Welcome back to the Journey Podcast! In this episode Sarah, Terry and Lianne encourage each individual to step out and risk building new relationships.


Transcription of Podcast


Sarah: Welcome back to the Journey Podcast. I’m Sarah Banowetz, and I’m here with Lianne Westcott and Terry Carlson and today our topic is risking new relationships.

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Sarah: This is a neat topic.

Lianne: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of possibility in that. People stepping out, risking new relationships. It seems like we can get stuck in wanting relationships where people are kind of like us and they think the same things as us. Sometimes when we spend a little bit longer with people, we find out we have a lot in common with them. It’s pretty awesome. At first you think, “Well, I don’t have that much in common,” but if you really take time, talk to somebody, learn about them, you can find that you have a lot of things in common and that’s how friendships are made.

Sarah: So why is it that… I’m an extrovert, so I have a hard time understanding this, so maybe you guys can give a little insight to me. Why is it that new relationships are risky?

Terry: I think there’s a lot of fear. I think there’s a lot of fear that they anticipate that the other person’s maybe not going to accept them, that they may not say things right, they may put their foot in the mouth, that sort of thing. At least that’s what I’ve heard at times is the fear.

Lianne: Well, we all have a comfort zone and some people, their comfort zone is in trying new things all the time. They want to go out and have adventures. Other people, their comfort zone is in a little bit of fear of the unknown. What if I come across to somebody else a certain way? What if they aren’t a type of person I really want to have a longterm relationship with? There’s just such a variety in what people are comfortable with.

Sarah: Yeah, that makes sense.

Terry: Well, I think that sometimes too, people come out of… A lot of our learning how to be social and learning how to be in relationship comes from our junior high or middle school and high school ages. And the problem is there’s a lot of cliques in that age and there’s a lot of different kind of things that go on that make it difficult to reach out and get new friends, make new friends. And then once we leave high school, it’s even harder because we don’t have that pool of peers to kind of draw on. And I think we just get busy in our lives, and so busyness can tend to be part of it. We may know a lot of people we work with, we may know a lot of people in college or whatever environment we’re in, but as far as just sitting down and having those one-on-one relationships or small group relationships with each other, it’s difficult.

Sarah: Yeah.

Lianne: I think one way to make relationships a little bit easier is to wade into them. So people talk about small talk. Can you get to know people through small talk? I think absolutely. Actually, that’s something we all could work on is maybe our skills of just being able to have a good conversation with somebody, But yet you don’t have to go to the TMI thing. You don’t have to really disclose a lot about yourself to get to know people better. I think just kind of walking down that path with somebody and keep… Start with the small talk, find out about them, and then just keep going down the path and get to know them a little bit deeper as you build trust and relationship. There can be a lot of reward to that.

Sarah: Do you guys have any insight into how to transition from small talk to slightly less small talk, like slightly deeper conversations, especially for someone who it doesn’t come naturally to?

Terry: I think some of it is just gradually getting to that place where you share a little bit of yourself at a time. Not necessarily going all the way deep, but saying, adding if you think this person might be somebody that you’d like to spend more time with, you can kind of ask them that, “Hey, do you want to have a cup of coffee? Do you want to… ” If the relationship is clicking, if you guys are having some things to talk about then, it just will naturally go deeper in a lot of ways. Some people end up going too fast, too deep, and then they get hurt. “Well, I gave somebody all this information about myself and then that person went and blabbed it all over.” That kind of thing tends to make people pull back and not trust people again. So giving little bits of information at a time and making sure the person’s trustworthy before you tell them a little bit deeper for a part of yourself.

Sarah: Well, and along that point, managing expectations too, because if you go too fast and too deep too fast, you may think that you know the other… Managing expectations, like you guys might end up hitting it off really well from a friendship level, but if you come on too strongly and stuff, then sometimes you just-

Terry: Scare them away.

Sarah: Scare them away or scare yourself, too, because you think that they’re someone else and you’re making that up in your mind that this is who this person is, and they’re really not that person. Then it could have been a great friendship, but it’s ruined because you had all these ideas of who they are and that’s not who they were. So instead ask a lot of questions and find out who this person is and what makes them tick and-

Lianne: Oh, I think that’s a great point because listening is probably the harder thing for people to do. We can talk a lot easier than we can listen. So maybe just slowing down, listening to people, building up conversation skills, how to ask good questions, and then see where it goes from there.

Sarah: I have had a lot of luck in asking questions when I’m meeting new people. I’m so curious about people and I want to know their backstory and everything. I want to know all about them, what makes them tick and stuff. Not because I’m… I don’t know, that’s just who I am. I think it’s the extrovert in me. And so I’m answering the question I asked earlier is how do you build those relationships? I think people do need to listen a lot and ask a lot of questions. Because then that’s where you can find out more about that person, make less assumptions about them, find out more information. And people do like to talk about themselves, too. I’ve had good luck with building friendships. My sister said I can make friends inside of a paper bag, and I think it’s just because I ask a lot of questions.

Lianne: Yeah, and I think that’s really hitting on maybe the focus is the reward. So the risk in relationships is that maybe concentrate more on the reward than the risk and just see what happens.

Sarah: So what would the reward be?

Lianne: Connection with people, getting to know more people, broadening your horizons, having just some interesting interactions and things to do.

Terry: Well, and I think connection. This again goes back to the mental health standpoint. When we connect with other people and we have these positive relationships, we have a better mental health picture. They’re looking, statistics are showing now that people who are not connected have a lot more depression and anxiety and other issues. So taking that risk to be connected with other people is a healthy thing.

Sarah: It is very healthy. Because I have a company and one thing that I had been looking into is this idea of, and we’re doing this like even with Journey, is that we can be connected to people via technology like Zoom and all of our Google products and stuff like this. So we don’t have to meet with people face-to-face in order to have working relationships with them. This has been a turning point in our world, not even just in our country, but in our world where a lot of people are working away from offices, and they’re working from their homes and they’re working from coffee shops and they’re traveling, which is exciting and they get to travel and meet new people, too. But there’s also a lot of people who are just working from home. 20 years ago you’d get those connections with at least your coworkers and such, and now your coworkers are spread out literally across the world.

Lianne: I was going to say the reward, if you can just get it down to just a little snapshot, to me would be, I remember when I was much younger and I was somewhere sitting and waiting in a mall or somewhere, and an older woman sat down and she just had some kind of a statement like she just isn’t happy now that she’s old. She just reminded me a lot of my grandma who had passed away, and I just wasn’t much of a conversationalist. So I thought of it internally how it would be really great to reach out and have a good conversation with her, but it was a little bit harder.

Lianne: So I think just as we reach out to each other, we’re maybe in a less connected world than we used to be. I don’t know if that’s true, but if we reach out to others, we can just help one person at a time or ourselves to be a little bit less lonely.

Sarah: What happened in that situation? Did you end up talking to her?

Lianne: It just kind of came and went, but learned, I’ve-

Sarah: So now you have-

Lianne: … I kept that with me and learned a lot from it.

Sarah: So now you’re keeping your… You have your eye out for that kind of situation now.

Lianne: Yeah, and now that I’ve been around a while, I’m a much better conversationalist so I could probably jump on that opportunity a little bit quicker than in the old days.

Sarah: That’s awesome.

Terry: Well, we’re in a society now that’s really technologically connected. When you think about how many Facebook friends most people have and connections on LinkedIn, and all of the other things, you know, social media, but yet we’re more and more and more disconnected from others individually in a personal sort of way.

Sarah: Yeah, and that’s deeper. That’s what I was trying to get at, the deeper sense, those close relationships where you’re really getting to know people really well and who, if there is a crisis moment, you can call on those people.

Terry: Well, I think the answer isn’t to get rid of the technology necessarily, but to find a balance between I can be technologically connected to people, but I can also be socially and personally connected to some.

Sarah: Because the technology that we have right now can aid in person interactions, even if it doesn’t have to, I mean sometimes spouses are overseas and stuff like that, but you can still have deep connections even through technology. It’s just making that intentional effort of having those deep conversations and opening yourself up to real relationships with people where they see who you really are.

Lianne: So I guess to wrap it up, we’ll say, yes, take risks in relationships.

Terry: The answer is yes.

Sarah: And to ask questions to help and just put yourself out there to get to that point where you can do that. So you’ve been listening to the Journey Coaching Podcast. We can be found on journeycoaching.org, also on Facebook, Instagram. Reach out to us, make sure you like and subscribe for more information. We’re all about creating connection with people and helping to facilitate that. So make sure you tune in and thanks for listening. Bye.

Terry: Bye.

Announcer: Thank you for listening. Tune in next time, and make sure you like and subscribe. Visit us at journeycoaching.org and check us out on Facebook and Instagram. Start your own journey at journeycoaching.org.

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