This is the 105th video tutorial that I’ve recorded and I think my dad actually used to say, still says, this phrase, “Truth is truth.” I’m sure that somebody else has said it too because truth is truth, right. Whether you believe something or not about something like… with some things, there is just a way that things are, right, I would argue. That’s my truth anyway. Truth is truth. Meaning, you know, in almost every major philosophy religion around the world, thereis some version of “treat your neighbor as yourself” or the golden rule or the platinum rule, “treat others as either as you want to be treated or treat others as they want to be treated.” The platinum rule.
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There’s some version of that. For this video, I actually wanted to introduce you to a buddy of mine, Ginger Johnson, who speaks and leads people around human connection ideas. And I just wanted you to hear some of the things that she says totally from her perspective. All I did was give her the title of this video and said, “Hey. can you just riff on this for a couple minutes?” I want you to listen with a very particular lens for what she’s saying in this idea that truth is truth to see if there’s any overlap. If you’ve been following me and Will’s work for any length of time, you know that Will and I’ve put together a book called “Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter” It’s a really great library of concrete ways to build their connection and trust in relationships, both professional and in personal. The book is structured in this ask powerful questions pyramid.
I want to show it to you and I want to just hold there for a second and look at it, read through real quick and then when Ginger speaks, I want you to tune in and pay attention to… if you see any similarities. Any language that is similar in what she’s saying. I didn’t give her this pyramid, but she’s just talking from the heart about human connection. Shedding some light on the subject, and I say light because after she sent me the video she was like, “Ah! Ring lights and glasses glare!” And any of you who wear glasses will understand glasses glare. Look past that and enjoy Ginger’s content here.
Let’s look at this pyramid… cool to have a magic wand and wave it right and make somebody feel like you’re willing to know them, you see them, you hear them, you actually get them, understand them and ultimately you’re with them. They feel like you’re on their team so, in the book anyway, this is kind of the impact of the result. The flip side of this pyramid is how do we actually create it.
We talk about this pyramid of skills and tools moving up here and so just tune into intention, rapport, openness, listening and empathy. Does anything show up in what Ginger is about to say? I’m Chad. We’ll cue up a little intro and then Ginger will join us right after that. By the end of this whole video, what is in my brain and what is in Ginger’s brain about how to build an emotional connection in a relationship will be in your brain.
Ginger Johnson here, human connection expert. How do you create an emotional connection with someone? Well, the first thing as a professional connector is I encourage people to think about it this way. Being the most curious, being the most interested, being the one who asks the questions is always a fantastic way to start an emotional connection. Here’s why. When we project the attention, when we let somebody know, “Hey, I see you and I don’t just see you. I’m interested in you.” You show them that you’re really interested in their worth, their value. You literally do see them and therefore you’re listening which leads to another key connector trade. Are you a good listener or are you simply hearing people? Is it noise or does it matter? That’s emotional connection. When somebody feels like they matter, then you’ve started to build that bridge. Brick by brick, board by board, you’re creating an emotional connection. You’re focusing on that h2h is what I like to think about it. The human to human side. I teach to connect, not to network. That’s a big part of it. In my world and what I teach is look, when you think about it as networking, all you’re looking at is surface level. When you think about it as connecting, that the burg underneath the surface of the water, people. I don’t want to be on the top of the iceberg, that’s just a tiny bit of it. I want to know what’s going on underneath.
If you want to make an emotional connection with somebody, focus on being interested, being curious. It’s a fantastic qualifier to find your people, as I call it, who is going to ask you back where is a relationship possible? Where is that connection going to take? And you can take it anywhere. Ginger, lovely. Thank you for that perspective. If you all want to know more about Ginger, you can check out her info in the description below. What I really love about Ginger’s last line there of, you know, where is that connection going to take and you can take it anywhere, I kind of like that because a little behind the scenes info. When we were choosing the title and subtitle for Ask Powerful Questions, Will had originally chosen the title “Ask Powerful Questions: Exploring The Unknown That Surrounds Us.” And my response was like, “Well, that’s cool but, ain’t nobody gonna buy a book with that subtitle,” right. It’s too up in the air and yet he and I very much believe that that is true, right. There’s so much unknown that surrounds us and that is embedded within the 8 pound block that sits on the top of people’s head, right. Everybody’s up this whole lifetime of experience and yet, typically when we meet someone we ask like, “Where are you from?” “How are you doing?” and “What do you do?” right. That’s like one of a few questions that we fall into a rut with. And so, if you really want to build an emotional connection with somebody, I would invite you and as a review, right, did you hear Ginger say that language, “I see you.” And talk about the power of being interested rather than interesting. And then this word “listening” showing up as well. These are core components of building emotional connection in a relationship. If you like free stuff, there is a link to a free excerpt of Ask Powerful Questions and maybe even more important, I don’t know exactly how you landed on this video, but we created a card deck called “We! Connect Cards” that’s got 60 questions that are really great to skip beyond the small talk and go beyond the surface. And we’ve made a digital version of them available completely for free, and I will say the disclaimer, the warning is that if you go through that entire deck with another human being,
I would argue that it might be impossible not to build a meaningful, emotional connection with another human being. In fact, I did have a friend go through the deck, the entire deck, on a 1st date, which they must have gone through the deck very quickly, they went through the entire deck on a 1st date and he reached out to me a year or so later and asked me to officiate his wedding because they were getting married and they wanted to actually do a question swap exercise with We! Connect cards at the wedding. Holy awesome! How cool is that? I’m not promising that you’ll get married. That is definitely not why we created the deck. In fact, it’s used mostly by universities and organizations to speed up the cadence of connection and reduce the time to trust. Yet, it’s a really cool set of questions. We spent 2 years researching and refining down this list.