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Thais
Hello and welcome to the Personal Development School Podcast. I'm your host, Thais Gibson, and I create regular podcast episodes to teach you about your relationships, attachment style and the subconscious mind. My goal of this podcast is to give you tools and awareness you need to thrive in your relationships, feel deeply connected, and find harmony and fulfillment in your relationships and personal life.

00:00:33:27 - 00:00:38:24
Thais
So I hope you tune in here with me each and every week.

00:00:43:22 - 00:01:13:24
Thais
Hi. In today's video, I'm going to take you through five lessons that you can learn when you feel lonely and not just lessons that you can learn about yourself or something like that, but actual lessons that you can take away so that you can convert loneliness into actual connection. Like what's limiting you? What's stopping you from connecting and what you can actually do about it and how to execute it in a way that also makes you feel comfortable and not in a way that makes you feel like it's a push so far and so fast outside of your comfort zone, just in order to maintain some sort of connection or friendship.

00:01:13:25 - 00:01:35:03
Thais
So I really hope you enjoy this. Of course, I'm sharing these videos with you throughout this month. It's May, which is Mental Health Awareness Month, so I hope you enjoy all of these videos that will help support you in creating more and more emotional peace and well-being. This is a really important topic right now, especially because over the last couple of years, a lot of individuals have sort of been programed into like getting comfortable in isolation.

00:01:35:13 - 00:01:55:14
Thais
Obviously, the the everything that happened in the world with COVID sort of forced people to like have to become more isolated as a general rule. And isolation hurts. And it goes against our human nature. And so there's some really important things that I want to share in this video in terms of like things we can take away, things we can change.

00:01:55:25 - 00:02:12:28
Thais
And I want you to know as well that if you're somebody who over the past little while has you know, that things have started to open back up, gone back out into the world and experience sort of a sense of like social anxiety, feeling a little more socially nervous in the workplace, going back to work, going back to seeing people again.

00:02:13:09 - 00:02:46:28
Thais
This is normal. This is because over the past couple of years, your subconscious comfort zone became a little bit more isolated because our subconscious mind adapts. And then once we're forced to adapt, we tend to prioritize and and value what's familiar because we see familiarity as something that brings us safety and increases the chances of survival. And so if you're going through this experience of going like, okay, you know, now I go back out and do things I used to love and I feel anxious, I feel uncomfortable, I feel nervous, I feel, you know, a little sense of just just discomfort.

00:02:47:06 - 00:03:24:15
Thais
That's normal. That's your subconscious mind sort of readjusting again. So the first thing I want you to understand is that loneliness has a lot more to do with quality, a lack of quality of a connection or connections rather than quantity of connections. And so these are things we can take away if, for example, there was a lockdown and you are in a position where you're able to say, okay, I may not be able to see people in big settings, big groups, but I'm going to prioritize the quality of the people close to me, the quality of those connections, by making sure that I'm seeing people, at least on Zoom, who are meeting with a few

00:03:24:15 - 00:03:52:05
Thais
close people face to face or, you know, making sure that I'm really present with people that I'm around and really like opening up and sharing and and asking questions, having deeper conversations, learning to express my love language to the people in my life, whether it's physical touch or quality time or acts of service or words of affirmation or gifts, and like instilling those things into your relationships, then even though we may be in difficult circumstances, we're able to kind of pivot around them a lot more effectively.

00:03:52:22 - 00:04:09:07
Thais
This brings me to number two, which is that vulnerability is key. You know, people I've seen a lot of people over the years in my client practice who would be like, you know what? I've got all these people around me, but I still feel lonely. And then I would ask them, okay, well, what are you sharing? Are you sharing your personal life with people?

00:04:09:07 - 00:04:31:18
Thais
Are you sharing your fears, your your dreams, your goals, the things you're working on? You sharing small details of your day to day life, and then asking people for the same thing. And what I found a lot of the time is people were nurturing mental connections with with others, like their intellectual connections about their thoughts, opinions, religious beliefs, or spiritual beliefs or political opinions or ideas.

00:04:31:23 - 00:04:55:10
Thais
And that's mental. And that's great. And that's a really important part of connection. But there's also emotional connection, which is like sharing how you're feeling. Sharing details about your day, sharing sort of the ups and downs that the vulnerable compose, tense your fears, your desires, your dreams is like more intimate things about yourself and vice versa. And when that is lacking, there is a huge disconnect that takes place.

00:04:55:10 - 00:05:14:05
Thais
And we can still feel lonely. Despite being surrounded by people. I just want to jump in here and let you know that we are doing a 14 day free trial, which means you get access to the personal department, school and everything we have going on on the other side for free for 14 days. That means you get access to the For Life webinars.

00:05:14:05 - 00:05:36:18
Thais
I do every single week. You can come in, you can ask me questions with your camera on. We can chat. You can leave your camera off if you prefer, or type your questions in the chat. There's lots of opportunity to get your questions answered. And on top of that, you get access to all of our different courses. We have over 55 different courses on relationships, communication boundaries, emotional mastery, guilt and shame, learning your needs.

00:05:36:26 - 00:06:01:05
Thais
So many different facets that are really important to master our lives and feel really good about our lives going forward. And last but not least, there's also community elements. And there's there's a daily community event, whether it's practicing communication or doing a guided morning routine or a guided reprograming exercise. We have trained facilitators and coaches who are in there doing that work, showing up to support you on your journey every single day.

00:06:01:05 - 00:06:18:13
Thais
So I would love to see you on the other side. There's lots of exciting stuff in there and we have had a 99.7% NPS score, which means we have literally that many people who report being really successful apprize and wanting to recommend us to others. And it was all done anonymously. So I felt really honored that everybody shared that.

00:06:18:13 - 00:06:26:04
Thais
So thank you to those who did. But yeah, please join me on the other side. Come check it out, see if it's a book for you. I'd love to see you there.

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Thais
Number three. So much of connection is also about knowing our needs. And so our needs are like, what do we want in relationships? Do we need to feel heard? Do we need to feel understood? Do we need to feel that somebody is willing to listen to us, support us, sort of take acts of of going out of their way to support us, show us through their actions, show us through behaviors like what?

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Thais
What are the ways that you feel supported or connected or close and and understanding what your needs are and relationships. Is it like for deep conversations? Is it for laughter, for humor, for consistency, for safety and relationships, for predictability? Like there's so many different things we can touch on, but if you don't know what your needs are, then you're not going to get into a position in your relationships where you feel fulfilled.

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Thais
You're going to get into a position in a relationship where somebody's sort of brain storming or not brainstorming, but like, like act like mind reading your needs, like guessing your needs on autopilot and doing their best according to what they might read about you and figure out about you. But if we don't know how to share who we are and what our needs are, then people will only ever, you know, meet so many of them because they're sort of connecting to us in the dark, like without really truly knowing what's going on and what we desire.

00:07:45:08 - 00:08:05:13
Thais
And so sharing our needs is huge. And this brings me to number four, which is we can come up with creative strategies to get our needs met just by understanding our needs and brainstorming about them. And so an example of this would be, again, let's say there's like this, this isolation that takes place and you're looking at this and you're going, okay, this is super frustrating thing.

00:08:05:15 - 00:08:26:06
Thais
This is taking away from like my needs for connection, for closeness, and especially for like in a long distance relationship or something like that. But if you're able to say, okay, what are my needs? My needs are for quality time or at my level, which is quality time, my needs are for like emotional connection, deep conversation, laughter and, you know, to be present with other people.

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Thais
Maybe you jump on Zoom calls and it may be like outside of your comfort zone of normally how you connect with people. But once we know our needs, we can say, okay, this one form of getting my needs met, for example, in person, sitting with somebody maybe being threatened right now, but what are different forms? How can I upgrade my strategies to get my needs met in new forms?

00:08:47:08 - 00:09:04:26
Thais
And what this does is it diminishes the outside world ability to impact you in the same way because the more you can become creative and think outside of the box, you know what your needs aren't. You can just pivot the ways that you get your needs met and it really helps you to like weather the storms of life as a person.

00:09:05:04 - 00:09:24:10
Thais
So this is huge. And then number five, building relationships takes time and consistency. This is a really important lesson. I've seen a lot of people over the years move to a new city, you know, be around new people or go through a life change. And they believe that if they don't click with somebody like this, you know, So, for example, I've seen like women go through a divorce.

00:09:24:10 - 00:09:38:19
Thais
This is just one example of somebody I worked with once, a woman who went through divorce. She was a kind of making new friends because all of her old friends were sort of like from that previous relationship and marriage. And she moved to a new city, sort of not too far away from where she originally left, but still a new place.

00:09:39:01 - 00:09:56:02
Thais
And she was at yoga and she was saying like, oh, I met somebody and we were texting, but like, she didn't even want to go for coffee right away. You know, I kind of brought it up in directly. And she had only met this person like once or twice. And it was sort of this idea that, like, sometimes things don't happen on our watch.

00:09:56:02 - 00:10:10:11
Thais
Sometimes we have to, like, nurture a relationship, maybe talk to me at yoga five or six times, and we text them here and there, you know, on five or six separate occasions on top of that. And then once we've really built that rapport, then we can be like, okay, let's grab coffee or grab dinner or lunch or whatever it might be.

00:10:10:21 - 00:10:29:14
Thais
So sometimes people fear rejection and so they read too early into rejection. Or if somebody is not moving as quickly as they are in terms of friendships and stuff like that, they can really take that to heart and what needs to happen is that we need to be able to like, nurture relationships and understand that building deep, close connections takes a little bit of time, takes on really ability, takes consistency.

00:10:29:22 - 00:10:32:00
Thais
And that's really what makes a big difference.