Art of Poise
• Becoming a Well-Differentiated Leader
• AoM Article: Never Complain; Never Explain
• Smoke-filled room experiment
• AoM Article: 8 Reasons You’re Hardwired for Sheepness
• The 34 Behaviors That Will Kill Your Authority

Connect With Chase Hughes

• Chase‘s website
• Chase on IG
• Chase‘s YouTube channel and The Behavioral Panel YouTube channel
• Chase on Twitter

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Download this episode.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Influence comes down to a person’s level of authority. When someone is perceived as having power, status and worth, others readily follow them and comply with them. Authority isn’t just a matter of position though, it’s also a personal quality. When people attempt to develop their influence or authority, they tend to focus on learning social skills and changing their behaviors around speech and body language. But my guest would say that authority isn’t about what you learn, but who you are. And that once you establish the right lifestyle and mindset, influential behaviors will emerge as a natural byproduct. Chase Hughes is a behavioral analyst who trains both military operatives and civilians. Today on the show, Chase unpacks the five factors that measure someone’s level of authority and produce composure, a state which resides between posturing and collapse. We talk about how so much of authority comes down to having your stuff together, why you should become your own butler, and what Andy Griffith has to teach about leadership. We also talk about the things that kill your authority and how not to be influenced by false authority. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/authority.

All right, Chase Hughes, welcome to the show.

Chase Hughes: Thanks, Brett. Thanks for having me, man.

Brett McKay: So you are a behavioral analyst and you train military and law enforcement on how to read people and gather human intelligence, so they might be using this stuff in interrogations, interviews, things like that. How did you get into this line of work?

Chase Hughes: I did 20 years in the military, and I joined when I was 17 years old and I was stationed in Pearl Harbor. Long story short, I was out in Waikiki Beach one evening and I was talking to this young lady who I thought was just super into me, and essentially I asked her out and she basically turned me down really hard. And I went home that night and I typed how to tell when girls like you into the internet. And I remember just printing off this massive stack of body language articles and stuff. And I just went down this rabbit hole for like a year. And then while I was getting good at this, one of my best friends, his name was Craig Weberley, died in the USS Cole terrorist attack. And I was reading these intelligence reports that all the failures that led up to this happening was just a training… Intelligence operative training that they couldn’t get people in the region to provide intel and stuff. So I just dedicated the rest of my career to making this stuff possible for intelligence operatives to be able to gain rapport and really build up a relationship with these people where they can get intelligence faster.

Brett McKay: So you went from pick up artistry to helping the military?

Chase Hughes: [chuckle] Right. I wouldn’t call it pick up artistry. I just wanted to be good enough at body language that I would just know when not to ask. And I would just avoid rejection, I think.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, so you’ve written several books where you present the things that you train in the military and law enforcement in a very reader friendly way. And you’ve developed these really sophisticated and, you know, that you have like this behavioral table of elements where you can… You analyze body language basically and what that can possibly mean. But one of the factors that you talk about a lot in your books and you hit home hard is one of the key factors in gathering intelligence, whether it’s from a potential, an enemy combatant, something like that, or if you just wanna know if someone is interested in you or you’re making a sales pitch and you wanna make sure that you are directing your pitch in a way that it resonates with that person. You argue that when it comes to influence, authority is more important than social skills. So what led you to that conclusion?

Chase Hughes: Well, if anybody’s ever taken like Psych 101 in college, you remember this Milgram experiment, and I’ll give you like a 15 second, 20 second recap of this thing. So essentially they got volunteers for this experiment, and they were told… They met this person and you’re gonna give them a quiz and every time they get an answer wrong, you’re gonna shock them with this electrical shocking machine. And with each wrong question, you’re gonna increase the voltage and it gets worse. I’m not gonna go into all the details, but it was pretty bad. Like 67% of people went all the way to maximum voltage, even when the person on the other side of the room that was being “shocked” even though they weren’t was screaming and begging to stop the experiment saying they had heart problems and all this, and there’s hundreds of other psychology experiments like this.

But just looking at this, there’s no secret technique that was used. There’s no like, oh, they use some covert language trick or some secret rapport building technique or any of this. It’s just authority made that happen. And if authority can do that almost on its own with no like secret linguistics or any of those tricks or anything like that, or sales tactics, that seems to be the number one place that we need to focus if we’re starting to learn persuasion or influence or any of that, authority is just so, so important because it can make extreme things happen.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah. Some of the other studies you highlight besides the Milgram study is that researchers have done studies on jaywalking. What was going on there?

Chase Hughes: Yeah. I think that was called the Crosswalk Experiment, where one person essentially just… It’s a dude wearing like jeans and a t-shirt and he walks across the street when he’s not supposed to, when the sign says don’t do it. And then the same dude goes up and puts on like a suit and tie and they cut his hair and stuff, and it increases the amount of people who will follow him across the intersection by like 88% just because of a shift in clothing. And that’s a good estimate. Just our understanding of authority is not all about just and real authority. It’s about perceived authority as much as it is about just having genuine authority.

Brett McKay: And why are we so keyed on individuals with authority? Like why do we tend to follow them?

Chase Hughes: So our ancestors left all kinds of stuff in our bodies to survive. That’s why we have a fight or flight response. And all kinds of just pre-programmed responses, even facial expressions, we’re born with facial expressions like anger and sadness and happiness and fear. So our ancestors also left everything that helped them to survive. So the DNA, let’s say like 100,000 years ago, if our ancestors are learning lessons that helped them to survive, their DNA essentially says, “Okay, I’m gonna hardwire this so I can pass it down.” So obeying authority and being obedient towards a perceived authority was probably one of, if not the most important thing for tribal function. And when humans are in tribes, and if they don’t obey the tribal leader, they might get killed. They don’t get protection, they get less access to resources, they get disliked by the rest of their tribe because the leader doesn’t like them. It’s tremendous. Like it’s the bottom second row and third row of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Like all the stuff we need to survive can essentially stem from our relationship to authority figures.

Brett McKay: And individuals who are highly persuasive, whether they’re people who, you know, good salesmen for example, good politicians, but also you could be like con artist. They understand this probably intuitively, correct?

Chase Hughes: I definitely think so. Like a good example would be like a, let’s say a dangerous cult is out there and they’re recruiting people into this weird cult. And how can like a socially intelligent CEO, for example, get talked into joining this weird cult, and just trying to figure that out is this mammalian, this almost animal response, this programmed into our brain to be responsive towards this confidence and charisma and authority. And it just says, you need to trust this person and go along with what they say. And that’s an unconscious process. We’re not sitting there with a checklist, a grocery list, like checking off everything as the person displays behaviors. Like it’s an unconscious list, which we’ll get into a little bit later for sure.

Brett McKay: So yeah, the big takeaway that I think we’re trying to get at, I wanted to frame the rest of our conversation around is, I think a lot of times when people think about social skills or being more persuasive or being good with women, like knowing how to interact with women, they think about all these little like hacks, like things you could say. They think about the specific body language they should use, and you’re arguing like, that’s probably icing on the cake. What you should really spend most of your time focusing on is developing that perception of authority.

Chase Hughes: Yes. So just getting to the point where the display of those behaviors is a byproduct of who you are, not what you’ve learned.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And so we’ve been talking to authority, like how are you defining authority? I mean, is it a matter of position? Can you have authority and not be in the position of authority? Is it charisma? How are you defining authority?

Chase Hughes: Well, in my training, I tend to use five factors to measure a person’s level of authority. And I even have an assessment that if you wanna throw it in the show notes, you’re more than welcome to. And it can essentially assess someone’s level of authority using these five factors. And those are confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude and enjoyment. And once those all combine, it leads to authority, but it produces a behavior that I call composure. And then a person can essentially rate themselves like at the end of every day in their journal or whatever on this composure scale and on those five factors. And the more often they’re doing that, the more that’s being brought into awareness and with composure. And we tend to look at composure as a pendulum where the center would be composure and the left side would be collapse, maybe the right side would be posturing. And that’s what we call those two far ends of that pendulum. When we fall out of composures, we fall one way, it’s into collapsing and we fall the other way it’s into posturing and over posturing behaviors.

Brett McKay: And can composure be situational? Like in some situations you have more composure and therefore more authority and then other situations not so much.

Chase Hughes: It can, and I think the more that somebody is able to bring this into everyday life, and this is one of the things I talk about a lot in my trainings is, are you able to do this off camera? Like when no one’s looking, are you still a leader? Are you still a role model when the cameras are off, no one’s looking, do you still exhibit those behaviors? And the more you get into that sort of lifestyle, the less situations will matter when it comes to authority, I think.

Brett McKay: So what you’re saying is, if you develop these five factors, which we’re gonna talk about, as a consequence of that, you will start displaying behaviors that other people will see and perceive as you having authority, is that the idea?

Chase Hughes: Absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So, I mean, okay, for us, when we’re looking at people and we’re sizing people up of whether they have composure and authority, what are we looking at? What factors, what cues are we homing in on to say, “Yeah, this guy’s got it together.”?

Chase Hughes: So our brains will typically, and this is very much an unconscious process, but our brains go through a five-stage process, I would say. So our brains are analyzing another person’s movement and it goes in this order. As far as I can tell, I’ve done about 20,000 hours of research on this. Movement first then appearance, then confidence. And this is essentially when our brains are looking for confidence on a subconscious level, what that means is we’re looking for a lack of reservation in behavior and movement. And so it’s movement, appearance, confidence, connection, like are they fully checked in? So just when you think about connection, just think of the way that Bill Clinton looks at people and connects with them when he talks to them. And the final one here is intent. So how am I understanding and processing this other person’s intent? And if all five of those line up, the subconscious part of our brain sees that this person is very likely an authority.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And as you’re saying, sometimes people wanna hack this and they do the posturing. So they probably read some sort of research where, well, people with big body language, they take up a lot of space, they’re perceived as having more authority, so they start doing that.

Chase Hughes: You’re right.

Brett McKay: But it just comes off as phony-baloney.

Chase Hughes: It really does. And I think one of the reasons that this is common is I think there’s a problem in learning new behaviors where people focus on symptoms and they ignore causes. So let me just look at the symptoms of rich people. For example, if I wanna make money, I’m gonna look at the symptoms of rich people. Okay, they have a big house, that’s what I need. Then they have an expensive car, that’s what I need. But they’re not looking at causes. So when I’m looking at like, I take up a lot of space, my voice is crystal clear, there’s two things that really happen. Number one, the person’s focusing on symptoms instead of the cause of those behaviors. And number two, the biggest disaster of all time when it comes down to authority and actually having real confidence is getting into a mindset where you’re worried or thinking, even just thinking about status and hierarchy. The number one thing that I see when I train operatives is, the soon as they start worrying or thinking about status and hierarchy, it automatically starts to deteriorate their level of authority and confidence.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The alpha doesn’t think about being alpha.

Chase Hughes: Right. It’s not in their head. And I think if you’re doing all of this symptom stuff, you’re getting into performance mode instead of connection mode. And when I say performance, this is if you wanna just figure out what mode I’m in, in a conversation, if you’re in performance mode, you’re maybe tense or feel pressured. You’re observing yourself too much in the conversation, you’re analyzing the event afterwards a whole lot. There’s not much feeling of connection and it feels like an evaluation from the other person while you’re in performance mode because you’re performing and the focus is more on yourself, and in connection mode, your focus is on the other person. It feels like a connection. You’re feeling good about the event without needing to recall all these details. You’re feeling relaxed, comfortable, curious about the other person and just you’re really comfortable sharing your own depth of emotion.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think we’ve all encountered the individuals who they’re in performance mode, right? If you’ve been with like a salesperson, I’ve had this happen to me when I’ve had people come out to give me estimates for a new roof or something. And it’s interesting to see the different approaches people take and like one guy I can tell like, man, you’re doing all the tricks. And it just… And then you have another guy comes in and he’s not doing that, but you can tell that he’s got his stuff together and I actually trust him more.

Chase Hughes: It’s so, so true. But I think that some of those things, when somebody gets into performance mode, there’s maybe some anxiety there that this helps them to alleviate anxiety because I’m gonna look up these power poses to give me confidence and I’m gonna look up these articles that are, you know, you’ve seen them on LinkedIn and stuff, like the 31 Body Language Signs of Confident People, which are all of course symptoms. But I think those help sometimes in the interim with people with anxiety, and anxiety is probably one of the things that keeps people from having confidence and developing authority. And I think anxiety comes from three things very specifically. Number one is a decline in the reputation that you have with yourself. And number two is an inability to recognize what you can and can’t control. And number three is unmet expectations or the fear of your expectations being unmet. Those are the three pillars that I have to get rid of in the operatives that I train.

Brett McKay: How do those things come about in someone’s life? How do they show up? Why does that happen to people?

Chase Hughes: I think they just get into this mindset of I need to manage how I’m being perceived. And they tend to think more about status and hierarchy and we’ll definitely cover some ways to get over that here in a little bit if you want.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, yeah. I guess they’re needy, and they showcase their neediness and I think everyone’s been around a person like, “Ah, you’re just way too needy.”

Chase Hughes: Yeah. And if you’ll allow me to go back to the pendulum for just a second, and we have composure in the middle and we have collapse and posturing, collapse and posturing on these far ends of the pendulum have a lot more in common than people think. They’re both trying to get the other person to give something up, whether it’s respect, admiration, love, money, whatever it is. Second, their agendas are concealed and hidden from public view. They wear this mask to kind of conceal the collapse or they wanna conceal the posturing behavior. And they both cover up for feelings of a little bit of inadequacy and the feelings of always trying to be tough. And I think they’re both incredibly stressful states to live in and they’re kind of rooted in insecurity. And the one big thing that they both have in common is they both believe highly in competition and they kind of live their lives in a competitive instead of a collaborative frame of mind.

Brett McKay: And then one other thing you talk about too is that people with authority or people with that natural influence, they tend to understand that most people have that neediness and those unmet desires, and they’re just kind of broken human beings. And because they understand that, that’s one of the reasons why they’re able to connect with them is they can give that person what they need.

Chase Hughes: It’s so, so true, yeah.

Brett McKay: So let’s dig into these factors that contribute to people perceiving us as someone with authority, and actually having it. It’s not just about perceiving, you actually have it, and because you actually have it, it naturally comes out in the way you present yourself. You talk about confidence. How do you define confidence?

Chase Hughes: I’d say confidence is, if I can just use one word, it’s comfort. It’s just comfort. It’s just giving yourself permission. That’s kind of what it is. It’s how you… You have got a good reputation with yourself, and you’re giving yourself permission to do something, and one incredible thing is that if you’re displaying super confident behavior to a person that you’re just meeting for the first time, they will automatically assume that you’ve been that way for decades. So you’re not just confident in yourself, you’re carrying the permission from thousands of other people that you’ve interacted with, so they’re assuming that thousands of other people accepted your confident behavior, so that’s a really key point to make that even if it’s a one-on-one interaction and you’re behaving confidently, that person… If it’s genuine, that person is assuming that it’s been this way for years for you.

Brett McKay: So how do you develop this genuine confidence? I’m sure we could dedicate a whole podcast to this, but generally, what do you tell your operatives, what do they need to start doing in their personal lives to develop this natural confidence that’ll be displayed naturally when they interact with other people?

Chase Hughes: All right, let me see if I can do this like a two-minute summary. So the first thing, I want you to start challenging yourself to be slower than anyone else in the room. So just set a speed limit on your body, just try it on for a few days of like, “I will not move faster than if I was standing in a swimming pool.” So this starts re-teaching your body to just display the signs of comfort. And second, just having the knowledge that you don’t need permission to be confident is so, so critically huge. And keeping track of your own levels of confidence throughout every single day is the way to get that down into the lower parts of the brain, because just thinking about it stays in the top of the brain, “If I can get my lower brain really invested in my confidence, I don’t need… ” I’m not talking about setting goals or anything like that, I’m just talking about at the end of every day, I’m gonna sit down and I’m gonna write from one to five or one to 10, how was my confidence today? That’s it. ‘Cause it’s just like when you’re looking for a new car, like on the internet and watching all the YouTubes and all the videos and stuff about, “I’m gonna get this new car,” then you buy the car and you start seeing it everywhere.

Like, I just got a Tesla and I’m like, “Wow, everybody bought Teslas at the same time as me.” But that’s not true at all, right? So I’ve just repetitively shown it to my brain so much that now my brain is searching for it, and if you can just set a competition to move slower than the person that you’re speaking to and to be more comfortable. That’s it. Just start out with those two things, “I’m gonna be the most comfortable person in this environment,” just comfort, just relaxed, “And I’m gonna move slower.” Those two things are like the… And monitoring, those three things, I would say, are this ultimate gateway to developing confidence the fastest way.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s a fast way to do it, but then at the same time, you’ll probably wanna do things where you’re developing that self-regard, you’re doing things that make you feel competent and confident. So it can come down to setting goals and accomplishing them, just doing those things in your private life will help you develop that confidence for the long-term.

Chase Hughes: Yes, absolutely. And just taking tiny, tiny steps out of your comfort zone when it comes to just talking to other people, and you’re essentially teaching the lower part of your brain like, “No, nothing bad’s gonna happen, they’re not gonna punch me in the face if I start acting confident. There’s not gonna be like a tiger that jumps out from a closet if I start behaving confidently.” You’re just slowly, gradually introducing your brain to a little bit more stressful or slightly stressful situations, and over time, and I’m talking like just over maybe 15 days, the confidence starts building itself and you get more and more permission and you’ll notice as a person becomes more and more confident, you can see that they’re just giving themselves more permission.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so it’s the ability… So that long-term, long-lasting confidence is the ability to handle uncertainty no matter what’s thrown at you. And I think that’s why you can tell some people like, “That guy’s street-wise.” And it’s probably because they grew up in the school of hard knocks, and they’ve had to deal with uncertainty over and over and over again, and because of that, they have the confidence in any situation, like, “Well, I handled this when I was a kid, and I was out in war and I handled that alright,” and so it just carries over to everything they do.

Chase Hughes: It’s so true, but that can lead people to thinking like, “Oh, I need to go through this big rite of passage,” which isn’t necessarily true. There’s all kinds of people who are super confident who have not been through anything like that.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Yeah, I mean, you define confidence as the ability to take action without reservation, and I really like that definition, because anybody, they can build up their confidence by taking part in little deprivations in their life, taking on challenges and then following through on those challenges, and by doing that, you’re gonna build up that good reputation with yourself, it’s a sense of self-trust. And this really takes us to our next element of authority, which is discipline. So why is discipline important in developing authority and how do we develop it?

Chase Hughes: Okay. So Brett, if you and I were sitting in ATL, like the Atlanta Airport, waiting on a flight or something, I could ask you with no… Like you’re not some behavior profile or anything, but I could say, “Brett, spot someone across that’s just standing over there, across the gate from ours, who is disciplined.” You could do it. And most people could do it. And I think that discipline has an unusual way, and I’m the number one body language expert in the world somehow, and I still can’t explain this articulately, but discipline has a way of coming up in our non-verbal communication that sends these little gut feelings to other people like, “That person is a disciplined person,” and it makes us, when we see a disciplined person, obviously it’s a little bit inspiring, but it makes us a little bit more likely to follow that person, who they are. So discipline definitely shows up. If I have off-camera discipline where nobody’s looking, it shows up in my behavior and other people can almost feel it.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s basically it comes down to keep a schedule, manage your money right, keep your house clean, make your bed like Jordan Peterson says, that’s stuff you do.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. And I say discipline is… I define discipline as the ability to prioritize the needs of your future self ahead of your own, so I am taking care of Chase tomorrow, and I’m prioritizing his needs over my own, so think of all the people or all the times, like when I was in college, you’d stay up all night and you know you have exams tomorrow, you stay up all night drinking or whatever. And you wake up the next day and you’re like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that.” And you’re mad at your past tense self because you didn’t have concern for your future self. So if you wanna start cultivating discipline in your life, start with small, little things, and just my advice is always to become your own butler, and this is… Wouldn’t it be great if you could wake up and everything was ready for you? Like you got up out of bed and your clothes are all laid out for the next day, and everything’s there? So, you are your own butler, your past tense self did all of that for you, because they put your concerns ahead of their own. And then I continue to do this, and I’ll be in the kitchen with my wife, Michelle, and I’ll be sticking… It’s night time, right?

And I’m about to go to bed, and I’ll be sticking one of those little Keurig Coffee Cup pods into the coffee maker and sticking a coffee mug there, ready for the next morning. And out loud, I’ll say, “Man, Chase is gonna love this.” So I will continuously speak about my future self in a way that I am prioritizing his needs and I will talk about him in the future, and just getting a relationship to where you’re looking forward in time with concern and getting to the point where you’re looking backward in time at your past tense self with gratitude.

Brett McKay: All right, so developing discipline that’s gonna make you naturally appear more competent and composed to other people. And I think also what it’ll do too as you do these things of being your own butler, working out, sticking to a schedule, managing your finances, that’s also gonna give you confidence, which is gonna just super charge that factor as well.

Chase Hughes: That is… Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So true, and I think all these things do feed into each other. I’m glad you brought that up.

Brett McKay: Yeah. All right, so that’s discipline. What about leadership? What do you mean by leadership?

Chase Hughes: My definition when I do trainings on leadership is that leadership is having possession of innate, like non-acting behaviors, your normal behavior produces following behavior in other people on its own. So what this means is, if I’m in another culture where I don’t speak the language, they would still follow some of my behaviors, I would still be effective to some degree as a leader because of how I behave and how I act. And I think if your behavior is producing what I call followership on its own, this means that you most likely have off-camera leadership. You’re not one person at work who’s all organized and everything, and you go back to your house and your bathroom counter is just covered in crap, you’ve got piles of laundry and dishes and stuff like that, but then when you go to work, everyone thinks that you’re really well put together. That would more likely be the person in charge and not the leader, ’cause those are two very, very different things.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the way you develop leadership is you work on that discipline, work on that confidence. So the next factor is gratitude. Why does gratitude contribute to our perception of authority?

Chase Hughes: So, if you look at the people that we naturally follow, that people talk about a lot, and the people that… One of the people that if I’m giving training on leadership, 100% chance, there’s gonna be a video of Andy Griffith on the screen. I believe that… And this came to me from one of my commanders on deployment, if you screwed up on this deployment in the Middle East, he had every box set of the Andy Griffith show, of every episode, and you had to pick a random season and a random episode and watch that episode, and write a paper on how you learned a lesson to fix how you screwed up as a leader from that one episode. And the insane thing was, in every episode, there was something that applied to a leadership mistake, a leadership lesson. And one of those people, like if you look at people like Andy Griffith or Bill Clinton or the people that we just naturally gravitate towards as mentors, as leaders, they all have a look of gratitude on their face, you can see that while you’re communicating with these people.

And I think gratitude has a very distinct way of showing itself in human behavior and on our face that other people don’t consciously perceive, they’re not saying, “Oh, that’s a very grateful person,” they just unconsciously perceive that level of gratitude and it helps us to be more likely to follow a person’s behavior. And I always teach that there’s the two types of gratitude, if you just practice this regularly, and you don’t have to go to Michael’s and build a crafty little gratitude journal or anything like that, but just low level and then high level gratitude. So if you’re eating a taco at Taco Bell, you’re grateful for the employees that put it all together for you, but you’re also grateful for the farmer who’s supporting his family somewhere in the world, who grew the lettuce that’s in your taco. So it’s like you’re zooming in on gratitude and then zoom all the way out, like on Google Earth, to where you can see the entire picture.

Brett McKay: No, I think we’ve all encountered leaders who have that, who display gratitude to you. You’ll go to the ends of the Earth for that person. Sometimes there’s leaders who will… They’ll bark at you and just get results, and in the short term, that might work. But they’re not gonna have that long-lasting influence because they didn’t cultivate that gratitude.

Chase Hughes: So, so true. Yeah.

Brett McKay: And it’s funny you mentioned Andy Griffith. That’s a great… I’m gonna look into that more, about Andy Griffith as an example of authority and influence. Wasn’t that… He only has one gun, it’s got one bullet and it’s locked up, but he’s able to manage the town with just that?

Chase Hughes: No, Barney carries the gun. Andy never does.

Brett McKay: Okay. Andy never does, right. He gave it to Barney, yeah.

Chase Hughes: He carries Barney’s bullet in his pocket.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.

Chase Hughes: And somebody asked him one time, they said, “Sheriff Taylor, why is it that you don’t carry a gun?” And he said, “Well, a lot of people respect me around here, and if I started carrying a gun, I’d be worried that some of that respect might be fear, and I might be confusing the two.” And it’s just… Man, the show is just such a good master class in leadership.

Brett McKay: And it’s funny, it’s super funny.

Chase Hughes: Yeah, it’s great.

Brett McKay: It’s a good… Yeah. There’s this barbershop I went to, they actually set up an old black and white TV, and they somehow fixed it, so where they put in a Amazon Fire Stick, and they’d stream Andy Griffith’s shows. And so you’re just sitting there to get your hair cut in an old-time barbershop, watching Andy Griffith, and just remember laughing out loud at Barney and his shenanigans.

Chase Hughes: If I’m ever out in your town, I wanna go there. That sounds awesome.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s cool. All right, so that’s gratitude. Enjoyment is that fifth factor. What do you mean by that?

Chase Hughes: Yeah. This is just a… It’s super simple, it’s just a person’s level of in-the-moment enjoyment. If you look at people that we nationally, culturally view as the natural leaders of the world, and then just imagine one of them taking their garbage out, or imagine one of them mowing their yard, or imagine one of them just doing a mundane task, you’d still imagine them with a tiny, tiny smile on their face, even if it’s faint. And we all have this ability to detect another person’s level of enjoyment, and I think it’s the most magnetic human trait that draws people in. And if we are able to stay in some kind of what I call calm enjoyment in my training, it’s just, I have the ability to just calmly enjoy these mundane tasks, that I think is the cornerstone of getting started as a leader, is being able to live in this calm enjoyment.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that makes sense. I think no one likes to be around a negative Nelly, we’re attracted to the guy who seems like he’s having a good time.

Chase Hughes: Always, yeah.

Brett McKay: So yeah, so we develop confidence, we develop discipline, we focus on developing our leadership, our gratitude, and just learning how to enjoy even the smallest of things. As we do this, we’ll naturally start displaying behaviors that will tell people that we have influence, we have authority.

Chase Hughes: Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so we’ll start moving differently, we’ll start talking differently, maybe we even start dressing differently, correct?

Chase Hughes: Yes, and I think some of those we’ll do deliberately, but over time, if we’re practicing measuring ourselves every day on confidence, discipline, leadership, gratitude, enjoyment, and then finally, composure, over time, all those cool behaviors that you read about in articles and stuff like that, those become a by-product of your new psychology, your new mindset of having authority in your life, and then it’s not… You’re not faking it because we are all manufacturing gut feelings in people every single conversation that we have. And if I wanna manufacture good gut feelings in other people, then that stuff needs to be real. So I’m always asking the question, “What can I do to make this a by-product of everything?” If I wanted authority, how do I make authority a by-product? And that’s by just monitoring that stuff every day. You don’t have to be judgmental of yourself, but just getting your lower brain aware of the stuff to begin with, and dragging that stuff out into the light, ’cause most people don’t really wanna think about it. We’re dragging it into the light and getting the brain super aware of it, and it speeds up that development so fast.

Brett McKay: And then if you wanna start implementing consciously some of these body language or social skills you read about, as you do the inner work, the stuff you start actually consciously doing will actually have more effect, likely.

Chase Hughes: So true, yeah. So as an example, a client of mine had trouble with posture and when people have anxiety, we want to… Our bellies are really soft, right? So when we talk about body language, somebody gets fearful, one of the things that happens with the body is the rib cage comes downward to protect all these soft organs that are in our belly, which makes our posture bad. So one client of mine had this issue and I put this kind of a kinesiology tape, like a physical therapist would use this stuff called KT tape, and it’s just kind of like a two-foot strip of like, I would say like mesh kind of tape made for the body. And I would stick it on his back in an X pattern in a way that if he started slouching, it would stretch the skin, and it would instantly… It’s not painful or uncomfortable, but it instantly brings awareness to the fact that he’s slouching. So, little tricks like that. How can I remind myself regularly to be in composure and to be confident? And just as a quick tip, how can I do this even in the car when nobody’s looking? Adjust your rear view mirror in your car for next time you drive to where you have to sit up really straight to see out of your back window. So just angle it up just a little bit to remind you every time you look in that rear-view mirror, to sit up straight. Just small little things on a daily basis like that to start correcting those non-verbal behaviors does go a long way, for sure.

Brett McKay: And again, I wanna circle back, the reason why we’re doing all this stuff, developing our authority, it just makes being influential and makes the social component of our lives just… It’ll get you 90% there, whether you’re interacting with women or making a sales pitch, or your leadership position at work, just developing that inner authority will get you 90% of your influence.

Chase Hughes: Absolutely. And it just makes your life better, just being able to just relax, ’cause a lot of people are living off-camera differently than they are on camera, and the moment that those two things start blending together and you’re like you can walk into work and know that the person I am here at work, when I’m in charge of these employees or whatever, is the same person I am at home, everything changes.

Brett McKay: In the books and in some of your interviews that I listened to preparing for our conversation, you talked about some authority killers. What are some authority killers? What are the most common ones you see in the people you work with?

Chase Hughes: I’ll give you a few here. I think number one is rapid body movement. And as a body language expert, there’s one thing that fear makes our bodies do, is protecting arteries, but it makes our bodies speed up, our head movement, our speech, our gestures, all of that speeds up, which is why I think that slowing down our bodies is one of the fastest ways to re-train the body to be more in composure. And complaining, I think, is one of the big ones. When we hear somebody complaining, we subconsciously make an agreement that they’re probably not a leader, and I will not claim to have any neuroscience to back this up, but think about the last time you heard somebody complaining. There’s something that goes on in the subconscious that says, “Wait, why was I paying attention to this person?” It automatically usurps some of the authority. But I would say overall, the biggest mistake that most people make is allowing the outside environment to determine who they are as a person and how they identify themselves. So starting to just internalize their own feelings and not determine who they are based on how people react. So like, “I need X, Y, and Z to feel good about myself,” that’s one of the biggest.

Brett McKay: Yeah. There’s a, I guess, in family psychology, family therapy, they call it differentiation, you wanna be well differentiated, so it’s like your self isn’t dependent on the emotions and feelings of other people. And it’s a hard thing to get… It’s a continual thing you have to work on all the time.

Chase Hughes: I do too. I mean, I don’t know if you go through this, but we’re about to hit a million subscribers on YouTube, and I’ll go through there and I’ll read a negative comment, and I will sometimes have a visceral reaction to it, like my heart rate will go up. And I was watching Eddie Murphy on an old interview, and somebody said, “Oh, you have a new movie coming out,” I think it was Jay Leno, and he said, “Oh, the reviews are great.” And Eddie said, “Oh, I don’t read those reviews,” and he said, “No, but they’re really good.” And he said, “Yeah, but if you believe the good ones, that means you’re going to believe the bad ones too.”

Brett McKay: [chuckle] Right, yeah, exactly. And it doesn’t get easier. Never does. So we’ve been talking about how we can develop our own charisma, authority, so that we can be more influential with others. What can we do to avoid being lulled into the charisma authority of potential bad actors? Like someone trying to recruit us to a cult or MLM or manipulative boss, what can we do to be on the lookout for that, so we know, we’re like, “We gotta be careful with this person.”?

Chase Hughes: I will tell you, I published books on hardcore interrogation tactics and stuff like that, and I’m a body language expert, behavior expert, that still does not give me a vaccine against being immune to that stuff. And when it comes to the charisma and authority, you’re not gonna really vaccinate yourself against it, but I would say the more that you learn about how the brain works and how it reacts to authority, and just learn a little bit about the psychological aspect of it, like the bystander effect and the Milgram Experiment, and there’s another experiment called The smoke-filled room where just a person sits because other people do in a room that’s filling up with smoke. And the smoke alarms are going off, they’ll just sit there because other people are sitting there, which are paid actors for the experiment. But in the last experiment they did, the percentage of people that stayed in the room long enough to die was 100%. 100%, just because 11 people stayed in the room and they didn’t leave, they didn’t care about the smoke, so that person stayed because the other people did. So, just understanding those little psychological principles can help you break away because it’s in your conscious awareness, and now it’s not unconscious. You’re taking the unconscious responses and making them very conscious.

And the final thing I would say is, pay very close attention to how you feel in that person’s absence. So if you’re around somebody and you’re like, “Wow, this is an incredible leader,” or “We’ve got an incredible connection and I can’t believe how awesome this person makes me feel,” if the positive feelings go away when you’re away from that person, something is off. You should still feel good about that interaction, it shouldn’t be like you need that drug again, because that person was probably using manipulative tactics on you, so they pumped you up with a lot of neurotransmitters, then you go away and those chemicals wear off ’cause it wasn’t emotional, it was chemical. They gave you a chemical high instead of this emotional feeling of actually feeling good. So pay attention, when that conversation ends with that person, do I still feel good about it? Do I still feel good? And if it’s not good, that might be a red flag.

Brett McKay: Well, Chase, this has been a great conversation. We’ve literally scratched the surface of your work. Where can people go to learn more about what you do?

Chase Hughes: You can just type “Chase Hughes” into the App Store, or you can check us out on YouTube. I’ve got pretty growing YouTube channel and we’ve got another channel with a few other guys that we profile human behavior, called The Behavior Panel, and it’s the most fun time of my week, for sure.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Chase Hughes, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Chase Hughes: Brett, thanks, man.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Chase Hughes. He’s the author of several books on behavior, including The Ellipsis Manual, it’s available on Amazon.com. Also, check out his website at chasehughes.com where you can find more information about his work, including his course on authority. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/authority, where you can find links to resources where we can delve deeper in this topic, including links to Chase’s Authority Self-assessment Matrix and his 34 Behaviors That Will Kill Your Authority.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code “manliness” at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android, iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. Helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett Mckay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #875: Authority Is More Important Than Social Skills appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

When Nick Gray moved to New York City, he was a shy introvert with few friends. But he wanted to build up his social network. So he started throwing cocktail parties to meet people. These parties changed his life, and he thinks they can change yours, too.

Nick knows what you’re thinking: you don’t throw parties, and hosting them is simply not for you. But, he would encourage you not to tune out. He’s got a great case for why you should give this idea a try, and just as he does in his book — The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings — Nick is going to lay out exactly how to throw a party that’s low stakes and low effort, but will be highly successful in helping you build all kinds of connections.

Today on the show, Nick shares what he’s learned from throwing hundreds of parties and refining his hosting technique to a T. He explains why cocktail parties are better than dinner parties (and don’t have to involve actual cocktails), the best night of the week to throw a party, why the party should only be two hours long and have a firm end time, how many people to invite, and who to invite when you don’t yet have any friends. And he explains why he’s a big fan of two things you might be hesitant about — name tags and icebreakers — and why two of his favorite things to include in a party are grapes and a harmonica.

Resources Related to the Episode

• Related articles by Nick:
  • How to Host a Party at Home With Kids
  • How to Host a Digital Nomad Happy Hour
  • Mocktail Party: How to Host When You Don’t Drink Alcohol
  • How to Do Icebreakers: The Ultimate Guide
  • Event Platforms: Pros, Cons, and My Favorites
• Related AoM articles and podcasts:
  • The Manly Art of Hospitality
  • How to End a Conversation
  • 9 Reasons You Should Host a Party This Weekend
  • Podcast #378: Brunch Is Hell
  • Podcast #362: The Art of Mingling

Connect With Nick Gray

• Nick’s website
• Nick’s newsletter
• Nick on IG

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. When Nick Gray moved to New York City, he was a shy introvert with few friends, but he wanted to build up his social network, so he started throwing cocktail parties to meet people. These parties changed his life, and he thinks they can change yours too. Nick knows what you’re thinking. You don’t throw parties and hosting them is simply not for you, but he’d encourage you not to tune out. He’s got a great case for why you should give this idea a try. And just as he does in his book, The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings, Nick is going to lay out exactly how to throw a party that’s low stakes and low effort. It’ll be highly successful in helping you build all kinds of connections.

Today on the show, Nick shares what he’s learned from throwing hundreds of parties and refining his hosting technique to a tee. He explains why cocktail parties are better than dinner parties and don’t have to involve actual cocktails, the best night of the week to throw a party, why the party should be only two hours long and have a firm end time, how many people to invite, and who to invite when you don’t yet have any friends, and he explains why he’s a big fan of two things you might be hesitant about, name tags and icebreakers, and why two of his favorite things to include in a party are grapes and a harmonica. After the show’s over, check out the show notes at aom.is/party.

Alright. Nick Gray, welcome to the show.

Nick Gray: Thanks. Excited to talk about parties.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so you got a book called The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings. So you wrote this book, but you came after you started experimenting with hosting parties. How did it change your life? Like what happened to you professionally and personally once you started having these cocktail parties on the regular?

Nick Gray: I’ll start with the biggest benefit, is that professionally, it helped me launch a multi-million dollar business called Museum Hack. I don’t say that to brag, but just to say like there are real benefits to learning to host these gatherings. And I built that business based on having a warm list of people who knew that they knew me, they knew that I did good stuff by hosting these parties, that I ran a well-run event. So professionally, I launched this business. Personally, I got invited to more events. I became someone who got introduced to people because of these events. And this is one of the number one benefits that new hosts will tell me, “I’m now getting introduced to people. I never used to get introduced to people.” “Oh, you gotta meet Brett. He hosts these awesome events,” that became a part of my life, and I guess I take it for granted now that I’m constantly being email introduced or I get on a text thread or at a party or I’m out somewhere and someone’s like, “Oh dude, you gotta meet Nick. He hosts these events.” That never used to happen to me.

Yeah, so I just get invited to meet events, I meet really cool people, and then I’ve built some of my best friends. Those relationships that I’ve built have come out of them first coming to my parties. That was the first step, ’cause I believe that big relationships always start at the acquaintance level, so… Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I imagine you felt good too. I know when I go to a good event from mingling people, the after effect is like I feel good afterwards. I feel happy.

Nick Gray: Yeah, yeah. Somebody asked me… Look, I gotta say. Somebody asked me like, “Oh, your parties, that was an amazing party. Did you have fun?” And I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t say that my parties… I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t say this ’cause people are gonna hate it, but I wouldn’t say that I have fun at my parties. That’s not the reason that I do it. I am so happy afterwards because I’ve hosted a good event and people absolutely love it, but it is not fun… Does that make sense? Is there like a difference in like…

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah, it’s not… Yeah, I would say like when you host a party, you feel tired and it can be exhausting, but you do feel good. You feel good because you got to rub shoulders with people and you’re able to bring people together, and that feels… It’s satisfying. Super satisfying.

Nick Gray: It’s super satisfying, and folks that I talk to, ’cause I’m very lucky I get to talk to people who read my book, and one of the things I say is, “Call me the day afterwards. I wanna hear how your party went,” and they say like, “That was amazing. I’ve never hosted a party,” and so they’re very happy and fulfilled, and they have this feeling… Here’s the key thing, you feel like you unlock a key life skill that nobody has ever taught us how to host a good event, like nobody’s taught us how to make friends as adults, and this is one of those things that like riding a bike or learning how to juggle, once you learn and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, great, I got it.”

Brett McKay: That’s a good point. I think a lot of people who might be listening to this and not party throwers and you’re trying to sell them on throwing parties, one of the selling points is if you wanna make more friends, this is an easy… You might think, “Well, party, that’s a lot of work,” we’re gonna show you actually, it’s easier than you think. The barrier to injury is not as high as you think it is. And it can… Like you said, you’ve made some of your best friends through these parties.

Nick Gray: Yes, hugely. Big friendships all started at that because… I don’t know. You tell me what you think about this. I think if you wanna meet interesting people, you have to do interesting things. And an easy hack to be someone who does interesting things is to host a party. Now, everyone wants to know someone who brings people together, and what I found was all that it takes is a simple two-hour gathering. In the time it takes you to watch a Netflix movie or something, you can gather 15 to 20 people and it just might change your life. It did for me. I sound like I’m a commercial or a multi-level marketing scheme, but I’m so red-pilled on the benefits of hosting these gatherings.

Brett McKay: Okay, let’s talk about the parties in general. Why did you choose parties, like a cocktail party over a dinner party?

Nick Gray: So I use that phrase, cocktail party, because it represents a lightweight social gathering, but you could call this whatever you want, a happy hour, a gathering. I like the phrase cocktail party because you say it to somebody and they immediately know, “Oh, this is a low commitment. I’ll meet a lot of people. It’ll just be conversations.” And as long as that phrase cocktail party has existed, it’s kind of always been about the people. There’s not a single drink recipe in my book. I don’t even drink alcohol myself. You don’t have to serve alcohol, but I found that cocktail parties got me 80% of the results of a dinner party with 20% of the work. And I can talk a little bit about why you should not host a dinner party, but many entrepreneurs and online advisers are like, “Start a mastermind group or a host a dinner party for other business owners.” I actually don’t think that’s the best advice for somebody just getting started. I actually think it hurts more than it helps.

Brett McKay: Why is that?

Nick Gray: Dinner parties require an extremely advanced level of facilitation and hosting skills. They’re also very stressful. People have dietary preferences. You have to manage the food. The hack, by the way, is that if you insist on hosting a dinner party, just order Thai food, like order a bunch of options, let people eat family style. But I found at least… So let’s say, for example, I’m trying to tightly curate a dinner of six people. By the way, more than six people and the dinner party conversation will naturally bifurcate into two groups. I don’t like that, I want it to be mono-track, and having something like a Jeffersonian dinner with 10 people on a mono-single conversation requires extremely advanced facilitation skills. And my book is really about just trying to convince a new generation of people, “Hey, if you’ve never hosted before, or if the most you would host is on your birthday party or at a major life event, consider how hosting can become a habit that you do once every other month to build up this network of acquaintances.”

Brett McKay: And I like too the idea of the cocktail party, because even if you don’t drink, everyone knows, when they picture a cocktail party, they probably picture, at least I do, 1950s, dudes in suits, women in nice dresses, but they’re just like at someone’s house and they have a drink in their hand and they’re just chatting. And I love that idea ’cause it’s so low commitment. You’re just gonna show up and you’re gonna talk, and the drinks are just something to give your hands to do, why you’re doing that basically. And I think today, oftentimes, I think when people think they wanna get people together, it’s gotta be some kind of big event and you gotta have… It’s gotta be elaborate and whatever, and so people end up just not doing anything. So I think bringing back this idea of the cocktail party is a great way to get people together more often.

Nick Gray: You said it much better than I did, which is that it’s just conversation. A cocktail party is lightweight conversation, a lot of people standing around, usually at somebody’s home, the drinks are the crutch, but they’re there, and it’s easy. You can pop in. If you don’t like it, you can leave after 30 minutes. Think about what it’s like when you invite somebody to an event. If I ask somebody to come over for dinner, I gotta be honest, that is a very intimate, large commitment that requires probably two to three hours of a dedicated schedule block. I really need like somebody to say yes to a dinner party. The key thing is a cocktail party is easy to say yes to. It’s easy for somebody to say yes to. And I found that at the beginning, for someone to be successful in hosting and making friends and building their network of acquaintances, the number one indicator of success for their first party is how many people show up.

Brett McKay: Alright, let’s start talking about planning these parties. We’re gonna call it a cocktail party. You don’t have to serve alcohol necessarily, but it’s just the mental model we’re using to help people understand like, “Oh, we’re just coming together to talk.” How far in advance should you plan a cocktail party?

Nick Gray: You need three weeks to plan your party, minimum, and again, the reason for that is I really want new hosts to be successful, and I’ve found that three weeks gives you enough time to first get the five yeses from your core group and then to cast a wider net and get 10 more yeses. Your goal is to get 15 people, and when you give yourself three weeks, I found that is a very healthy amount of time to fill up your guest list in one or two weeks and then just kinda have the next week to sit and simmer, send your reminder messages, buy the supplies, clean your house. You really don’t have to overly clean your house. That’s one of the biggest myths, is that you have to have a perfect home and perfect condition, shape, location. And there’s not a lot of supplies either. It’s under $100. But three weeks is about… For more advanced people, two weeks, but one of the biggest mistakes is it’s Monday and someone plans a party for Friday. There’s so much wrong with that.

Brett McKay: Well, one of the things wrong with that is, okay, first off, it’s short, not enough time, but you don’t like people having cocktail parties on Fridays or the weekends. Why is that?

Nick Gray: Friday and Saturday nights, at least where I live, are socially competitive days. Socially competitive days of the week mean that you will get bumped. Other things will come up. People are busy. They have things on their calendar. I suggest instead of these red level days to host on an easy day, like a Monday, a Tuesday or a Wednesday night. Those are the three nights that I like. And by the way, the whole thing is two hours, and so you’re not staying up till midnight on Tuesday night and everybody has to work, the party is generally two hours long, 7:00 to 9:00 PM approximately. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday nights are easier to say yes to. You get less of a flake rate, that’s the people that say they’ll come, but don’t, and I think it’s just non-traditional. It’s a little bit different. It also signifies that a Monday night is not a crazy blackout boozer drinkathon, like this is a social event, it is not about the drinking or the co-partying to the extreme.

Brett McKay: Alright, so you mentioned the title of the book is The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. You’ve put a hard limit on the party. Just two hours. Why the two-hour limit?

Nick Gray: One of the biggest mistakes people make is not setting an end time to their events. That causes slippage in what time people show up. It causes an extended awkward zone. The awkward zone happens at every party, even the ones I still throw. It’s the first 10, 15, 20 minutes of an event when you haven’t reached critical mass in the room when there’s only a couple of people who’ve shown up. At a party when you set a two-hour limit, people will show up on time, number one, that’s very important. Number two, it goes back to making it easy for people to say yes. When they know this is only a two-hour party, that’s easy. It’s a small space in their calendar. I also find that when you end things on a high note, when you end things that are going well, people think more highly of your event and then of you, so I like to end my party when things are going well. It gets people to be willing to come back. They say nice things about my parties. I also think two hours… I don’t know. I have a short attention span. Two hours is good.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And the other too I like about the limit, the hard limit, the hard end time is that we’ve all been in those parties where you’re ready to go, but there was no end times like, “Well, am I obligated to stay?” You can… Once it’s 9 o’clock, you’re like, “Alright, I’m out,” and no one’s gonna say anything ’cause that’s what time the party was over.

Nick Gray: Dude, I wanna talk about that for a second because there is this feeling when you’re at a party and you know when you kinda wanna leave, but you don’t wanna be a vibe kill. I don’t know what the word is.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you don’t wanna be the guy that’s like just ruining the vibe. Right, yeah.

Nick Gray: Right. And when you give your guests the excuse to leave, now you don’t have to end the party exactly at two hours, but you need to make an announcement, say, “Hey everybody, party was scheduled to end right now. Thank you so much for coming. If you need to leave, I just wanna say thank you. For everybody else, we can do a last call, start to wind down your conversations. Thank you for coming, and I’ll see you guys in a few minutes.” When you give them that exit, that release, people are surprisingly thankful for it. For those who have to go, they’re so thankful. “Hey, thank you for running a good event. I really appreciated that you ended your party on time.” You will be shocked and surprised how often that comment happens after you host a two-hour party.

Brett McKay: Well, the other benefit of the two-hour party that I just thought of and one of the reasons why you probably get more yeses is because if you’re a parent and you gotta find a babysitter, it’s hard to find… You can actually ask that 17-year-old to babysit your kids like, “Hey, I wanna be home at 9 o’clock,” instead of this, “Well, I don’t know when it’s gonna be over.” It could be 10 or 11 on a school night. Well, you’re not gonna find a babysitter.

Nick Gray: Right, right. And thinking about that, by the way, for those listeners who have kids that are wondering, “How do I host this party with kids?” We could riff on that. But one thing I have found is that if you have kids, if a lot of your friends have kids, a key unlock, a key hack, whatever word you wanna say, is to hire a babysitter to provide child care at your party, if you are able to, allows it to be even easier for your friends with kids to say yes. Now, maybe it’s not doable for you to hire the childcare for your party, then what you wanna do is host a simultaneous kid’s party in another room of the house. I have a article on my website that speaks about how to throw a simultaneous kid’s party, to play a movie, to get some snacks for them, what to do to make that a success and allow those parents to have adult conversations. What we don’t want is for the kids to be running around the house. It serves as a conversational crutch for the parents, and they don’t actually get to build those adult relationships that are so important.

Brett McKay: That’s a good point. I’ve been to events where it’s kids and parents mingling together, which some of those can be fine, that’s fine, I like those things, but sometimes we just want the adult conversation, and then you see the parents, like the kids will interrupt and the parents go, “Oh I gotta tend to Jimmy,” and it just… It throws the conversation off. Or the parents will invite their kids. I think they’re being well-meaning and well-intended, they’ll invite their 12-year-old, 13-year-old to the adult conversation, and it completely changes what you’re able to talk about because there’s a kid there.

Nick Gray: Yes. One thing that I have heard is that if you are hosting a children’s birthday party, if you are hosting a birthday party for one of your kids, consider using some things from my book, such as name tags for the adults. When we have these birthday parties for our kids and all the adults show up, that is a missed opportunity for the adults to meet new people and make new friends, and I will almost guarantee you that they will not know each other’s names at those events. You’ll say them, but it’s oftentimes forgotten. A little name tag can make a lot of difference to helping adults make new friends and make connections, even at a kid’s birthday party.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we’ll talk about the name tags. That’s really interesting. Okay, so let’s talk about… We talked about when to plan these things, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights are best, you wanna set a hard two-hour limit ’cause it just increases the opt-in for it, and plus, it just… People like that, it’s short and they know when they can be finished with it. Let’s talk about where to host these things. Where should you host your party?

Nick Gray: For 95% of people that are listening to this, the best place to host is at your home. Your house is key to building these relationships and creating connections. Now, in certain situations, the house is not viable, but I’m gonna tell you why your home is best, even if you think it’s too small or it’s too far away or it’s too messy. First the why. When you host at home, it’s kind of a vulnerable act to invite someone into your home, and yet it creates this connection that’s almost like going on a little date with someone. It’s so vulnerable to be welcomed into someone’s home that you turbocharged the relationship. Imagine meeting somebody at a bar and the difference in meeting them at the bar or going to their home, you get to come into their personal space, which is so different and unique and it just doesn’t happen that often.

Hosting at home is also incredibly generous. It’s the difference of having to wait and handle a bar tab when people are having to buy their own drinks and things like that. That is not generous. And I believe that to build relationships, you have to give before you can ask, and the fact that you’re giving them drinks and snacks when they come up to your home, that’s very nice. Hosting at home is also nice ’cause you get to control who’s there. Everybody is there that you have invited. Hosting at home, you can control the music, the lighting. You are in charge. You are the leader when it’s at your home.

Brett McKay: Okay, so that’s the why you, you mentioned that a lot of people have… There’s some pushback. Why do people say, well, I wanna do this, but I don’t wanna do it at my house. What are the common reasons?

Nick Gray: As I’m recording this, I’m in New York City. I live in Austin, Texas. In both places I have very small apartments and people say, I have a tiny apartment, a tiny house. I cannot host people. I don’t have enough chairs. Well, number one, you don’t want chairs. If you have a large house, you wanna remove the chairs because sitting down is actually kryptonite to a successful event. When people sit down, they become locked in conversations, they become a bit lazy and it’s harder for people to approach and join those conversations. So at my parties, I actually want people standing much more often than sitting down. A small space, actually, the energy is way better. A small space is actually better than an enormous mansion for a party because in a small space you have that energy and excitement that feels more like a crowded bar. It doesn’t feel empty and big and ghostly like a huge mansion.

Some people say, “Oh, my house is way too far away. I’m in Green Point, New York. I’m in such and such place. That’s 30 minutes drive.” What I say to that is, don’t make the decision for your friends as to whether they will drive or not. Test it out, invite your core group. You will be surprised that people will be willing to come to you, even if it’s 30 or 35 minutes away. People will come for a cocktail party. It is so hard to meet new people. What you are doing is special. You and your home is enough of an excuse to make this a special night for your friends to come join you. The last thing I hear from people, “Oh, my house is too messy, I’ve got kids, I’m not the cleanest person.”

I’ll tell you what I do. I’m very messy. I have junk all over my house and I take a couple large plastic bins or some old Amazon boxes and I kinda just clear off the countertops and put all the junk in the boxes and hide it in my closet. I will stack things on my bed in my room and just close that room off. And I tell you of many years hosting hundreds of parties, nobody has ever barged into my room or my closet and said, “Hey, here’s where he is storing all the junk. Let’s go everybody. We’re leaving this party.” To start a rival house party. Nobody says that, nobody’s gonna be peeking around for your junk, host your party at home, it will completely turbocharge how you can build these relationships.

Brett McKay: For the people who were saying, “My place is too small to host a party.” Here’s an insight from Henry David Thoreau. We all know he lived in a cabin he built on Walden. It was 10 feet wide by 15 feet long. And this is what he had to say about when he had visitors, he had people come to his place. He said this, “It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I had 25 or 30 souls with their bodies at once under my roof. And yet we often partied without being aware that we had come very near to one another.” So if Henry David Thoreau could have 30 people in his 10 ft by 15 ft cabin, you could probably have 7, 10 people in your small apartment.

Nick Gray: You can have 15 to 25 people. There’s this kid whose name is Peter in New York City. He hosted a cocktail party. His apartment is like the size of two yoga mats and I have a selfie of him and everybody packed in there and they’re all smiling. There’s a guy, Noah, who’s on my blog. I wrote about, he had 29 people in his 400-square-foot apartment in Chicago. You’ll be surprised when everybody’s standing and mixing about.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So we’ve talked about where to host it at your home, if you can’t host it at your place, right? So there’s maybe that 5% that can’t do it. Where do you recommend doing it at?

Nick Gray: If you cannot host it your home. Here are some places you can host it. Number one, in a common or community space in your apartment or your neighborhood. Number two, at a co-working space, I have an article will include in show notes about how to host a good event if you’re a digital nomad or you have access to a co-working space. Number three, the key thing and the one that will help the most people. If you cannot host it your home, find a co-host. Find someone that has a larger space. This happens way more often than you think. Who wants to host? They say, “Wow, I got this beautiful house, but I just never host.” Link up with them. Now if you do that, you need to get them to buy in to the elements of my party formula. Say, “Hey, I’m gonna host this, but there’s some things. There’ll be name tags, we’re gonna do some rounds of icebreakers. I’m gonna kick people out at the end.” Get their buy-in for those elements. And that can turbocharge, having that co-host that is a major, major accelerator on your journey.

Brett McKay: All right, so we got the date, location, time for our party set. We talked a little bit earlier who you’re gonna invite. Who should you invite to these cocktail parties and like how many people should you be inviting?

Nick Gray: Okay, let’s start with the number of people. How many people, you need to have a minimum of 15 people to come to your party. Here’s why 15 is important. I have found that anything less than 15, there is not enough energy in the room. You don’t reach a critical mass for conversational collisions. Somebody walks into a room of 15 other people and they say, “Wow, I’m not gonna be able to talk to everybody here. Like this is kind of exciting.” If you walk into a room of seven or eight people, that is, I don’t know, there’s just not enough energy there. I have also found surprisingly that the more number of people actually requires less work during the party for you as a host. When I have 15-20 people, I can kinda step aside for a little bit. I am still an introvert and I need time to recharge.

And during my parties, I will often sneak into my room and scroll social media for a few minutes just to take a breather. And I can do that when there’s 15 people. When there’s less than that, I need to babysit people, there needs… There’s a lot more work you have to do as a host to monitor the room and keep people engaged. More than 22, the ice breakers take too long. The logistics are complicated. Welcoming people, name tags, for a first-time host, I think 15-20 is the right amount. Now to get 15-20, you will very likely have to invite a lot more than that. In small towns, maybe not the case. People don’t have a lot going on and maybe you can invite 25 and you’ll get 15 to 20 to say yes. In larger cities where maybe your relationships aren’t as strong or there’s a lot more going on, you will have to invite a lot more than that.

For your first party, who should you invite? Number one, it’s okay to invite couples. So you invite one person, ask ’em to bring their significant other that can double the size of those that attend. Do not mind… One piece of advice on what not to do. Do not reach from the top shelf for this first party. Say that you know Brett and you’re like, “Oh my God, I really wanna impress Brett, I hardly know him. Do not invite Brett to your first party.” Your first party should be a low-stakes affair where you’re inviting your friends, your neighbors, your work colleagues, those people that you feel close to and comfortable with. That is who you should do for your first party. If you’re trying to use these parties for business to impress potential clients, don’t do that on the first party. Keep it a low-stakes, no-stress affair.

Brett McKay: We also talked earlier about this idea of a core group of invitees. Who are these core group of party invitees?

Nick Gray: Your core group are people that you feel comfortable around your core group are people that if only those five people showed up, you would still have a good event. For me, that’s like my college friends, that might be my sister, that might be my girlfriend and one of her best friends, it might be my neighbor who I know these two guys that are my neighbors and I would invite them because I see them a lot. It’s not a big lift. That’s the five people that you feel close to who you know would show up on time, you know will maybe laugh at your jokes. Who just you can count on. And that’s what I consider your core group. You’re gonna test whether your party date and time are good by texting your core group a message like, “Hey David, I’m thinking of hosting a cocktail party on Tuesday night, March 14th at my apartment from 7:00-9:00 PM, if I do it, would you come? That’s the key phrase to your core group and you’re not gonna plan your party until you get five yeses from that core group.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the core group’s kind of like the sourdough starter, the kombucha starter.

Nick Gray: Yes, yes, yes.

Brett McKay: So after you got this core group, you said these are the five people you know who are gonna show up. What other sorts of people should you start inviting to get that 15?

Nick Gray: After your core group, you get those five yeses. Now you wanna get 10 great guests. These are everybody else at your party. They might be the person you worked with at your last job two years ago and you haven’t talked to them in a while. This might be somebody that you went to high school or college with and you haven’t talked to them in a little while. It might be your neighbors that you don’t know as well. It might be a friend of a friend that you’ve been meaning to meet up with a coffee, could be somebody at the gym that you see all the time and you say, “Hey, I’m hosting a cocktail party with some of my friends on Tuesday night.” Use this phrase, by the way, “Can I send you the info?” You don’t wanna say, do you wanna come? Will you come? It’s not the same as with your core group. For a great guest you’re gonna say, can I send you the info? And then you’re gonna send them the little page that you’ll create, which by the way, you have to collect RSVPs. But that’s that wider net of people who you cast more of into the acquaintance and less of a friend.

Brett McKay: And then at a certain point when you’ve gotten good at the hosting, you can start and asking those VIPs to come as well.

Nick Gray: Yes. And that is the biggest thing that you can use these parties for is to connect with VIPs. If you truly wanna build good relationships, I think you have to be able to give value first. The secret I found is that everybody wants to be invited to a party. I’ve given thousands of party invites and nobody has ever said, “No, do not send me the info for this free party that you’re hosting with free drinks, snacks and interesting people.” Nobody said that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and I imagine those VIPs, they’re probably getting invited to things all the time and oftentimes they might say no, ’cause they’re like, “Well it’s, it’s high stakes, I’m gonna feel… ” But if you’re good at hosting these parties, you can present it to ’em like, “Hey, we have this thing on the regular, we’ve got interesting people in our community. We’d love to have you. If you can make it, it’d be awesome.” And they might be more likely to say yes to that.

Nick Gray: One big thing I found is that when I take a picture at my parties, I always snap a group photo and in my book it talks about exactly at what time to snap your group photo. I think probably about 30 minutes before your party is scheduled to end you would snap a group photo. The group photo is helpful, number one to follow up with everybody the next morning, “Hey everybody, thanks for coming. Here’s our group photo.” And then number two, I use that group photo when I plan my next parties, when I invite VIPs to show them what these parties look like, the people who attend it is social proof that this is a good event. And so those parties reaching out to the VIPs. The other piece of advice I found is that if you’re inviting VIPs because they are very busy, I will invite them to multiple events and give them, I say, “Hey, I host these cocktail parties, I get together some interesting people as well as my closest friends in the city. Would you like to come sometime? Here’s my next two.” And I’ll tell them the date and the time of the next two. And I found a much higher success ratio in getting people to come when I gave them multiple dates.

Brett McKay: Let’s say someone wants to start hosting these parties, they wanna make friends but they don’t have friends yet ’cause they’re, maybe they’re new to the city so they don’t have that core. How do you do that? How do you start developing that core group? You can start inviting so you can get these things going?

Nick Gray: If you absolutely have zero friends, this is a little bit out of my zone of expertise. I can tell you what I have done and what I’ve worked with people on. But I will give the little warning that these parties work best when you have at least five friends, five people you know that can be part of that core group. If you know absolutely no one, you still need to pick a date and time, give yourself more, more of a party runway. Instead of three weeks, let’s say four weeks, you’re now gonna set that date and time. Let’s say it’s a Tuesday night from 7:00-9:00 PM, you are now going to start to go to events in your local town or community. A lot of people tell you this, this is not new advice, but I would say that going to a yoga class, a workout class, a sports event, think about you basically have two opportunities to meet people that’s in the 5 or 10 minutes before the yoga class starts and the 5 or 10 minutes after.

And at each of those interactions you can really only meet one person. You’re not gonna jump around the room inviting tons of people. That’s just gonna look or feel weird in my experience. You can go to events like this, you can look up groups around your hobbies, you can join a sports team, you can go and literally pass out flyers in your neighborhood or slide them under the doors of your neighbors. A guy named Richard in Calgary, Canada did this. He moved to a new apartment building, literally knew nobody and put up flyers. “Hey I’m hosting a housewarming party.” He slid ’em under the doors, he put up signs in the common areas and he invited his neighbors to come and that helped him build a core group. The other advice I tell people is that like I love diversity at my parties and diversity extends to the occupations.

I don’t mind inviting the barista of the cafe that I go to. I don’t mind inviting folks that work at the library, things like that, saying this thing to them, “Hey, I just moved to town, I’m meeting these interesting people, I’m hosting a party, just, it’s hard to make new friends as adults, can I send you the information?” If you are new to town, you can lean on that as part of your introductions. “I’m new to town, I’m meeting all these interesting people, I’m new to town, I’m trying to meet some new people.” People respect that you have just moved to town. Why? Because it’s a vote in their favor. You have moved to their town. You think that their town is the best place that you can possibly live and they will respect and appreciate that, that idea that you’re new to town, do not feel shy to lean into that.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for words, more sponsors. And now back to the show. So you got your people you’re going, going to invite, how do you invite them? Like what’s the best way? Is it a mass message or do you invite people one by one?

Nick Gray: This is so key. You have to invite people one-on-one. I will say to them, “Hey, I’m hosting an event on Tuesday night in three weeks can I send you the info?” I get them to say yes before I invite them to the party. Why is this important? It’s a double opt-in introduction. I’m getting them to say yes sort of and it boosts the attendance rate. I’m trying to sort of make it a little hard for somebody to RSVP to the party because I don’t want a large flake ratio. I don’t want a lot of people who say that they are going to come and then to not show up.

How do I invite them? Say that I knew somebody, I hadn’t seen them in two or three years from work, from my last job. I’d send them a message like this. I’d say, “Hey John, I haven’t chatted in a while. I’m hosting a happy hour here in town at my apartment on this date and time, I’m getting together folks I used to work with, my neighbors and my friends from sports. Can I send you the info? Hope you’re well and having a great year.” I would send out a bunch of little messages like that to gauge the interest. Once they say yes, then you’re going to say, “Hey, great. Here’s the information please RSVP here.” And you need to get them to sign up on your little event page.

I think this is very, very important. Now there’s a few platforms that will do free events. I don’t like using Facebook events anymore. Five years ago I did, but now I don’t. Now I use this one tool that’s called Mixly, Gen Z, loves this one called Party Full. You could use paperless post. The important thing is you just want a free simple service that folks can just make their commitment to attend your party. It creates a little social contract and then when you display the guest list, it also shows social proof that other people will be attending your party.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that social proof’s important. Before you do the RSVP, you wanna make sure, yeah, that core group you’re gonna show up ’cause like nothing, nothing’s a vibe killer.

Nick Gray: Yes.

Brett McKay: Then you, you sent out the RSVP and like zero people have checked in that they’re gonna come.

Nick Gray: Yes, yes. It’s like the old days of Facebook events where it’s like 97 invited, 3 yes. And you’re like, “Wait a second, what’s going on with this party?” I talk a lot about social proof and I think the reason why is that the purpose of these parties, is to meet new people. Your friends will want to come and be happy that they came because they will meet so many people and the party is structured in a way that there are a lot of little conversations happening. That’s what make these parties successful.

Brett McKay: And the other thing you do, as the event gets closer with that events page, you will actually… You’ll like put bios of some of the people who’ve committed to coming and that can be useful ’cause it allows people who are going to see, “Okay, who’s gonna be here? I have an idea who’s gonna be there.” But also for the people who have been on the fence, maybe they’ll see, “Oh wow, this, there’s gonna be some cool people there. I’m gonna opt in now ’cause I saw that bio on the event page.

Nick Gray: Dude, the bios are my secret weapon. The bios are… I use them in my reminder messages. By the way, you need to send three reminder messages. One that’s about a week before your party. One that’s three or four days before your party and the other the morning of your party. But these guest bios that you mentioned are brief little anecdotes or summaries or talking points about half or more of all of your guests. They could be as simple as, Jim is my neighbor, he has a golden retriever. I think he works in tech. [laughter]

It could be as detailed as saying like, “Brett hosts a podcast, ask him about some of his recent guests we met through the internet.” They’re not long detailed things, but they’re little blurbs about people that give the attendees conversational access points and I’ll tell you why they’re important. Probably half of the people you’ll invite could be introverts, some of them have social anxiety. Seeing this list of who is going to be there, makes people so excited to attend, it gives them the confidence to create these new conversations, and like you said, if somebody’s on the fence, it really ensures that they actually will show up.

Brett McKay: And some people might think the reminders is overkill, but as someone who’s like, I’ve organized events for different things, it is not overkill. You cannot over-communicate because people are getting inundated with all sorts of emails, text messages, so stuff slips through the cracks, and so you have to over-communicate ’cause chances are, they’re gonna miss maybe one or two of those reminders you sent.

Nick Gray: In hundreds of parties that I have hosted, I have never had somebody say, “Hey, you were spamming me too much with these reminder messages.” Instead, I consistently receive over a 90% attendance rate of those that are gonna come. What’s the down side? The downside of this is, yes, maybe you send one too many message, but it takes somebody five seconds to move on from an email message. The upside is that you show that you are a host who cares. In this age of like, too cool to care, you are showing that you are someone putting thought and effort into the planning of this social experience, in this cocktail party, happy hour. You show that you’re a host who cares and people appreciate the heck out of it. You’re gonna be seen as a super connector and people are gonna look at your hosting skills like you’re a magician, when all you did is just host a cocktail party, it’s amazing.

Brett McKay: I was talking about supplies, we kind of mentioned it, it’s not much. Some cups, some drinks, some snacks, you don’t want anything that you have to warm-up. Nuts are great. Maybe a cheese platter. That’s it. $100 max is what you have to spend on these things.

Nick Gray: $100 max, the bar, by the way, is a self-serve bar, so you’re just gonna buy some liquor and some mixers and some non-alcoholic options. People love seltzers. One thing that I added in the last week of finishing my book to the list of supplies, was grapes. I would encourage anybody listening, that sounds so silly, but in all these calls I do with people, the next day I always ask, “What snacks got eaten, what snacks didn’t get eaten?” Everybody eats the grapes, grapes are such a good party snack, and that and the harmonica, I think are my two things that I’m like, “That is so weird, why include those?”

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about a few things you mentioned, harmonicas, we’ll talk about that later, but first name tags.

Nick Gray: [laughter] People are gonna think I’m crazy.

Brett McKay: It’s all right. Let’s start with the name tags, so you make your guests wear name tags. Now, people might be like, “Well, this is like a cocktail party. Grandpa in the 1950s in his coat, suit, he wouldn’t be wearing a name tag.” Why do you make your guests wear a name tag?

Nick Gray: I talked to a kid yesterday who’s hosting a brunch on Sunday, and he was like, “All right, I’ve listened to everything, I don’t know about the name tags. I don’t want this to feel too formal, I don’t know if my friends will be up.” So I said, “Well, what’s the purpose of your brunch?” He said, “Well, I’m having about 20 people over, it’s kind of a house warming.” I said, “Do you know everybody’s name?” He said, “Yeah, of course.” I said, “Does everybody else know everybody’s name?” He said, “Oh. No. No, I guess not.” Name tags are important because while you may know everybody’s name and know that they know your name, they do not know everybody else’s names. And here’s why it’s helpful. When you have name tags, you will show that this is not a party of cliques. This is not a clique out party with your work friends together, your hockey friends together, and your neighbors all mixing. When we wear a name tag, it serves as a sports uniform, that we’re all on the same team, that this is a safe space to go meet new people. It makes it easier, you don’t have to remember all these different names.

I’m bad with names, and ultimately that’s why I started using these name tags, but I have found that… This is the one thing, name tags make it easier to talk to new people. The whole purpose of this party is for your friends to meet other friends. Remember, you have to give before you can ask for anything to build relationships. When you do name tags, even at house parties, it will make it such a conducive environment to create new conversations, and make it easier for people just to go up and speak to somebody new.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s a good point ’cause I think a lot of conversation when you’re starting off with somebody you don’t know, a lot of it’s just spent, “Oh, what’s your name?” And then you have to spend all this time, this bandwidth in your brain, I gotta remember… Saying their name over, “Okay, it’s Jeff. It’s Jeff. It’s Jeff. It’s Jeff.” And then you’re not in the conversation, ’cause when it finally turns to you, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t even know what they’re talking about ’cause I’m still trying to remember Jeff’s name here.”

Nick Gray: Yes. I’m so bad with names. I went to this one event that was in New York, and there was this CEO who is a woman who started a company, multi-million dollar PR firm, and she remembered my name, and she called me from across the room, “Nick, oh my God, it’s so good to see you,” and I was like a deer caught in the headlights. I had forgotten her name, it was obvious that I had forgotten her name. I could have solved it by saying like, “Oh my God, it’s so good to see you, remind me what your name is again.” But honestly, this had been several years that I had casually seen her at social events, I was mortified. And that could have been solved with a simple name tag.

Brett McKay: And with the name tag, you actually write the name for your guest when they come in, correct? You don’t let the guests write heir own name. Why is that?

Nick Gray: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a small thing, and I have a lot of specific preferences, for example, first name’s only, big block letters. I think you should write the name tag when your guest come in, it gives you a way to welcome everybody, to sort of establish yourself as the party leader. It gives you a chance one-on-one, when I write the name tags, “Hey, what’s up? What’s your name? Thanks for coming.” “Alex.” “Alex, A-L-E-X. Here’s you name tag, Alex. Go over to the bar to see John, he’ll help you find a drink, but thank you so much for coming today.” It gives me a chance one-on-one to have a connection with every single person who attends.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. So let’s talk about those early moments. So you have a start time, that you want people to be there on time, and the two-hour limit encourages that, but there’s always gonna be those moments where you just have two, three people, and it’s like you’re 10 minutes in, that’s kind of awkward. You’re like, “Well, what am I supposed to do?” How do you handle that awkwardness when there’s just a few guests and it’s just you and them?

Nick Gray: Number one, know that this awkward zone happens at every single party. I’ll give you some tools and tips how to get out of the awkward zone, but, one, know that it happens and that it’s normal. Number two, a way to ease the awkward zone is to ask some of those people in your core group to arrive five or 10 minutes early. Now, even though they are your best friends, they will still probably show up late, so maybe ask them 15 or 20 minutes to come early, but you can ask them to show up early and say, “Hey look, I just want some friendly faces around the room when other people start to show up.” That will help the room feel a little more welcome and comfortable.

Number three, what does everybody say when they show up and they’re one of the first to arrive? They say, “How can I help?” Well, be ready to give them a way that they can help. I have a list in my book of things they can do to help, but some of those are, help me with the coat check. “This is where people hang up their jackets, can you help them?” Help people get a drink. “John, will you help for the first 15 minutes, I’ll send people over to you to grab a drink.” You can ask somebody to be the photographer. “Tyler, can you take pictures tonight, I always forget to take pictures. Can you take photos?” Be ready to delegate duties to some of those first arrivals. That is a key thing and why? Because now they’ll feel invested in the success of your party.

Some people, by the way, won’t want to help with drinks. “Oh, I don’t… Not really.” That’s okay. Say, “No problem, thanks so much. Just hang out over here and make yourself comfortable, and I’ll see you in a few minutes.” Giving people duties and things that they can do at the beginning is helpful. And then number four, do your first icebreaker. When you have about four or five people, you’re gonna lead this first round of icebreakers, mostly for you to practice. That first icebreaker is just for you to practice, because many people have never led an icebreaker before, never mind at their home. And so you’ll lead a icebreaker to help you exit the awkward zone when you have four or five people. That first icebreaker, by the way, you’re just gonna go around the room, “Hey, everybody. Just say your name, say what you do for work,” and if you have enough time, then maybe you’ll do one more thing. But that’s how to exit the awkward zone and manage that first 10-20 minutes. Again, however, when you host a two-hour cocktail party, you will be shocked at how many people show up on time, compared to normal parties with no end time, when people show up 30, 45 minutes, even an hour late, very common.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about these icebreakers ’cause I think a lot of people they hear icebreakers, they think summer camp, or they think some corporate retreat, and they’re like, “Ugh, I don’t like icebreakers.” So why do you incorporate ice breakers in your party, and how are they different from maybe the ones they might have done at some office retreat?

Nick Gray: I think icebreakers get a bad rep because a lot of people do them wrong. I hate though, “Say a fun fact about yourself.” or, “Two truths and a lie.” I think about icebreakers as green, yellow, red level of intensity or vulnerability, and many people will start with the red level, which is totally wrong. They’ll ask, “What was your worst first date. What was your first kiss?” or something like that. That’s a terrible icebreaker. That is terrible. I will start my parties with a green level icebreaker. Now, a green level icebreaker, an example is, what is one of your favorite things to eat for breakfast? That may sound silly or stupid, but I promise you having led thousands of icebreakers, this works 100% of the time, here’s why. It is easy to remember. It does not require a lot of thought. There is minimal judgment. And it ever so slightly expresses something about somebody’s personality. The answer is also generally very short. Now, some people don’t eat breakfast and they can say why they don’t eat breakfast, that’s fine. But the breakfast icebreaker is good at the beginning of a party when there’s not a lot of rapport built up, and you can just share.

For example, mine would be, “I like scrambled eggs, my secret ingredient is coconut oil, it really fluffens them up. Sometimes I’ll add spinach to them.” Now, note that what I said was, “What is one of your favorite breakfasts?” I didn’t say, “What is your absolute favorite thing to eat?” I just wanna know what’s one of your go-tos. Similarly, if you were to ask as an icebreaker later on, “What is your favorite book?” That’s not a good example. That’s definitive, it’s subjective, and it really will elicit judgment. People wanna know, “What’s the best book? I wanna sound smart. What’s my absolute favorite?” People freeze up. The way to modify that would be to say, “What is one of your favorite books? What is a book you have read recently?” Allow them to pick so they don’t feel like they’re going to be judged on their favorite.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. So the ice breakers, what are the purpose? Why do you do these in the first place? Why not just let people just start getting together and talking? Why facilitate this?

Nick Gray: Yeah, I’m sorry, I jumped in too much to the logistics. Let’s talk about the why. You gotta tell people why you’re doing the icebreakers, and the purpose is that it’s a conversational crutch, it’s an excuse to go up and talk to somebody new, but more importantly, it’s a survey of the room. I got tired of going to these events in New York, 20 people in the room, I don’t know who I need to talk to to help my business if I’m trying to network. You want people to say a little about themselves. Are you a parent? You probably wanna talk to other parents. You have a unique life situation. Are you working on a startup? Are you hiring? You probably wanna talk to other people that relate to that. An icebreaker serves as a little roll call around the room, to know who’s there, and to inspire some new connections and conversations. It also has a secret purpose. When you break the room for an icebreaker, you bring an end to existing conversations. Have you ever been at a party and you get trapped in conversation? After five minutes, you’re kind of done talking to this person, but you’re just not ready to say, “Okay, well, thank you very much. I think I’m ready to go meet some other people.”

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, that happened to me once. I went to an event and I got stuck talking to this person for the entire thing. And I wasn’t able to… And I should have been more assertive. Like, “Oh, I wanna go talk to other people,” but they just kept talking and talking and talking, and by that point, that was the only person I talked to.

Nick Gray: Dude, that happens to all of us. That happens to me even. And I was hosting an event here in New York City and I had to train a bunch of facilitators, and they said, “How do I leave the conversation? After I do the icebreaker, how do I leave?” And I said, “Well, I just say something like this, ‘Hey, thank you so much, it was really nice to meet you. I’m gonna go mix around the room and mingle with some other people.'” And this guy followed up with me the next day, he said, “I never knew that you could say that.” I thought that you just wait till the conversation dies and the other person leaves or something, I never knew that you could end a conversation like that.” That little thing, nobody really teaches us these stuff.

Brett McKay: But the icebreakers as the host, you’re kind of helping people with that, in the conversations they might be in.

Nick Gray: Exactly.

Brett McKay: You’re doing these every 30 minutes or so, is that right?

Nick Gray: Roughly every 25 minutes or so, you’re gonna do two and a half icebreakers. So that first one, I call it the half one, that’s at about… Let’s say your party starts at 7:00, that’s a 7:10 or so, about 20 minutes later at 7:30, you’re gonna do the full… The first big icebreaker with everybody, that’ll take five or seven minutes. About 35 or 40 minutes later, you’ll do your last icebreaker of the night. And that one, by the way, is your value-additive icebreaker. Should I talk about that one? And how that is… Yeah.

Brett McKay: Sure, yeah. And again, I think when you’re doing these, you’re having people stand in a circle and you’re just going around, all right, share your name and then answer the question about your favorite breakfast food. That’s kind of what it looks like.

Nick Gray: Yes. Yes.

Brett McKay: And you want them to be fast. You don’t wanna let people talk forever, and ever. Just like, “You gotta be done in 30 seconds.” You maybe even set that time limit for people.

Nick Gray: Dude, I’m so glad you mention this, because you need a sense of urgency when you’re running these. A good icebreaker is a fast icebreaker, and you need to be looking at everybody, thanking them, “Oh, thank you, John. Let’s go to Gina next.” You need to be directing the group.

Brett McKay: Yeah, keep the pace going.

Nick Gray: Keep the pace going, and yes, you have to have everybody stand up and get them in a circle. “Hey, everybody. Let’s all stand up in a circle real quick. I promise this won’t be awkward, we’re gonna do this icebreaker to give you an excuse to meet somebody new. I found it’s so great to meet new people, and doing this party, that’s the reason why I brought you all together. Bear with me. Let’s go around the circle. Say your name, what you do for work. If you don’t wanna talk about work, then you can say how you spend your days or something, a hobby that you have.”

Brett McKay: And also, that’s what the harmonica is for, to get their attention. You mention the harmonica.

Nick Gray: I know, I mentioned the harmonica and I hesitate to bring it up, because I don’t want somebody to totally blow me off, but I have found that at a large event with 15, 17 people in my apartment, I was always yelling above the crowd. I turn the music down, I’m clanking a glass, I’m yelling, “Hey, everybody. Hey, quiet, quiet, quiet.” And I tried all these different things to get people to be quiet. And I don’t know how to play the harmonica, I don’t have a musical hair on my body, but I somehow had a harmonica and I just blow a little tone in the harmonica like a whistle but much softer, and that noise, which is a little calming, helps people to quiet down and to be like, “What is this?” It’s also playful and it’s silly. I am not gonna talk anymore about the harmonica for fear of totally losing people, but I have… I will swear by it, it’s in my book, I have videos on my website on how to do it.

Brett McKay: It works.

Nick Gray: You gotta do it.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned the value-add for that last icebreaker. What are you doing there for the value-add?

Nick Gray: So the value-add icebreaker, let me give the three questions, I guess I’ll start though and say the why. You want your last icebreaker for people to get smarter. You want them to get ideas or suggestions of things in town or stuff they wanna do, so that they leave your party feeling smarter. I don’t wanna know somebody’s worst job they ever had, that’s not value-add. A value-add icebreaker for me is one of these three, number one, what is the best piece of media, or one of the best pieces of media that you’ve consumed recently? That could be a podcast like the Art of Manliness, that could be a book that you read, it could be a movie you watched, that show you binged on Netflix. Just, what’s some good media that you’ve consumed?

That’s great. People love to get these recommendations, and they’re often trying to write them down, and they leave with all these good ideas. That’s number one. Another one that you could use is, what is one of your favorite purchases you’ve made over the last few months for $100 or less? That could be a kitchen gadget, it could be an object, or an experience. It could be a massage, it could be a tour, it could be a new blender thing you got. But people love this one as well, they love hearing these types of things. And then the last one that I like is, what is your favorite city or life hack for the town that we’re in? Say we’re in St. Louis, what’s your favorite dog park in St. Louis, local business you like to support? What’s your favorite little thing about this town that we might not know or that you’re just passionate about?

I do these icebreakers… By the way, for this last one, you’re gonna wanna give people about a five-minute warning before you do it. “Hey, everybody in five minutes, we’re gonna do the last icebreaker of the night. The question will be… ” and you tell them the question. You say, “Grab another refill, use the restroom if you need to freshen up, we’ll do that last icebreaker in five minutes.” By the way, that’s yet another chance for people to end their conversations. I’m constantly at the party, looking to mix the room up, I wanna see movement in my parties.

Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s talk… You’ve done the icebreaker, the party end time is coming near, how do you end a party, and why is it important that you end right on time? And what do you do with those people who, they can’t get the hint, they’re sort of lingering around?

Nick Gray: Let’s start with why. Why do you end the party? Because like we said, you wanna finish the party on a high note, you wanna bring finality, you wanna be the leader of your event, you don’t want it naturally just to fizzle out, you wanna sort of end it with authority and finish it up on a high note. How do you do that? Number one, by setting the expectations. In the invitations, in the RSVP, you’ll be listing a start time and the end time. When people know that there’s the end time, they know they have an idea. You wouldn’t surprise people to say, “Hey, show up to my party at 7:00,” and then suddenly you say that it’s ending. They’ll know when you list the start time and the end time. Now, how do you end the party? 15 minutes before the party is scheduled to finish, I’ll make a little announcement, I’ll turn down the music, I’ll say, “Hey everybody. Party is scheduled to end about 15 minutes, I guess this is last call, so make a last drink, grab some snacks if you want, say hey to somebody new or start to wrap up your conversations. We’ll wind down in about 15 minutes.” I then will turn the music back up.

And when the party is scheduled to end, I’ll turn the music down, I’ll turn the lights up, and I’ll make announcement, “Thank you guys so much for coming. The reason that I hosted this party was to bring people together. I’ve met so many interesting people. It’s hard to stay in touch. I hope you got a chance to meet somebody new. Thank you everybody, and I’ll see you next time.” Then I kinda just start to clean up and start to tidy and people get the hint and start to make their way out. Now, what you need to be aware of is sometimes someone will be there who hasn’t had a chance to talk to you or they haven’t seen you in years, and they’ll say something, “Brett, oh my God, I didn’t get to talk to you all night. Dude, let’s catch up. Let’s sit down.” And what I will say to them because I’m kind of strict on my stuff, I’ll say, “Dude, I am so glad you came tonight. I would love to catch up. I haven’t seen you in forever. I wanna stick to my goals with this and I need to wrap up tonight, can I call you tomorrow? Because I wanna stay in touch and I wanna see what’s up and what’s new with you, may I call you tomorrow?” That will get the person to feel seen, and they will not feel like you’re being dismissive of them.

One final thing you can do is, if people are really having a great time, you can plan ahead with a venue that they can go to next. You can give them a name of a local restaurant, or a bar or something, if you live in a town where those things are nearby. “Hey everybody, thank you so much for coming tonight. Folks are gonna keep going next door at Beatnik. So if you want, meet us down at the bar there, I’m gonna start to wrap up here ’cause I got my goals to finish on time, but if you wanna keep chatting, I encourage you to go down to Beatnik and you can have a drink or a slice of pizza down there.” That’s generally how you wrap up the party.

Brett McKay: So you’ve successfully had your first party, any follow-up you need to do after the party is over? Like the next day, or the next few days?

Nick Gray: I send a simple thank you the next morning where I include the group photo, again, just keeping it sort of top-of-mind if people wanna follow-up or if they forget anything. I would note that if you’re using these parties to try to build relationships, you really only have about 16 hours after your party ends to try to create and deepen that next connection. So if I’m trying to connect with somebody, I will invite them to my party, and that day at the party itself, I’ll say, “Hey, I’d love to get to know you better, can we schedule a coffee for some time later this week, or next week?” Or the next morning, “John, thank you for coming last night. I’d love to chat more. Can I call you later today or tomorrow?” That is the time when you would make that ask.

Brett McKay: Right. Within 16 hours. If you wait too long, it gets cold, it gets stale.

Nick Gray: Yeah. That’s not 17 hours. I just say the half-life of what somebody owes you after a party, life goes on, and if you expect to follow-up with somebody one week after your party, and them to be ultra responsive to your invitation, I haven’t found that. I found that the next morning is a good time for me to follow up, next afternoon is fine, but if I wait two days afterwards, life goes on. Folks are busy, they have work, family, friends.

Brett McKay: And I imagine the next thing too besides that follow-up, is start planning your next party?

Nick Gray: If possible. If you are excited and many people are, keep the momentum going and pick your next party date. Even if it’s 6-8 weeks out, get that date on your calendar. Why? Because now you’ll have it when you meet somebody interesting. You’re like, “Hey, I’m hosting a cocktail party in six weeks. Once I get everything together, can I send you the info?” And this is the thing, you go through life, and you just start collecting interesting people that you get to bring into your world.

Brett McKay: Well, Nick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Nick Gray: The name of my book is The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. It’s available wherever books are sold online. I recorded the audio book, I’m very proud of it. And then I have a ton of resources on this website, I’ll try to include notes in the show notes. I’m very big on social media, I love posting stories and funny videos, so you can check me out. I’m @nickgraynews, N-I-C-K-G-R-A-Y, news, N-E-W-S. And I have a really cool friends newsletter. Oh, and if you wanna download an executive summary of my book, a checklist of 17 things you can do before your next party, sign up for our newsletter, nickgray.net, and you’ll get that PDF download right away.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Nick, great. Thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Nick Gray: Thanks. More parties.

Brett McKay: Let’s do it. My guest here is Nick Gray, he’s the author of the book The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, nickgray.net. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/party where you can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast. Make sure you check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter, a daily or weekly options, they’re both free. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to Stitcherpremium.com, sign up using the code manliness at check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher App on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to review our podcast for Spotify, it helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member, if you think you will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #874: Throw a 2-Hour Cocktail Party That Can Change Your Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

You’ve heard of the seven-year-itch.

It’s the sense of restlessness or dissatisfaction that supposedly sets in after you’ve been with someone for seven years of time. It’s most often talked about in the context of romantic relationships but is also applied to one’s “relationship” with something like a job or place.

While the seven-year-itch is part of pop culture lore, is there evidence that it’s actually real?

Very little research has been done specifically on the questions of whether the seven-year-itch exists, and if it does, why it exists. But there are things we know about human psychology and the rate that people seek change that can help us infer some answers. 

If It Was Real, Why Would It Happen?

When you first fall in love, your brain is bathed in a heady cocktail of feel-good neurochemicals. These neurochemicals generate intense excitement about your significant other and your future together. And they act as a pair of perspective-altering goggles that minimize your partner’s flaws and magnify their virtues. This person is everything you ever wanted! Your relationship will be a never-ending honeymoon of bliss! 

The neurochemicals of love form a kind of buffering forcefield that prevents the other person’s flaws from fully registering and keeps their annoying behaviors from being annoying. 

As these neurochemicals wear off, your pedestalized portrait of the person shifts into a more nuanced picture. You start to notice their faults and weaknesses more. Areas of incompatibility, formerly ignored, increasingly come to the fore.

The neurochemicals of new love have largely evaporated by the second or third year of a relationship, so their disappearance occurs too early to explain the seven-year-itch. Yet while they wane in the main after several years, their fumes likely go on longer than that.

One of the central neurochemicals of new love is dopamine, which drives love’s feelings of excitement and pleasure. Dopamine is catalyzed by anything new, and while the novelty of new love — as a whole — eventually recedes, the partners in a couple will continue to discover new things about each other even after the relationship has become well-established. It takes longer than two or three years to learn all the secrets and idiosyncrasies of another person, and each time you do, you get a little resurgence of dopamine.

Perhaps then, the seven-year-itch arises at the time in a relationship when both partners have finally gotten to know each other like the backs of their hands. They have few new stories to share or secrets to reveal. Each person knows what the other will say before they say it. In the absence of novelty, there is an absence of excitement, and a feeling of stagnation — a feeling that the relationship has run its course — may set in. 

This is, of course, just a speculative theory.

And, Is It Real?

If the seven-year-itch were real, we would expect to find a rise in relationship break-ups around a couple’s seventh year together.

While not all long-term partners get married these days, we have the most data on relationship length with regard to divorce.

Stats vary according to the data and methodology different studies use, but, on average, the highest risk of divorce seems to occur 5-8 years into a marriage.

The fact that divorce peaks within a range of years, rather than exactly at seven, may count for rather than against the existence of the seven-year-itch, given the other variables at play:

First, the clock on the 7-year-itch would presumably start running when a couple begins dating, not when they get married. 

Second, you have to account not just for the length of the marriage, but the length of time between when the couple felt the itch and when they actually got divorced. 

So if a couple dated for a year before getting married, their seven-year-itch would arise six years into their marriage. Once the itch emerged, they might first try simply separating, and even once they decided to divorce, it might, for personal and legal reasons, take a year or more to become official. They would thus feel the itch around their sixth wedding anniversary, but not be legally divorced until around their seventh or eighth anniversary.

If a couple dated for three years before getting married, they would experience the itch around year four of the marriage, but might not be divorced until year five.  

Given the average time a couple dates before marrying and the time it takes to get a divorce, the fact that the risk of divorce peaks 5-8 years into marriage does suggest that the seven-year-itch may be a real thing.

Data from other domains of life suggest something similar. On average, people replace half of their friends every seven years, and move houses every eight years (they would presumably feel the itch to move at year seven, and it would then take another year or so to prepare their home for sale and to actually sell it).

Is the Seven-Year-Itch a Cause for Alarm?

While the existence of a seven-year-itch can’t be proven, there does seem to be something to the idea. The itch undoubtedly doesn’t arise according to a strict timetable — exactly at seven years on the dot — but likely happens somewhere around that marker.

Given that the seven-year-itch seems to sometimes lead to divorce, should you be concerned if it’s something you’ve been sensing in your relationship?

What’s important to note here is that while the seven-year-itch seems to lead some people to dissolve their relationship, the news for people who make it past that milestone is quite good: your risk of divorce goes down each year after your tenth anniversary, and years 9-15 of marriage have a particularly low risk of divorce. 

The fact that some people’s relationships disintegrate after seven years while others get stronger suggests that the significance of the seven-year-itch isn’t in the phenomenon itself, but in how the partners in a couple choose to frame it. 

The seven-year-itch is best interpreted not as a negative signal that your relationship has a problem, but as a neutral signal that it’s undergoing a transition.

Long-term love can remain many things: deeply satisfying, profoundly ardent, and even intensely passionate. But one thing it won’t stay is exciting.

Excitement is predicated on uncertainty, anticipation, and even a kind of pleasurable apprehension. The guessing at feelings. The gap between an imagined future and what will actually unfold. The tension of not knowing who you will end up being to each other.

Excitement dissipates once possibilities become realities and uncertainty transforms into surety. There is little room for uncertainty once you know your lover’s deepest secrets, most granular habits, and the nuanced meanings of a single eyebrow-raise.

But the diminishment of excitement is not without its compensations. As excitement decreases, feelings of stability, security, and intimacy rise, and you have the opportunity to enjoy a new set of satisfactions: The gratification of knowing someone completely, and being known that way in return. The freedom from fraught misunderstandings. The comfort of being entirely at ease with someone else. The joy of having your entire life — your past memories, present navigations, and future dreams — intertwined with another’s. 

The feeling of the seven-year-itch may simply be the feeling of reaching a new threshold of familiarity in your relationship. At this juncture, it’s natural to look back a little nostalgically to the intoxicating road you traveled to get there, and to wonder if the best is behind you. But if you hold on, if you recommit to doing all the romantic stuff that brought you to this crossroads in the first place, there can be a whole nother epoch of love, happiness, and swoon-worthy fulfillment ahead. 

The post Is the 7-Year-Itch Real? appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Have you ever known someone who joined the faith of the person they were dating?

Perhaps the sincerity of that conversion seemed a little suspect, given that the move was likely motivated in part by the individual’s love for their significant other.

But Plato would have found it the most natural progression in the world.

He compared love to a ladder: what begins as an individual’s passion for a particular person can arouse a love for virtue which rises to a love for knowledge and, ultimately, a love for eternal ideals.

A desire for beauty leads to a desire for Beauty; an attraction to goodness becomes an attraction to Goodness; the inspiration to stay true to another inspires a dedication to Truth.

Plato posits that the potential for this progression is rooted in the fact that all earthly beauty is but a reflection of the perfect heavenly “Forms”; all the beauty we encounter here points to something greater beyond it.

But there’s more to it than that.

Love animates the soul, lending someone the energy, sense of capability, and motivation to move formerly backburnered, seemingly arduous quests to the fore.

Love opens dimensions of experience that someone couldn’t have conceived of, prompting them to wonder what other aspects of existence remain to be discovered.

Love, the desire to forever bind one’s life to another’s based on a feeling, softens the inflexible rationality that can ironically handicap the pursuit of truth.

Love emboldens us to do more, be more, perceive more.

Everyone senses that romance is shot through with possibilities. But a glance stolen across a room, a hand held in a darkened theater, or a kiss exchanged on a doorstep can mean more than the beginning of a new relationship; it can be the first rung of someone’s ascent into something even higher.

The post Sunday Firesides: Climb the Ladder of Love appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

We’ve all had plenty of firsthand social experience. 

We all know how good it feels to be complimented, appreciated, reached out to.

Yet when we contemplate directing such behaviors toward others, we hesitate. We worry that it will be awkward or figure the person won’t really care about the gesture.

This mismatch between our perception of how others act toward us, and how we think others will perceive how we act toward them, is created by our innate egocentricity. We get caught up in thinking about our own thoughts; if we noticed that we acted awkward during an interaction, we figure the other person noticed our awkwardness too. We struggle to step through our own feelings to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes; if doing something doesn’t give us a sense of positive surprise, we can’t imagine the positive surprise it will create in someone else.

Reams of studies have been done on the human failure to accurately read other people’s minds. But our common weakness in perspective-taking is more than just a psychological curiosity. It has very real effects on our social life, demotivating us from doing the kinds of things that will help us develop richer and more positive connections with friends, family, and even strangers.

Below are nine research-established mental distortions to be aware of. Understanding them will help you be more proactive and confident in social interactions and keep in mind these important and overlooked truths: talking with others will go better than you think; people are less critical of you than you suppose; folks appreciate affirmation far more than you know.

1. You underestimate how much you’ll enjoy talking to a stranger. People in subway cars and other public places tend to keep to themselves — listening to music with headphones in; staring off into space. They’re reluctant to start a conversation with the folks around them because they think their overtures will be rejected or the attempted conversation will be stilted. But such pessimism is overblown; studies find that when you do strike up a conversation with a stranger, the interaction is more welcomed, enjoyable, and mood-boosting than expected. You never know where a conversation with a stranger will lead; at the very least, it will cause you to feel a little bit happier.

2. You underestimate how much new acquaintances like you. After meeting someone at a party, you go home and think, “Boy, was I awkward! They probably think I’m a real goober.” Actually, they probably don’t. People typically like you and enjoy your company much more than you think. Researchers call the mismatch between what you think people think of you and what they really do think of you “the liking gap,” and it can last a long time; even college students who shared a dorm room and interacted daily believed that their roommates liked them less than they actually did for several months. So spend less time ruminating on how poorly you think you came off to others; as researchers concluded: “after people have conversations, they are liked more than they know.”

3. You underestimate how much people will care about intimate disclosures. Most people say they’d like to move beyond small talk to have deeper and more meaningful conversations with new acquaintances. Yet they’re reluctant to share the kinds of revelations that would make these deeper conversations possible. That’s because they overestimate how awkward doing so will be and underestimate how much people will be interested in such disclosures. In reality, research shows that people care about the more intimate details of your life more than you think. You don’t want to overshare, of course, but don’t stubbornly stick to only the shallowest of conversation, either.

4. You underestimate how much someone else will be thinking about you after conversing. You have a meaningful and interesting conversation with a stranger or a good friend and find yourself chewing on the things discussed in the hours and even days afterward. But you figure the conversation didn’t feel as significant to the other person, and they’re not doing the same. Wrong. “Studies demonstrate that people remain on their conversation partners’ minds more than they know” and “remember their stories [and] revisit their advice.”

5. You underestimate how willing people are to help you. We can be reluctant to ask for help because we figure the people we might ask are likely to say no, and that even if they say yes, they’ll feel put out by the request. But studies show that people are much more likely to comply with requests for help than people predict and feel more positively about giving this help than people expect. Folks very often want to help, and they feel good when they’re able to do so.

6. You underestimate how hesitant someone will feel to ask you for help. You see a loved one struggling, and, unsure of what to do for them, assuage the guilt you feel about not reaching out by saying, “Well, if they needed help, they would ask for it.” Probably not. Even though they themselves are hesitant to ask for help, people still routinely discount the discomfort — the feelings of inadequacy and self-consciousness — that others feel in doing so. If you wait for someone to ask for help, you’ll likely wait forever. Use your sagest discernment to assess what they need, and then just step in and take care of it. 

7. You underestimate how much your appreciation will be appreciated. It’s easy to let an upwelling of gratitude for something someone did or who they are in general go unexpressed because you figure it won’t really mean that much to them or will make them feel weird. But research shows that people overestimate how awkward receiving an expression of gratitude will make someone feel and underestimate how much the person will appreciate it. Never hesitate to express your gratitude to others.

8. You underestimate the positive impact of giving a compliment. It’s the same deal here as with expressions of gratitude: people overestimate how awkward giving a compliment will be and underestimate how good the compliment will make its recipient feel. Offer praise regularly and freely. 

9. You underestimate how much someone will appreciate you checking in with them. You write up a text to an old friend you haven’t talked to in a long time. Something like, “Hey! I was just thinking about you today. How have you been?” But then you delete the message, thinking, “Hmm, maybe they’ll think I’m weird for reaching out out of the blue like this.” Not so: research finds that people appreciate a check-in message more than you’d think, and the more distant you’ve been, and the more surprising the message is, the more it makes their day. So the next time you find yourself thinking about an old friend, go ahead and hit send on that “Hey man!” message. 

The post 9 Mental Distortions That Are Sabotaging Your Social Life appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Over the last year, my 12-year-old son has been doing one challenge every week as a rite of passage and chance to earn a special trip. Some of these challenges have involved reading a book in a week, and the most recent book we gave him to read was How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. His review? He said it was the best book he’s read so far.

So a book written almost 90 years ago can still be a favorite of a kid in the 21st century. Talk about some staying power. 

The advice in How to Win Friends & Influence People, and Dale Carnegie’s other classic, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, is timeless. But to help introduce it to a new audience, my guest, Joe Hart, has recently co-authored the book Take Command, which synthesizes, updates, and adds to the principles of Carnegie’s two perennial bestsellers. Joe is the President and CEO of Dale Carnegie & Associates, which continues Carnegie’s work in the present day, and we begin our conversation with some background on the guy who kicked off this work back in 1936. We then talk about what principles we can take from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living on developing a positive mindset. From there, we talk about the big overarching principle of How to Win Friends & Influence People, and how you can use it to improve your relationships. We end our conversation with advice on how to live life with more intentionality and meaning.

Resources Related to the Episode

• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
• The Dale Carnegie Website, with links to the Take Command book page and the Dale Carnegie Course
• AoM Article: The 8 Best Vintage Self-Improvement Books
• AoM Podcast #818: The Philosophy of Self-Improvement
• AoM Podcast #457: Leadership Lessons With Craig Groeschel
• AoM Podcast #527: The Journey to the Second Half of Life With Richard Rohr
• AoM Podcast #518: The Second Mountain With David Brooks

Connect With Joe Hart

• Joe on Twitter
• Joe on LinkedIn

The post Podcast #865: How to Win Friends and Influence People in the 21st Century appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Started in 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development represents the longest study on happiness ever conducted. It set out to follow a group of men through every stage of their lives, from youth to old age, to discover what factors lead people to flourish.

Here to share some of the insights that have been gleaned from the Harvard Study of Adult Development is Dr. Robert Waldinger, the current director of the project and the co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Today on the show, Robert explains how the study has affirmed the absolute primacy of relationships in happiness and how to develop the “social fitness” to make and enrich those vital connections. We discuss what the happily married couples in the study did differently, and why happiness in marriage tends to follow a U-shaped curve which hits its low point in midlife. We talk about how the way you were raised helps set a trajectory for your life, but how it’s also possible to overcome a rough upbringing to become a transitional character in your family. We also discuss the role that friends and work played in the happiness of the men who participated in the study. We end our conversation with what folks in every stage of development — whether youth, midlife, or older age — should focus on to live a flourishing life.

Resources Related to the Episode

• AoM Article: Love Is All You Need: Insights from the Longest Longitudinal Study on Men Ever Conducted
• AoM article and podcast on how and why to have weekly marriage meetings
• AoM Podcast #795: The U-Shaped Curve of Happiness
• AoM Article: You Don’t Have to Be Your Dad — How to Become Your Family’s Transitional Character
• AoM Podcast #742: The Power of Talking to Strangers
• A Eulogy for My Grandfather, William D. Hurst

Connect With Robert Waldinger

• The Good Life website
• Harvard Study of Adult Development

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast, started in 1938. The Harvard study of adult development represent the longest study on happiness ever conducted. It set out to follow a group of men through every stage of their lives from youth to old age to discover what factors lead people to flourish here to share some of the insights that have been gleaned from the Harvard study of adult development is Dr. Robert Waldinger, the current director of the project, and the co-author of The Good Life. Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness.

Today on the show, Robert explains how the study has affirmed the absolute primacy of relationships with happiness and how to develop the social fitness, to make and enrich those vital connections we discussed with the happily married couples and the study did differently on why happiness and marriage tends to follow a U-shaped curve, which is its low point in mid-life, we talk about how the way you’re raised help, set a trajectory for your life, but how it’s possible to overcome a rough upbringing, become a transitional character in our family, we also discuss the role that friends and work played in the happiness of the men who participated in the study we enter a conversation with what folks in every stage of development, whether youth, mid-life or older age should focus on to live a flourishing life. After the show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/happiness.

Robert Waldinger, welcome to the show.

Robert Waldinger: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are the Director of the Harvard study of adult development, and this is a study on human happiness flourishing, that’s been going on since 1938, and you recently co-authored a book with Marc Schulz about what you and other researchers have discovered in this 85-year-old study about human happiness. Before we get into the book, let’s talk about study itself, when it started, what was the aim of the study and who were the individuals being studied, give us a big picture overview of this Harvard study of adult development.

Robert Waldinger: Sure, so it was actually two studies that didn’t even know about each other, well, it started… One study was at Harvard University Student Health Service, it was a study of undergraduates, sophomores from the classes of 1939 to 1942, their deans thought they were fine, upstanding young men, and they want to do a study of young adulthood and normal development, so of course, you study all white guys from Harvard. It’s totally politically incorrect now, but at that point, that’s what they wanted to study, and then the other study was started by a Harvard Law School professor, Sheldon Glueck and his wife, Eleanor Glueck, who was a social worker.

They were interested in juvenile delinquency and particularly why some kids born into really underprivileged, impoverished, troubled families, why those kids managed to stay on good developmental paths, not get into trouble, but really develop into upstanding young guys, and so both of those studies then were combined by my predecessor, so that they’re very contrasting groups, like a very privileged group, and a very underprivileged group, and we followed them all for their whole lives, we brought in their wives at one point when I started with the study 20 years ago. And then we reached out to all their children, more than half of whom are women, so now we’ve studied over 2000 people in 724 families.

Brett McKay: And so this is called a longitudinal study where you take somebody or a group of people and you study them, not just for at a moment in their life. But across their entire life, ’cause I think this is interesting, what are the benefits of doing a longitudinal study like this, what insights can you get that you can’t get when you do a study, when you just look at a person at a particular moment in their life?

Robert Waldinger: That’s such an important question, and most research is done by just looking at particular moments, so the best way I can give you an example is through a joke, so often we take snapshots, like if we were to do a study of people in their 20s and then also some people in their 40s, and in their 80s, we’d take snapshots at different ages, but there’s a senator from Florida named Claude Pepper, who once said, when I look at my state of Florida… And particularly South Florida, I would have to believe that you are born Cuban and you die Jewish. That the issue is that we tend, if we just take snapshots at different points of life to make connections, that aren’t real, that we think we know how life proceeds, but it’s not often the case, so by following the same people throughout their entire lives, we really can see whole lives play out, and we’ve done that with thousands of people now.

Brett McKay: So in this study, so you’re, they’re researching or studying Harvard sophomores and they’ve been following on their entire life, then there’s a group of under privileged kids, these poor kids, what kind of questions were the researchers asking these individuals throughout their life.

Robert Waldinger: They were asking questions about the big domains of life, so mental health, physical health, work, satisfaction. Did you get promoted? Did you get fired? How much do you like your work relationships, all kinds of relationships, not just romantic partnerships, but friendships and casual relationships in the community. So we asked all those questions, and of course, we relied a lot on their reports to us, their questionnaire, self-reports, but we also then began to bring in other sources of information, we began to videotape them, talking with their partners, we began to draw blood for DNA and that’s so cool, because if you think about it, DNA wasn’t even imagined in 1938, and when I came on in the 2000s, we started measuring DNA, we bring them into our lab and we stress them out and see how quickly they recover, and all of these are different windows on human thriving.

Brett McKay: So after decades of looking at the lives of these men and even the lives of their children, the study has gone on to a second generation, what’s the most important thing that you and the researchers involved in the study have learned?

Robert Waldinger: Well, we took away two big things, and one won’t surprise you, it’s that taking care of your health really matters, exercising regularly, not smoking, not abusing alcohol or drugs, eating right, all that stuff matters hugely for your happiness, for your health for your longevity, but the surprise for us was that the people who stayed healthy the longest, who were the happiest and who lived the longest, were the people who had the best connections, the warmest connections with other people as they went through their lives, the surprise was, you know… Okay, it stands to reason that if you have a good relationship, you’d be happier, but how could it predict that you would be less likely to get coronary artery disease or type 2 diabetes? How could that possibly happen? And that’s what we began to study, many other research groups have found the same thing, so we have a lot of confidence in these findings, they’re very strong.

Brett McKay: When… The point you make is that what’s nice about the study is that you have two groups that come from different social strata, so you have the Harvard guys, and then you have the kids who are poor, and what you found is that where you started off in life didn’t necessarily correlate with how you would end up later on in life, if you’re flourishing in life, there were men who were great at the beginning of their life and then they died just unhappy, unhealthy, etcetera, then there were boys who were poor and destitute, but they grew up into flourishing human beings.

Robert Waldinger: Exactly, exactly. And we found that it wasn’t much to do with wealth, it wasn’t much to do with achievement and certainly not fame, even though everybody feels like they want those things, that it was about taking care of themselves and their families, and about the strength of their connections that those were the things that really mattered.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned the strength of relationships in a person’s life contributed to their physical health, they’re less likely to get type 2 diabetes, coronary disease. Did the satisfaction or the strength of relationships correlate to other life outcomes like careers or… Things like that?

Robert Waldinger: Absolutely, so what we know from our study and other studies is that if you are good with people, if you have good people skills and you prioritize good relationships, you do better at your work, you are occupationally, more successful compared with other people who may be brilliant, but aren’t so good with other people, so this prioritizing of relationships really matters in your work life, not just in your home life…

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think I’ve seen looking at the study, there’s things like men with at least one good relationship with their sibling growing up made 51000 more per year, than men who had poor relationships with their siblings or no siblings at all. I think another one I saw was men with warm mothers took home $87000 more than those men whose mothers were uncaring, but I think the point you make, throughout the book is that even if you had a bad childhood doesn’t mean you’re destined to not make as much money, but generally, if you look at the outcomes of individuals, you see those correlations.

Robert Waldinger: Well, you do that childhood experience really matters, but there’s a lot of room for correction, course correction, so very often people who find a good partner can really change what they expect in relationships so let’s say you grew up in a really difficult family where you couldn’t trust people or people were mean and emotionally abusive or even physically abusive, if you’re able to find a partner, if you’re able to find friends who are reliable, who are kind, who are stable, often that goes a long way to correcting your own expectations about life.

Brett McKay: So social relationships are most important thing, it’s gonna correlate to you having a flourishing life in all aspects of your life, and this is not to say that being born into poverty or wealth is gonna not have an influence. It will, but the relationships, the power of those warm relationships are going to… Can overcome those influences. So one of the things that you and your colleague have developed with this understanding that from the study that relationships, the power of relationships, is the thing that allows us to flourish in life, you develop this idea of social fitness, and I really like this idea of thinking of our social life in terms of fitness, how would you describe social fitness, like what makes it up, and how do you measure social fitness?

Robert Waldinger: Yeah, well, what we did was we coined that phrase just as a way to be analogous to physical fitness, because with physical fitness, if you think about it, if you exercise today, you don’t come back home and say, gee, I’m done… I don’t ever have to do that again. We know that physical fitness is a lifelong practice, and similarly, what we find is that with our relationships, there is a kind of social fitness, there’s a practice that… You know, when I was in my 20s, I used to think that my good friends were always gonna be my friends from school, from college, now they were just there, no need to worry about them, but it turns out when we watch friendships over time that many really good relationships can just wither away and die because of neglect, not because there’s anything wrong in the relationships, and so what we’ve learned is that the people who are the best at maintaining social connections are active, they make it a practice. And so what I mean by that is they take care to reach out to somebody to make sure they have regular contact to connect when it’s been too long, and they wanna make sure that they catch up with the people who they wanna really keep in their lives you know, I’ll tell you, for example, that. My co-author, Marc Schulz and I became buddies, became friends when we were apprentices in somebody’s research lab, like 30 years ago.

Well, he since moved to Pennsylvania where he’s a psychology professor, but we have a phone call every Friday, noon, and we talk about, yes, we talk about our research and our writing, but we talk about our kids and our wives and our personal lives. That’s hugely important in maintaining a vibrant friendship that otherwise I’m sure would have just withered away.

Brett McKay: And the other reason I like this idea of social fitness, I think this could be very appealing to men who often think of… Not always, but I think they often think that social skills are just something to either have or you don’t, but this idea of social fitness is no, you can act, it’s like getting stronger or getting better at endurance, it’s a skill that you can develop with training and practice, I think that can be appealing…

Robert Waldinger: Absolutely. Yeah, and there’s some ways you can do it. So first is to be active, as I was saying, but another way is simply to be curious about another person, so if you say, well, I don’t know how to talk to people, all you have to do is be curious, so let’s say at work, you see somebody who’s got something interesting, they’re displaying on their desk, like a little object or a photo, just ask them about it. People love to talk about themselves, or if you know that somebody has a particular hobby, ask them… If somebody plays fantasy football, just ask them about it, what’s it like, what do they do? It could be anything, that what we find is that if we bring curiosity to our encounters with other people… Conversations get going pretty easily.

Brett McKay: I think you broke down social fitness, this is how I interpreted it. So correct me if I’m wrong. There’s two key components. The one you’re talking about now is attending, making a focus on attending to the people that are in your life, and then time spent, and I like this idea of this attending to them, so you talked about how you can attend more to people or pay more attention to people, ask questions, be curious. And anything else that you found from the study that the men who really thrived with their social life, what else did they do to pay more attention to the people around them?

Robert Waldinger: Sure. Well, to spend some time on that idea of attending on attention, one of the things we’re worried about a lot now is this problem that we’re all giving each other partial attention a lot of the time, so that even when we’re together in the same room, we’re often on our screens and maybe half paying attention to each other or not paying attention to each other at all, think about the last time you saw people in a restaurant where everybody was sitting at a table, presumably friends or family, and everybody was on their phone, not even looking at each other.

So one of the things we want people to think about is being very intentional to give each other full attention, one of my Zen teachers has this famous quote that I love, he said Attention is the most basic form of love. And what he means by that is attention our full, undivided attention, is probably the greatest gift we have to give to somebody else, and it’s not that hard to do, you just have to really pay attention to it, you have to be mindful and intentional and say, okay, I’m gonna put down my phone, I’m gonna put away my screen, I’m gonna look at this person and give them my full attention…

Brett McKay: So yeah, I think one question you propose that people ask themselves every day to increase the amount of attention they give the people in their lives is what action could I take today, to give attention and appreciation to someone who deserves it, so think about that and then set a goal to attend to that person…

Robert Waldinger: Yeah, and then notice how it feels, because what you’ll find is that it actually feels good to do that, that when you appreciate somebody first of all, you get a lot of good stuff back usually, but also it just feels good to do it.

Brett McKay: Okay social fitness, one part is the attending part, the other part is time, just as your physical fitness, if you wanna get more fit, physically, the more time you spend exercising, the more fit you’re gonna get, I imagine the same is the same with social fitness, the more time you engage in social activities, the fitter, you’re gonna get?

Robert Waldinger: Absolutely, absolutely. ’cause we learn things. When we do that, we get better at it. It’s like practicing a sport, it’s like practicing anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it, and you overcome some of the awkwardness, like a lot of us are worried that if I strike up this conversation with the guy who gives me my coffee at Dunkin Donuts, it’s gonna be awkward. Well, the more you do it, the less awkward it becomes, so it’s like practicing any skill, just keep trying…

Brett McKay: Were there any insights from the study that suggest how much time we should spend with family and friends?

Robert Waldinger: There’s no formula that one size doesn’t really fit all people, so what we know is that all of us are on some kind of spectrum from being really shy to being really outgoing, and there’s nothing abnormal about either end of the spectrum, it’s fine to be shy, but what that means is that if I’m a shy person, that means being around a lot of people can be exhausting and I need more alone time. If I’m an extroverted person, then I want parties with a lot… I wanna be around a lot of people, so it’s up to each of us to pay attention to ourselves and say, okay, what works for me? Is it a few close people or is it a lot of people in my life?

Brett McKay: You also found a research that participants who not only socialize with their friends and family, but also socialized with strangers, that affected their social fitness. Correct?

Robert Waldinger: Absolutely. That when we connect with strangers, so let’s say the person who delivers our mail, the cashier at the grocery store, if we connect and exchange some pleasant conversation, we get little hits of well-being, and we give other people little hits of well-being, it’s like just a recognition of, “Hey, I see you, I like saying hello to you,” and those little interactions turn out to contribute every day to our feeling better about ourselves and to our health.

Brett McKay: Okay, so social fitness, spend more time with people we care about spend more time socializing, and again, you said this with a caveat, everyone’s different, sometimes you need more of that, sometimes you need less, but then also when you are spending the time, make sure you are actually paying attention to those people. One of the interesting things about this study is that, again, it’s longitude, so you’ve seen from when these individuals were in college, from boyhood all the way into their 80s, 90s, so you’ve seen them date, get married, divorce, have kids, faced a lot of challenges in a relationship. What did you learn about what these participants did, who thrived with their relationships and in life, how do they handle those challenges that will inevitably come up in any relationship?

Robert Waldinger: Yeah, they didn’t hide from the challenges, so the temptation can be, if I’m having a disagreement with somebody, let me just sweep it under the rug, let me just turn the other way, let me just avoid that person. Well, it turns out that the people who thrive are the people who work out disagreements, that actually there are always gonna be disagreements in any relationship, no matter how good it is, and the challenge is to work out those disagreements in a way that helps everybody feel stronger and better not so that one person wins and the other loses, but that both people feel like they came to some understanding and they’re able to move ahead with the relationship, and usually what happens is when you work out disagreements… The relationships get stronger.

Brett McKay: So turn towards the adversity instead of withdrawing.

Robert Waldinger: Absolutely, absolutely.

Brett McKay: Okay, so if you’ve faced challenges in your relationship, turn towards it, do so again, I think bringing that curiosity, if you see a disagreement, figure out why the person you’re disagreeing with sees things the way they do, and try to really control and harness those emotions towards positive, proactive ends… Let’s talk about marriage. That’s a big part of life. What did you learn about marriage from studying the men in this study.

Robert Waldinger: We learned that it changes that we pick a partner and we say till death do us part or not, we don’t necessarily get married, but we have a partner, and what we don’t expect is that we and our partner are gonna change, but of course we do, we’re always changing, and so one of the things we notice is that the people who have the best and the most stable relationships are the people who accept that they change, that their partner changes and that the relationship is gonna morph and change as it goes through time, that that’s not a problem at all, that that’s to be expected. And if we give each other room to change, that’s a way of doing what we call growing together instead of growing apart. So the people who were best at learning new dance steps with their partner, if you will, were the people who had the most satisfying relationships that lasted, that met the test of time.

Brett McKay: And I imagine the people who didn’t have that flexibility usually end up in acrimony or divorce.

Robert Waldinger: Exactly, exactly. Why can’t you be the person you were 20 years ago? Well, nobody is.

Brett McKay: Yeah, anything else that you found just the day-to-day, that these individuals that have a thriving marriage, that they did to strengthen their marriage?

Robert Waldinger: Yes, they caught each other being good, we often catch each other being bad doing the wrong thing, and we call them out, but really, if we catch each other being good doing the thing we appreciate and name it, it goes such a long way to… First of all, reinforcing the behavior, getting the other person to do it again, gee, you like that? I’ll do it again, so we can help each other learn how to please each other, and so what I would say is that the people who were best at this were the people who kept appreciating their partner for the things that they genuinely valued.

Brett McKay: Well, here’s a tip from my own life, so listen to the podcast, probably you’ve heard me talk about this before we actually… We did a whole podcast about this, is this idea of a marriage meeting, a weekly marriage meeting, my wife and I have been doing it for years, and you start off the meeting with appreciation, and so you just… We each take turns just sharing how we appreciated what the other did during the Week, so it’s the mundane stuff, just, “Hey, thanks for picking up the kids,” to more meaningful things as well.

Robert Waldinger: Yeah. Fantastic, fantastic. And that’s… You start with appreciation. And actually, that’s a good way to start lots of encounters, but especially with your partner… Wow, it’s such a good thing. And then you were able to move on to talk about the things that you’d like to maybe be different or change.

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah, so we talk about our to dos… So we talk about what stuff that we have to do to just manage the household, what needs to be fixed, cleaned, where the kids need to be, and then we talk about plan for good times. So we plan for good times individually, so if there’s something I wanted to do, I wanna go hang with my friend on Thursday night, are you available to make sure the kids… Someone’s watching the kids… Oh yeah, that’ll be great. Same thing, we plan good times as a couple or as a family.

Robert Waldinger: I love that.

Brett McKay: And then we end it with big issues, so it could be issues with the kids, concerns in the relationship. You talk about that stuff.

Robert Waldinger: Yeah, this is fantastic, because the other thing we know is that it’s easy for couples to just become a tag team raising kids, and where you do this and I’ll do that, and then we stop paying attention to the romance, we stop paying attention to the fun parts. And so what you and your wife are doing is actively remembering to plan some fun and plan… Planning fun individually and planning fun as a couple and planning fun as a family, because those fun times are the glue that holds every relationship together.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for words from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. Well, the other thing you found day-to-day that the participants in the study who had flourishing marriages did was just physical touch, like a frequent daily physical touch, hugs, hand-holding, etcetera, they did that from once they got married till their 80s and 90s, they didn’t stop doing that.

Robert Waldinger: Absolutely, absolutely, ’cause physical touch literally calms us down, it literally relieves stress, and it certainly gives us hits of well-being when somebody takes your hand, when somebody puts an arm around you, gives you a little peck on the cheek, it makes a big difference and we can see it, we can see in the laboratory when somebody is about to have a stressful medical test, if they can hold the hand of someone they trust, they are hugely calmer, and in fact, they feel less pain if the procedure is painful. And so we know that this stuff really works.

Brett McKay: And the other thing you found with this longitudinal study is that relationships… We mentioned that, relationships change over time, and one thing that they follow is this sort of U-shaped curve of happiness. We actually had an economist on the podcast to talk about this idea that generally people follow this U-shaped curve of happiness through their life, they… In their 20s, they’re really happy, and then as you get down to your 40s, your happiness reaches its lowest point, and then after that, it starts going up, and the same thing happens in relationships, marital satisfaction is high in the beginning, and then it sort of follows this U-shaped curve of happiness where your 40s, 50s like, Oh, this is… Our relationship is not the best, but then 60s, 70s, 80s, it’s the best it’s ever been.

Robert Waldinger: Absolutely, absolutely, and it’s such a surprise ’cause we think being old, oh, I don’t wanna do that, and that looks depressing, but older people get happier and this U-shaped curve keeps coming up in study after study. A lot of it is because mid-life is hard, mid-life is often the time when we have the most pressure, most career pressure, the most pressure to take care of kids, if we’re raising kids, often pressure to take care of aging parents or disabled relatives, and so often, we talk about the sandwich generation, the middle-aged person who’s got so many responsibilities on so many fronts, it’s easier when you’re a young adult, and it’s easier when you’re older and maybe the kids are launched, maybe you’re no longer taking care of elderly parents. So there are a lot of reasons why this dip in happiness occurs in midlife, now, it doesn’t occur for absolutely everybody, these are big averages when we look at thousands of people, but it’s pretty reliable.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about… We’ve sort of glanced on this, but a participant’s family of origin, how did that influence what their own family was like in adulthood?

Robert Waldinger: What we’ve seen is that if you have warm relationships with your parents, you’re much more likely to have warm relationships as you get older, and we found that there was a connection even across 60 years, that people who had warmer connections with parents and childhood had warmer relationships with romantic partners in their 70s, and that kind of connection is really hard to find across so many years.

Brett McKay: Well, what about people who grew up in a home that wasn’t so loving, a broken home, did they often carry those negative familial patterns into their adult family?

Robert Waldinger: Many people do. It’s also possible to have other good relationships that help a lot, so for example, you could have a relationship with an uncle or an aunt, you could have a great relationship with an older sibling, with a coach, with a teacher, somebody who you can rely on, somebody if it’s an adult who’s just crazy about you and mentors you and takes care of you if you have that, that goes a long way toward compensating for some of the bad times we can have with parents.

Brett McKay: Well, there’s this idea from a family scholar that I’ve read, Carlfred Broderick, and he called this idea, say if you grew up in a family that was not good, it was a bad, a broken family, you don’t have to carry that on, you can become what he calls a transitional character. And it’s a person, he calls it a person who in a single generation changes the entire course of a lineage, and that can happen, and you highlight people who did that, they came from a broken home, but then through someone they met or just even just will… They change that for themselves and their family.

Robert Waldinger: Exactly, exactly, and I love that concept of being a transitional figure, where you interrupt a lineage where you don’t wanna pay something forward that was unfortunately given to you, that you wanna do it differently. And many people do that. Actually, being a parent, a lot of parents are intentional about doing it differently because there were some things in their childhoods that were hurtful, that were neglectful, and they don’t want to inflict that on their children going forward, and that can be a source of healing for the parent, it can be a hugely healing thing to be able to do for your kids, what wasn’t done for you.

Brett McKay: And it was interesting too, you also highlight people who… They try to be that transitional character in their family for their own kids, but by doing that, they actually were able to heal the rifts with their parents or siblings from their family of origin.

Robert Waldinger: They can because sometimes grandparents can learn from parents about how the parents are taking care of their kids, grandparents can say, oh wow… Actually my own father, who was a very good man, didn’t know what to do with young kids, and so he didn’t really spend much time with me and my brother when we were little, but when he saw me being a father and spending an awful lot of time, taking care of my first son when he was a baby, my dad got really curious and interested and said, “Gee, I wish I had done more of that when I was a parent of young kids.”

Brett McKay: Did the flourishing participants in the study, did they stay connected with their family of origin more than participants who did in fair as well, in life?

Robert Waldinger: It depends. There were some people who put distance between themselves and their families because the families were hurtful, because the relationships were more toxic, and those people found that they survived better and they thrived more when they put distance between themselves and their families of origin. There were other people who stayed quite close, and that was an enormous source of support as they went through all kinds of challenges as young adults and middle-aged adults… So I would say that if the families of origin were good, nurturing families, staying close was an enormous source of support.

Brett McKay: So I think the big takeaway from that aspect of the study is that if you came from a family that wasn’t great, you’re not doomed to repeat that, history is not doomed to repeat itself.

Robert Waldinger: Exactly, exactly. Childhood is not destiny.

Brett McKay: That’s… Is genetic destiny? So you’ve talked about how you brought in DNA studies, and there’s a lot of talk about how well, a lot of problems in people’s life they’re determined by genetics. You were able to see this like first-hand. What influence have you found that genetics has had in the outcomes of individuals lives?

Robert Waldinger: Actually, there’s another researcher who’s done some work on this, a psychologist named Sonja Lyubomirsky, and she’s done some estimates, like how much of our happiness is under our control, and what she finds from looking at a lot of studies is that about 50% of our well-being is genetically determined that we’re all born with a certain temperament, a certain happiness setpoint that is pretty stable throughout our lives, but then about an extra 10% is our current life circumstance, and then the remaining 40%, she estimates is under our control. So she says about 40% of our happiness, our well-being is malleable. We can do something about it. And that’s a big percentage.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about friends. What role did friends play in the lives of the men in the study?

Robert Waldinger: It varied, some men turned around in mid-life and said, I don’t have any friends, and they really felt quite isolated, some of them had spouses who made their social lives for them and that worked okay. Some of our original study participants are men had very good friendships, friendships that were long-lasting, also some friendships that they made for the first time in mid-life or in late life. People who they never thought they’d become friends with, became friends when they were in their 70s and 80s. So it varied a lot. The message from all of that was that it is never too late to find friends never too late, and we have stories in our book about that life stories where people who thought that it was too late for them, they were never gonna have good friendships suddenly found their friendships late in life.

Brett McKay: Did you all find any… Was there a specific number of friends someone needed to have a flourishing life, or did it vary?

Robert Waldinger: It varies a lot, and again, it’s that continuum, some of us are shy, and it means that maybe we just need one or two really good friends in our lives, some of us are extroverted and we might want lots of friends, so it’s a very personal matter to check out for yourself. What works for me? And then to try to make that happen for yourself. What we do know is that everybody needs somebody… Everybody needs at least one solid relationship, at one point, we asked our original participants, we said, “Who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared, list everybody you could call.” Some people could list quite a number of people who they could go to, some people couldn’t list anybody. We think that each person needs at least one person in their life who is their go-to person who would have their back if they really needed help.

Brett McKay: And one thing you found is that the people who maintained or kept growing friendships throughout their life, what they did… One thing they did was really powerful was they thought about their social routines and then changed it up so that it allowed them to make more friends, so take a look at your life, like, “What am I doing that’s preventing me from making friends, and then what can I do to increase the likelihood that I’ll make a new friend?”

Robert Waldinger: Yes, and one of the things we find is that if you think about what you enjoy or what you care about, what are the things you love to do? Or what are the causes you care a lot about? Do those things with other people. So volunteer for a gardening club, or a biking group, or a bowling league, anything… Something you love to do, because one of the things we find is that if you put yourself in groups of people who share interests, first it gives you an immediate topic of conversation, something to talk about, and you go back again and again and you’re with those same people, you’re more likely to strike up conversations, to eventually have deeper conversations with a few people and eventually build some deeper relationships.

Brett McKay: And in this idea that it’s never too late for you to make new friends, you talk about… This is a great example of a guy named Andrew that was part of the study, and he was in a not great marriage, his wife was really critical of him and she was very averse to social situations, they kept to themselves. And he was miserable. He said that at age 45, he attempted suicide. And then 20 years later, at 65, he was thinking about it again. And then at 67, he retired, he was forced to retire because he couldn’t see anymore, and then he got divorced and he was even lonelier ’cause he divorced his wife. Even though the marriage wasn’t great. But he decided to do something I’m lonely, I need to make friends. And so what he did, he changed his social routine, and he joined a health club, fitness club, went through every day, started making friends. Guy is really social, and then it says a couple of years later, when they did this study on him, they asked if he ever felt lonely… Before he’d say yes often. And recently, he said, “No, I never feel… ” And this is in 2010, he says he never feels lonely and he gets people visiting him at his house, he’s made friends, so it took a while, but it is possible to change.

Robert Waldinger: Exactly, and he’s a perfect example of how change happens, even when we’re sure it’s not going to… He made an effort and he did something that he wanted to do anyway, which is he wanted to join a gym, he wanted to take care of his health, and it had this wonderful side benefit that turned out to be the main event for him.

Brett McKay: What role did work play in the happiness of the participants of the study.

Robert Waldinger: It played a big role. First on the down side, many people, when we asked them to look back on their lives and we said, what’s your biggest regret? Many of them said, I wish I hadn’t spent so much time at work. I wish I had spent more time with the people who mattered to me, but in addition, the people who were happiest at work were the people who made friends at work, who had important relationships at work. It gave them a reason to go to work every day. It gave them people to show up for, and what we find is that that’s true when they study millions of workers, that if you have a friend at work, someone you can talk to about personal matters, it makes an enormous difference in how much you like the job, whether you’re a good performer at that job and whether you’re more likely to change jobs, you’re more likely to stay put, if you have friends who you wanna show up for at work.

Brett McKay: So let me guess the big insight there is pick a job where you enjoy being around the people at work.

Robert Waldinger: Yeah.

Brett McKay: So we’ve talked a lot about what you’ve all learned from the study, we talked about how relationships are… That’s the most important thing in life. It correlates to higher health, higher income, higher happiness, but then to increase those relationships, we gotta exercise our social fitness, we do that by spending more time with people we care about or even strangers, and then really when we’re spending that time attending to them, then we talk about different ways we can exercise our social fitness within our marriage, our friends at work. Again, this study is longitudinal, so you’ve been able to see these men at different points in their life, young adulthood, midlife, elderhood, let’s say someone who’s listening to the podcast, they’re in that early part of adulthood, they’re in their 20s, maybe early 30s. What do you think is like the one thing that these individuals should focus on to really lay a foundation for a flourishing life?

Robert Waldinger: Basically focus on your relationships, and they don’t have to be a choice between relationships and work, or relationships and family. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, focus on your relationships wherever you find yourself during the day, and that… And bring those skills that you just named so beautifully, those skills of curiosity and reaching out, that you can bring those wherever you are, at home, at work, in the community, but it turns out to be the best investment in your future.

Brett McKay: What about mid-life? What are the challenges that you’ve seen there, and what can individuals who are in mid-life do overcome those relationship challenges?

Robert Waldinger: Probably the biggest challenge is shutting down is being so beleaguered by all your responsibilities that you don’t take time to connect with other people, you don’t take time to care for yourself and to have fun, which is a part of self-care, so I would say make that a priority, plan that out just the way you and your wife do, plan it out every week, let other things fit in around that, make those the first things you plan and let the other things come in when there’s time for them.

Brett McKay: That’s that idea from Stephen Covey, the Big Rocks. Plan your big rocks first and then let the sand of life fill in on those rocks. Let’s say someone whose retirement, so late 60s, early 70s, what’s something that they should be turning towards when it comes to their relationships?

Robert Waldinger: The people in our study who are the happiest in retirement replaced their work relationships with new relationships in retirement. So I would say that finding that group of friends, finding those causes you love and volunteering for them, finding those clubs you wanna join, do those things, make those things happen. Be active about it, because that’s likely to build a kind of bedrock of social connection that’s gonna keep you happy when you’re no longer seeing people all day at work.

Brett McKay: I saw that in the life of my own grandfather, he passed away in 2015, he was almost 101, but he retired from the Forest Service… I forgot how old he was, it was like in the ’60s, but then he lived like another 40 years and he had a flourishing life and it was spent socializing, he was involved with the conservation groups, the Rotary Club, he traveled a lot, he did Meals on Wheels even in his, he was in his 90s, he was visiting, he’s delivering meals on wheels to other 90 year-olds who couldn’t get around, I think that did a lot for his longevity, and he had a flourishing life all the way up pretty much up to the end.

Robert Waldinger: Yeah, and that’s the recipe staying engaged in the world, it sounds like he was very engaged with all kinds of people, with all kinds of activities. It’s staying engaged, that matters hugely for your happiness and your health when you retire.

Brett McKay: Well, Robert, this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Robert Waldinger: Well, the book has a website, thegoodlifebook.com, and you can also go to our study website, it’s www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org, adult development study. All one word, dot-org.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Robert Waldinger thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Robert Waldinger: Thank you, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Robert Waldinger, he’s the author of the book The Good Life. It’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about the Harvard study of adult development at adultdevelopmentstudy.org, also check at our show notes at AOM.is/happiness, where you can find links to resources where we’ve delved deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast, make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, and while you’re there, sign up for a newsletter at artofmanliness.com/newsletter, there’s a daily option a weekly digest as well you get our updates it’s for free, check it out. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium, head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code “manliness” to check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast.

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The post Podcast #863: Key Insights From the Longest Study on Happiness appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

For most people, their siblings will be the longest-lasting relationships of their lives, potentially enduring all the way from birth until past the death of their parents. 

Marked by both jealousy and conflict and love and loyalty, siblings are also some of our most complicated relationships. While a little over half of people describe their relationships with their siblings as positive, about one-fifth classify them as negative, and a quarter say their feelings about their siblings are decidedly mixed. 

Here to take us on a tour of the complex landscape of sibling-dom is Geoffrey Greif, a professor of social work and the co-author of the book Adult Sibling Relationships. Today on the show, Geoffrey shares how our brothers and sisters shape us and how our relationship with our siblings changes as we move from childhood to old age. We discuss how the perception of parental favoritism affects the closeness of siblings and how a parent’s relationship with their own siblings affects the relationship between their children. Geoffrey explains how most sibling relationships are marked by the three A’s — affection, ambiguity, and/or ambivalence — and how the relationship can also become very distant or outright severed. We end our conversation with Geoffrey’s advice on developing a good relationship between your children and reconnecting with your own siblings.

Resources Related to the Episode

• Geoffrey’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #360 — Understanding Male Friendships
• AoM Article: Forging the Bond Between Brothers
• Study: “How Experiences with Siblings Relate to the Parenting of Siblings“
• Study: “Differential Effects of Perceptions of Mothers’ and Fathers’ Favoritism on Sibling Tension in Adulthood”

Connect With Geoffrey Greif

• Geoffrey’s Faculty Page

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For most people, their siblings will be the longest lasting relationships of their lives, potentially enduring all the way from birth until past the death of their parents. Marked by both jealousy and conflict and love and loyalty, siblings are also some of our most complicated relationships. While a little over half of people describe their relationships with their siblings as positive, about one fifth classify them as negative and a quarter say their feelings about their siblings are decidedly mixed. Here to take us on a tour of the complex landscape of sibling-dom is Geoffrey Greif, a professor of social work and the author of the book Adult Siblings. Today on the show, Geoffrey shares how our brothers and sisters shape us and how our relationship with our siblings changes as we move from childhood to old age.

We discuss how the perception of parental favoritism affects the closeness of siblings and how a parent’s relationship with their own siblings affects the relationship between their children. Geoffrey explains how most sibling relationships are marked by the three A’s, affection, ambiguity and or ambivalence and how the relationship can also become very distant or outright severed. We end our conversation with Geoffrey’s advice on developing a good relationship between your children and reconnecting with your own siblings. After the show is over check out our show notes at aom.is/siblings. All right, Geoffrey Greif, welcome back to the show.

Geoffrey Greif: Thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: So we had you on several years ago to talk about the nature of male friendship. You’ve also done research and writing about the nature of another type of relationship that has a big impact on our life. And that is the sibling relationship. As a professor who studies this stuff, how would you describe a sibling relationship? Like what makes it unique?

Geoffrey Greif: Sibling relationships are the longest relationships we have. They’re with us when we are born often. If we’re the oldest or older sibling, it could be the person with whom we spend most of our lives. We have these relationships longer than we do with our parents, longer than we do with our partners, spouses. Maybe if there’s a big age gap between you and your sibling or siblings, you may have a friend that you meet in kindergarten or something. But for the most part, these are the longest and I would argue probably the most important relationships that we have in our lives because they are so long and they define us in so many ways, both in relation to our parents, in relation to them. They’re the first intimate relationship we have. And they are there for us throughout the good times and if we have them, the bad times.

Brett McKay: So you’ve done research on friendship. How is the sibling relationship similar and different to a friendship?

Geoffrey Greif: One of the things that happens with friendships is of course is we can pick them up and drop them. If I have a toxic friendship or a friendship that turns toxic, I can decide to drop that friendship. A sibling is like a shadow throughout your whole life. Whether or not you are close or distant from that shadow/sibling, they are always with you and you do not have a choice about having them in your life and maybe you don’t have a choice if they are out of your life.

Brett McKay: So siblings relationship, it could be like a friendship. Some siblings are just like best friends, others not. They’re just indifferent or maybe they have a really bad relationship. But you also talk about how the sibling relationship is interesting because it is horizontal. You have this vertical relationship with your parents. But then even sibling relationships can sometimes resemble a vertical parent child type of relationship, correct?

Geoffrey Greif: Sure. If there’s a big age gap between siblings or even a small age gap, a two or three year age gap, they can certainly be a vertical or almost an intergenerational. If we think about parents up the line and grandparents up a line, that would be a vertical relationship whereas a horizontal relationship going across in your general age or in your general family hierarchy would be a sibling, it could be a partner, it could be a friend. Those would all be of course horizontal. And if you have children, that could be a vertical relationship with you at the top of that hierarchy. So it’s this interesting mix of with siblings is you’re dealing with somebody both from a horizontal point of view, but you have to come together when your parents age perhaps and become ill and deal with the vertical relationship. So it’s this fascinating intersection of the two that we all have to struggle with if we have siblings.

Brett McKay: And that’s what makes it sometimes really complicated.

Geoffrey Greif: Yes, because if we get along well with siblings, even then things can become complicated. Parents may live closer to one sibling. Parents may pull on one sibling differently than another sibling. So there are grounds for things becoming very complicated depending upon how intergenerational patterns in families have been handed down and how current patterns are being acted out either de novo or as a reflection of previous family patterns.

Brett McKay: So what I like to do with this conversation is talk about how the sibling relationship sort of changes from childhood to young adulthood to midlife, then also how those relationships with our siblings affect us. So let’s talk about sibling relationship and childhood. What factors influence whether siblings and childhood are going to be close or is going to be acrimony? What are some of the factors you found in your research?

Geoffrey Greif: I think some of this is of course luck. So while we can say people carve out their own relationships, I think there’s a certain amount of luck. Sometimes siblings born in the same family just adhere to different values like doing different things have different natures. And so those siblings may or may not struggle more to find common ground aside from the common ground that they have from birth. Obviously, there are people that are born with greater disabilities and that can cause hierarchical swings as to who is taking care of whom. There are gender issues that can be revisited in families. If you’re from a culture that values men more than women, you may have a different status even if you’re the oldest girl or the oldest boy. Families may wait for the firstborn boy to come along or if you have parents that have always wanted girls and they have a series of boys, the girl that comes along third or fourth may get special status. So there are a lot of things that even have nothing to do with the behavior that someone chooses that can imprint upon siblings some of the things that can affect you.

Of course, people are born with different talents. We’re all not the same. Some people are better at writing. Some people are better at math. Some people are better in sports. Some people are better in chess, et cetera. So the way that we develop our talents may configure more closely with one parent or the next or with neither parent. So there are fundamentally so many different variables that can come in to affect these relationships. Do children share rooms? Are they close in age? If they’re one year apart, they’re more apt to share friends in school and to be in closer competition than if they’re three or four years apart and are not the same sex. So there are many, many factors that can come into play that begin a trajectory that maybe continues with them through life or at least influences them through life. Though I believe you can always change the trajectory you’re on.

Brett McKay: One of the factors that I thought was interesting you talk about in your book about adult sibling relationships, about childhood sibling relationship is that birth order can influence sibling relationships. So the firstborn might have this expectation to be like, well, I’m in charge. I got to take care of everybody. It’s sort of like George Bailey looking out for his kid brother. And then even the birth order can affect… Parents are different based on birth order. Like the first time parents have a kid, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re going to pay a lot of attention. Then the next kid comes along and they don’t pay much attention to the second kid. And then that can affect the relationship between the first and second kid.

Geoffrey Greif: Correct. The first child usually has more attention paid and maybe more, a more intense kind of attention for better and for worse. Of course, the other things that happen that affect the time with a child and the way the child is raised is what’s happening in the parent’s marriage, what’s happening in the parent’s work life. The thing that a third or fourth child may benefit from is that over the course of time, many people begin to earn more money. So a family’s financial situation may improve, or of course the reverse may happen. Somebody may lose a job and that will have an impact on the family situation, where the family lives, how often the family moves. So all these kinds of things can affect the parent’s ability to focus. You also talked about the fact that, and this happened in my wife’s family, she’s the oldest of three daughters. Her father was a middle child and focused on my wife’s next younger sister. So he, being a middle child, felt much more sympathy and much more support for her because of his struggles as a middle child. He connected and supported her. My wife’s mother was an oldest child and focused more and was more supportive of my wife.

And that left the third daughter to kind of be on her own and not have the same kind of attention or focus or maybe even affection as the oldest two. So all these things can play out in so many interesting ways.

Brett McKay: We turn to the idea of gender and its influence on sibling relationship. Do sister-sister or brother-brother relationships differ?

Geoffrey Greif: Yeah, what we found, and we did a lot of interviews and have a lot of data in the book, Adult Sibling Relationships, that I wrote with Michael Woolley, we did a lot of focus on the fact that it appears that when we talk to sisters, as opposed to brothers, sisters play a much more fundamental role in communicating with each other and with their brothers, in keeping connections open. I’m very interested, as you said, in men’s roles, and I’ve been studying men’s and women’s roles because you can’t study one without the other for my whole career. And men still fundamentally leave a lot of the emotional work in the family to the women. It may not be true of any particular person listening to this podcast, but in general and across a wider spectrum, women are more central in many of these families, and sisters are more emotionally focused and are going to spend more time trying to make the relationships work than our brothers. We did find differences between brothers. The older brothers, those 65 and over, tended to be much more the traditional man than the younger brothers, those in their 40s who tended to be more open and more emotionally expressive.

So I’m. Optimistic that men are moving in a good direction in terms of being able to play a more central emotional role and not just the functional financial roles that they sometimes play in family caregiving as parents age.

Brett McKay: Returning to the parents’ influence on a childhood sibling relationship and maybe how that affects the relationship in adulthood, you mentioned some factors. Parents, maybe their birth order may influence how they treat different kids. So if your parents are middle child, maybe they’ll focus more on the middle child. The parent’s job and kind of what’s going on in their life can influence the relationship. Any other things that parents do that can cause either the siblings in a relationship to draw closer together or to have conflict? Any other things you found in your research?

Geoffrey Greif: Yeah, that’s a really important question and this continues throughout life. So we found pretty clear data that if you are raised in a household where someone is favored much more than someone else, that obviously has an important impact both at the time and later. And we found strong connections between people who believe one or the other of their siblings themselves or the other sibling or siblings were favored and how close they were into adulthood. Now, of course, we’re looking at only siblings in adulthood, but we asked them to reflect back and we didn’t define in any great way what being favored meant. It was sort of a feeling. So if there is a favored sibling, there are two sides of that. Being favored can be of course really pleasant, but it can also be very unpleasant depending upon the way that the being favored plays out. Now there are some families where it was played off. It wasn’t a big deal. If there are a bunch of siblings and dad likes to hunt and I’ll say a son, it could be a daughter likes to hunt, everybody can sort of joke and say, oh, we know they really love each other.

They just go off all together all the time and hunt. And it’s not seen as necessarily being dismissed as a child. It’s just a public and comfortable acknowledgement that a parent and child really enjoy usually an activity together. So that can work out very well. Obviously, when favoritism comes to the feeling that someone is being neglected or not loved or not supportive, that’s also a very, very dangerous and more painful kind of experience for someone to have. So favoritism is a big thing and it can continue on into adulthood. There are of course, the other thorny issues around child rearing. If I have two children and one of them is born with a disability, I may have to spend more time and do more with that child. And in those families, there should be a great deal of communication about that. But you often get families where someone may have a hidden disability, a hidden challenge, a hidden disability where it’s sort of talked about, but not talked about, and maybe a child needs more support and more time and the less disabled or less challenged child doesn’t get quite as much attention. And that’s a really difficult thing for any family to balance.

So favoring is one issue. The second one is parental interference in the relationship. And again, parents should, if they can, let their children work out issues to the extent that they can without being interfered with. There are of course, times when parents, and we have a few chapters in the book on this, where parents have to step in and have to protect one child from another. There was a chapter where we interviewed a guy in his 60s who talked about having been physically abused by his older brother. Parents naturally had to step in there to protect them. But parents should be trying to stay out of their kids’ lives when they need to work things out, because if children are left to work things out as children, they’ll learn how to work things out as adults. So favoritism and interference that begins in childhood does affect how close children are when they become adults and how close they are with their siblings.

Brett McKay: Something that’s also interesting with favoritism is that there’s research that there’s more tension with adult siblings when there’s the perception that the father favors one of the siblings more, but the perception of a mother’s favoritism isn’t predictive of sibling tension. And something else that’s interesting about favoritism is that the child who feels like he or she is the unfavored one, their tendency for depression goes up and that tendency for depression carries with them into adulthood.

Geoffrey Greif: Yeah. Yeah. I think if you grow up thinking that you are not favored by your parents, then you are going to maybe be more likely to struggle with connections when you get into adulthood. You’re sitting in a classroom and the teacher doesn’t call on you, but your hand is up. That’s kind of a revisiting of what happens when you’re at home or you go to a fraternity party, a sorority party, a dance, and people are not sort of willing to dance with you or approach you or talk to you. You may think to yourself, here it goes again. I’m sort of being overlooked. That’s why some of these things that can begin as a kernel can sprout and continue to grow into adulthood.

Brett McKay: With the favoritism thing, it seems kind of tricky because there is a big subjective element to that. One child could feel like, “Well, mom and dad favor the other kid,” but it subjectively feels like everyone else looks like, not really. That’s, I guess, another factor. If just one child has a propensity to kind of have a negativity bias about everything, that can affect the relationship between siblings.

Geoffrey Greif: Yeah. It kind of opens up the question and maybe something I should have started with, a statement that no two people grow up in the same family. Yes, I’ve got an older brother and older sister and we grew up together, but I never had the experience of having me as a brother. So… And having the same configuration, we all are going to have different narratives on what our family history is like and what an event is like. No two people can agree a hundred percent on anything that they observe because they’re coming at it from a totally different perspective with a different person in the room than themselves. So the notion of a family narrative and I was favored, no, I was not favored, no, I was favored, no, I was not favored from one sibling to the next, or I was favored here, but I remember six months later you were favored there. Those are all narratives that families are going to have to work through.

Brett McKay: You also talk about in your research that a parent’s relationship with their own siblings can also influence the relationship their own children have with each other. What does the research say there?

Geoffrey Greif: Yeah, very interesting. What we found and we had to think about it for a while, we asked both sisters and brothers, in this case, mothers and fathers also, siblings that were parents, if they were close, if they perceived their parents as being close, I should say, with their own siblings when they were growing up. So if I grew up in a household where I saw my father being close with his siblings, I was more apt to be close with my siblings. So to be more succinct, father closeness or the perception of father closeness with his siblings would often tend to make somebody more close with their own siblings. And about a third of the people we interviewed said that they believed their father was close with his siblings. When it came to mothers, 80% of the people we interviewed said their mothers were close with their siblings, and that did not have the same effect. So, mothers were seen as being much more close in general, as we’ve said, with siblings, where it was in the minority that fathers said they were close with their siblings. So in those cases, having a father and growing up in a home where a father put a lot of value and was close with his siblings would tend to improve one’s own relationship with one’s own siblings.

Brett McKay: So just to recap here, kids who have a father who’s close with his siblings tend to be close themselves, but a mother being close to her siblings doesn’t seem to influence the closeness of her own children. Though what’s interesting is that there’s some research out there that shows that if a mother had a negative relationship with her siblings, her children are more likely to have positive relationships with each other. And the thinking is it’s because those moms try to correct for things that went wrong in their birth families. And so they’re intentionally trying to cultivate with their own kids a sibling experience and bond that they didn’t get to experience themselves. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So as you said earlier at the beginning, our sibling relationship is the longest relationship we have. And this is a person that’s in our lives that we, I don’t know, we kind of compare ourselves to them, like how we’re doing. In your research, do you find that children and then even maybe adults like shape their own identity in order to differentiate themselves from their siblings?

Geoffrey Greif: Yeah, not so much my own research because I didn’t do a lot on children. But yeah, from what I’ve read, it seems to be that siblings have to sort of find their own place in a family. And if your brother or sister is a great cellist, you may then decide to pick up the violin instead. So you’re not directly competing with the older and at least the beginning, the more competent player. Now, if you pick up the cello, as did your older sibling and you’re much better immediately, you may continue along with it. And these kinds of hidden or not maybe always overt forms of competition or choosing a different path can of course continue throughout life. And those can lead to all kinds of feelings. And one of the themes of the book about siblings and from our research is that these relationships are defined in our book as being a combination of great affection, but also often affected by ambivalence and ambiguity. That when we talk to people about their relationships and you talked about it initially, about how your sibling may be your best friend and the person to whom you’re closest in the world or your siblings.

And a lot of people said, I trust my siblings. I’m very close to them. They’re my best friend. I love being with them. There were also the minority of people that said that I’m mixed about my sibling. I haven’t been close to him my whole life. We grew up, we moved apart. Maybe we’ve come back together now to take care of mom and dad. And that’s been a struggle. So there might be a lot of ambivalent feelings. And just as we can all remember, maybe the million complimentary things we heard from our father or mother, maybe we can also remember the one or two, at least less complimentary things and those loom large. We have so many communications with our siblings that of course, some of them are likely to be negative and maybe those stick with us longer or perceived as being negative. And those can affect how we feel. Yes, I want my brother to do well in life, but do I want him to do as well as me? Or do I want to sort of say, aha, I won because that’s the way we used to compete as brothers when we were young.

So I think that’s a normal thing that we’re trying to help people to understand that it’s okay to have ambivalent feelings and still love your sibling. And that affection is a very strong feeling and it tends to grow over time. The other word to get in here is of course, the ambiguity. A lot of siblings we interviewed did not understand why their brother or sister did certain things as an adult. Why did she marry that idiot or why did he marry that jerk? I can’t understand it. I can’t understand their behavior. I don’t know why they continue to treat me like I’m 12 when I’m a competent adult who is navigating the world. So all these sorts of things, and I can’t understand why they’re close to dad or mom after all the horrible things he or she has done to them. So there’s the three A’s, the affection, the ambivalence, and the ambiguity that really, if you think about it and step back, I think characterize a lot of adult relationships. And again, we’re trying to say in the book, these are normal. Don’t think it has to be a Norman Rockwell kind of loving family.

There’re going to be ups and downs in families across 40, 50 years of family life together or 60 or 70 years of family life together or even longer now. So expect ups and downs, but try and focus on things that are working on the love that should be shown in many families.

Brett McKay: Staying in childhood and we’ll move on to young adulthood. I think a lot of research talks about how the parents influence children and shape children and sort of teaching them and whatever. But there’s other research that says, actually kids probably spend more time with each other, with their sibling than mom and dad. So what sorts of things are we learning from our siblings in childhood that carry with us into adulthood?

Geoffrey Greif: Well, we learn of course how to share the bathroom, how to share the kitchen, maybe how to share a bedroom or in some families even have to share a bed with a sibling. So there’s a lot of very, I could almost say forced physical closeness that comes along depending upon the size of the house and the number of children. And those can form a blueprint for how one forms intimate relationships as an adult. In some cases, it doesn’t mean you can’t change the way you were raised, but it will certainly influence what you are thinking about, how you feel about women and men and closeness. So I think all those early experiences do set the stage for, but do not have to be the final act on what happens when one comes into adulthood.

Brett McKay: Okay. So when you’re a kid, you probably spend a lot of time with your siblings, especially if they’re close in age to you. That’s like, it can be like the first 18 years of your life. You’ve got this person that you’re just constantly in contact with. How does the relationship change as siblings shift into adulthood?

Geoffrey Greif: Yeah. I think one of the greatest tasks in life is to figure out how to grow up, move away from home, perhaps with a partner, perhaps not yet still stay connected to the family. So that’s where the struggle comes in. How do we all grow up, perhaps get married, perhaps have kids yet still stay loyal or connected to our family? And so many people do grow up. They do leave home. They move out of town. They move away and they’re balancing their lives. They’re balancing maybe their partner or their spouse’s lives and families. And they’re trying to figure out how to stay close to both sides of a family in adulthood. And then as they age and their parents age and become ill, they then as siblings have to come back together as a group to figure out how to do the caretaking of parents, and how to negotiate if the parents die, when the parents die, how to negotiate the estate. And there may be well-meaning parents that will call me into the room and say, “Geoff, I want you to have that painting on the wall after I die.”

And I say, “That’s great. I’ve always loved that painting. Thanks, dad.” And then my brother comes in or my sister comes in and my dad tells my brother or sister the exact same thing because he forgot that he told me, well, my father dies. And then we struggle over who’s supposed to get that painting. And how parents divide up their estate. And of course, some siblings need more than others. Siblings may marry people that are school teachers and not earning much money or marrying people in business that are earning a huge amount of money. So there are always those things that maybe start to reverberate down to, well, here’s the favoritism again that happened when I was six. Or here I thought I had grown up and separated from the family and established myself as a competent adult, but I’m back again, dealing with the same issues I’ve always had to deal with the family. There they go again, repeating these patterns of favoritism or my being dismissed or my being favored. And I don’t want the burden of taking care of my other siblings. So there’s so many factors that can affect that.

Brett McKay: Okay. So, it sounds like when you shift into a young adulthood, that relationship with your sibling could drift apart, especially if you move out of state and you move far away from them. And then also you’re just getting busy with life, raising your own family, work, et cetera. And then as you shift into middle age and your parents get older and you have to be concerned about their health and helping them out, that’s when siblings are likely to come back together again.

Geoffrey Greif: Right. And of course, if they stayed in touch and stayed close, then that’s not a struggle for them. But if they moved away and they felt the need to establish an identity strongly different from their family identity, that may make other siblings somewhat resentful of them all of a sudden coming back into the fold if that person has drifted too far from the family.

Brett McKay: So let’s speak about that sort of young adulthood period. I guess the factors that influence whether siblings stay connected through that sort of young adulthood period, like 20s, 30s, maybe early 40s, is if they had a good relationship when they were kids and maybe they saw their parents had a good relationship with their siblings, that pattern is likely to follow through with them, correct?

Geoffrey Greif: Yes, it is. And of course, who they marry is important too. If they marry someone that values family life and staying connected to everybody on both sides of the family, they’re more likely to stay in touch and to be a force for pulling the family together. Some people grow up and are attracted to people that will help them separate from their families. Others are attracted to people that will help them to stay connected to their family. So there are all these different factors that come in play as you grow up and begin to establish a work life, establish a partner life, and then have children that maybe pull the family further apart or help the family to stay together.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think it’s always interesting to kind of survey your friends about their relationship with their siblings. And like, some friends are like, “Yeah, I talk to my sister every day. We FaceTime each other.” And then there’s some other people that’s like, “Yeah, we call each other on Christmas and say, Merry Christmas. And that’s about it.” And it’s not like they’d hate their siblings. It’s like, “well, we’re just busy and it’s just not a priority for either of us.”

Geoffrey Greif: Right. Probably the seeds for that could have been sown in childhood or maybe they were sown in adulthood. Maybe they met somebody or have married somebody who is pulling them in a certain direction or maybe doesn’t even like the family all that much too. There are so many different factors that can come into play when people move away and have to go away to school for a special program or have to take a job on a different coast. So many of these factors can affect what happens with these relationships across the lifespan.

Brett McKay: And you mentioned another one early on, gender can play a factor. Sisters typically do more work to stay connected with siblings. Brothers, not so much.

Geoffrey Greif: Right. And of course, traditionally when taking care of older parents, the women would be the ones doing the physical care and sort of checking in while the brothers might be handling the money. And that’s at least historically because men were more likely to be in the workforce than women. That of course has changed with women taking much greater role in helping with the finances and men feeling more comfortable and helping with the physical care, the driving, the cleaning up around the house. So all these things are becoming more, I guess, intermixed and less specific to any one gender.

Brett McKay: So returning to this idea of classifying sibling relationships as affectionate, ambivalent and ambiguous. So you said the research shows in your surveys that most people, they have like an affectionate relationship with their sibling, but then also even those affectionate things can be sort of pocketed with ambiguity or ambivalence. And then some of them might just be completely ambivalent. I’m curious, how do two people who spend so much time together for perhaps two decades end up feeling completely ambivalent towards each other? How does that happen and what does an ambivalent sibling relationship look like?

Geoffrey Greif: Well, we grow up and we witness somebody else doing things that aren’t very nice to other people or to themselves. You may be in high school with your older or younger sibling and you don’t like their behavior. And that sort of begins a narrative in your head or continues a narrative in your head that my sibling wasn’t very nice to me when we were young and I see he’s not very nice to other people too. And yeah, he’s my sibling and mom and dad said we should always be close, but I don’t feel all that close to him because he’s just not the kind of person that I enjoy being around. So there are paths that people can take and there are ways that people can sort of not connect that may help to build a narrative that maybe has existed in the family for a variety of generations ahead and it’s getting played out. You hear your parents talk about not liking their own siblings or you don’t trust Uncle Joe or don’t trust Aunt Millie. And so you begin to be cautious around family and that can sort of feed into this narrative of I don’t really like this person but I’m stuck with them.

Brett McKay: And then also, yeah, you see your siblings how they treat your parents. Maybe they just cause a lot of stress and problems for your parents and you kind of resent that and you’re like, geez, I just don’t want anything to do with you because you’re causing mom and dad just so much grief.

Geoffrey Greif: Right. I think that’s a really good point. I think this notion that, and again, this gentleman who was in his 60s who was abused by his brother said in the interview that the brother was such a difficult person that the family never took vacations. They were just so focused on trying to control his behavior that there was sort of no fun in the family. He for whatever reason sucked all the fun out of the family. So I think that things can get going that make being together as a family just not as much fun as it might be if everybody enjoyed playing the same games together on Saturday night. If there’s somebody who was hanging out in his room and not wanting to join the crowd, it’s going to draw down the fun from the family.

Brett McKay: I think another factor that could play into the ambivalence between siblings is there’s research out there that shows that personality wise, two siblings are nearly as dissimilar as two people randomly drawn from the population. So siblings, they might look alike, they’ve got this shared history, but they often just don’t have a lot in common and their personalities just don’t jive. So I think that could be another factor that could contribute to ambivalence. So we talked about ambivalence and then with ambiguity, this is something where your sibling does something where you’re not sure what that meant. So for example, they didn’t invite you to this thing and you’re thinking, “Well, what does that mean?” And that ambiguity can actually lead to greater feelings of ambivalence.

Geoffrey Greif: Yes. I think the two definitely do feed each other. If you don’t understand why someone has acted towards you or towards somebody else, you tend to be a little bit more cautious around them and that’s going to engender more mixed feelings towards that person.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about siblings who just decide to just completely cut off or sever the relationship with their sibling. What does the research say about that? Like what causes those cutoffs?

Geoffrey Greif: People sometimes, again, don’t know why their siblings drift off. And the more siblings there are, if you’re one of five or six siblings, there’s more likely to be somebody who has decided to row his own way through the waters of life. So, it can be because of something perceived or something that happened at the hands of a parent that people want nothing to do with the family. It can be the feeling that I just don’t fit in here. It can be having a relationship with somebody, a partner or spouse that pulls you away from the family. It can be that you’re spinning in one direction and the other family members are spinning in another direction. There’s nothing really to do with anybody, just that you never really connected on any deep level and you may stay in touch every so often, but you really enjoy not being with the family. You don’t want to be put back into a role that’s uncomfortable. You have people that don’t go to their high school reunion 50 years later because they never had a good time in high school.

They didn’t like themselves in high school or they were bullied or not liked in high school. So, why go back to your reunion if it was never a happy time of your life? I think that’s the same sort of pattern that can happen in families. If you just struggled your whole life with connecting to your family members, it’s going to make it less fun to stay in touch and you may need, out of your own protection for your mental health or physical health, to stay away from your family.

Brett McKay: Can those rifts ever be mended? Have you seen people where there was a big cutoff, but then they kind of work together to bring the relationship back?

Geoffrey Greif: Yes, absolutely. And it happened with, again, this guy that I talked about that was physically abused by his older brother. They are now back in touch and this guy just flew out to spend a few days with his older brother who is now in his late 70s and pretty frail. So aside from that extreme example, people can always change. I can pick up a book and read something and change how I feel about someone. I can watch a movie and say, oh, those siblings got closer. Why can’t I get closer with mine? Maybe I’ll reach out. And I would encourage people to write a narrative for themselves that makes them feel good about their sibling relations. Even if you’ve got a sibling who is out of touch and seemingly doesn’t want anything to do with you, you may feel better about yourself if you continue to reach out once a year or once a month with a card or an email. Even if that sibling does not respond, you might like yourself more if you have written a narrative where you’re the one that’s reaching out.

Brett McKay: So returning to the sibling relationship in middle age. So they start coming back together because mom and dad has an issue. How does the relationship change? When you were kids, there might’ve been favoritism and sort of resentment about that. Does that stuff stay there or do you tend to grow out of that as you get into your 40s, 50s, and 60s?

Geoffrey Greif: We found a very clear change across time. People tend to trust each other more. They tend to be less competitive. They tend to like their siblings more across time. I think they tend to value their siblings more with time. That’s the great part about growing old. You become less focused on the small stuff and maybe more focused on the existential stuff. And siblings sometimes, even if they’re married, will turn to each other for care. There was one case that is an interview I did with a group of sisters. One of the sisters had died about a year before the interview I did. And the other sisters didn’t think that she had been well taken care of by her husband as she was dying. So, they sort of got on their horses and were trying to help out a lot and disagreed with the way she was being taken care of by her husband. So those kinds of things can cause people that are close to get closer. And the example of the brother can cause somebody who was very distant and cut off to decide over time, “let’s try and make something meaningful out of this last stage of our lives.”

Brett McKay: But as you said, there could be some conflict in middle age too. But it’s usually around mom and dad. Like what are we going to do with mom and dad or how are we going to do the estate? I thought it was interesting. There was some research in the book where you highlighted that in some sibling relationships, they actually start drawing further apart after mom and dad died. Did I read that right?

Geoffrey Greif: Yes, absolutely. So, you know, it’s not surprising, but at the death of the first or second parent, three things can happen in the sibling relationship. You draw closer because maybe mom was keeping people apart or you just never enjoyed the interaction with mom. You become more distant because mom’s house was where you went for Thanksgiving and she was the magnet that drew everyone together for the holidays. Or the death has no impact. My mother died at the age of 98 a few years ago after having dementia for a few years. So, we had already adjusted. We had accepted she was going to die, that she was no longer a force, that we were going to work out how to take care of her, which the three of us did. And her death didn’t change our relationship at all because we had already absorbed her loss into the ongoing relationship that we had prior to her death.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, is there any insight from your work and then maybe the research of others on what parents can do who have kids at home right now to ensure their kids have strong sibling relationships from childhood into adulthood?

Geoffrey Greif: I think when parents show that they are trying to maintain a healthy relationship with their own sibling, first of all, that can be a role model. Secondly, I think discussions around how difficult emotional relationships are handled with others, which happens all the time when people talk over the dinner table about what happened at work or what happened at school or what happened with friends or family, I think all those are a template for children as to how parents might expect the children to handle their own relationships. So I’d be very aware of how intimate relationships, friendships are, and work relationships, and sibling relationships are all talked about because those are going to be important life lessons that children are going to hear and will affect how they see their own sibling. And of course, parents need to be attuned to when siblings need to be given their own identity, their own time with a parent. All those things are important in terms of not forcing siblings together if you can give them some space from each other. And of course, on the other hand, allowing closeness if that’s what they want.

Brett McKay: What about people who’ve got adult siblings and they want to strengthen those relationships? Anything from the research or your work there that can help?

Geoffrey Greif: Reach out to them. Most of the requests I get for help, I get people who read the book and say, “Can you help me with a relationship I wish I was closer”? Is usually what we get. The other side of that is that, “I don’t want to be as close as this sibling wants to be with me.” So it’s usually around someone has drifted away and I want to reestablish a relationship. One approach I got from somebody a few years ago was that something happened between my sister and me many years ago, and she will never forgive me for that, yet I’m trying to get this relationship to work. And she thinks the sister sort of made more of it than she wanted to make of it. So there can be a lot of things around how close to get to a sibling that bring people into treatment. And again, I think to work that out, you’re going to want to have to have both people willing to change or open up a little bit about what they want the relationship to be and drop what the relationship was. That requires maybe some level of forgiveness, depending upon who feels they need to forgive.

And that’s going to be a willingness to move forward. The important thing to remember is that how those relationships get worked out in adulthood, send a powerful message to your own family. So if I’m not close to my siblings, am I sending a difficult message to my own children about how important I think their relationship is? And that’s where you can attempt to change the narrative and say, I’m going to try and reach out, even if she doesn’t respond to me, even if he doesn’t respond, I’m going to feel better about myself if I want to continue to try and build a positive, healthy relationship. And that’s how you should handle other relationships in your life is the message to give your kids.

Brett McKay: Well, Geoffrey, this has been a great conversation. Is there someplace people can go to learn more about the book and your work?

Geoffrey Greif: I guess aside from going to Amazon and looking at the book, and that’s where sort of most of the information will be, will be in the book.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Geoffrey Greif, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Geoffrey Greif: Thank you, Brett. This was great.

Brett McKay: My guest there is Geoffrey Greif. He’s the co-author of the book, Adult Siblings. It’s available on amazon.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is/siblings, where can you find links to resources, where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you could do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLY as a checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review of our podcast on Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think could get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcasts, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #858: The Affectionate, Ambiguous, and Surprisingly Ambivalent Relationship Between Siblings appeared first on The Art of Manliness.