Mastering Emotional Connections: The Key to a Richer, More Rewarding Life
Learn how to form genuine emotional connections with anyone by understanding true empathy. Unlock a more interesting and fulfilling life with this essential skill.
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How to make a CONNECTION with ANYONE the master skill of human relationships
Added on 10/01/2024
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Speaker 1: I'm Dr. Orion Teraban and this is Psych Hacks, Better Living Through Psychology, and the topic of today's short talk is how to make a connection with anyone. The ability to form a sincere, genuine, emotional connection with people opens up your life more than almost any other skill. The world is full of people, and if you can forge an emotional connection with these people, you're going to have a more interesting, rewarding, and exciting life full of potential friends, partners, and lovers. It's kind of the master skill of life, and I'm going to tell you how to do this. However, before I do so, please remember to like this episode and subscribe to this channel. It takes less than a second, costs you nothing, and it would definitely bring us closer together. So if you like what I'm saying here, then please do the thing. Also, if you're thinking about going to grad school, then check out StellarGRE.com. You can use the coupon code PSYCH for 10% off all membership plans. So how do you form an emotional connection with anyone? It basically involves empathy, but most people don't really understand what empathy is, so I'll need to spend a little time here. Most people think that empathy is sort of like putting yourself in another person's shoes and imagining how you would feel in that person's circumstances. Sounds reasonable enough, right? But the issue is that that doesn't really work. And why doesn't it work? Well, because the same stimulus can create vastly different emotional responses in different people. Hell, the same stimulus will create vastly different emotional responses in the same person at different times. One statement will make somebody roar with laughter and another person offended and furious. So imagining yourself in another person's circumstances and considering how you would feel doesn't often work to forge an emotional connection. In fact, it can often leave people feeling alienated and judged. Let me explain by using a concrete example. Let's say that you come across a crying child, and this child is upset because his favorite toy has been broken. Now, if you were to put yourself in this child's situation, you might think, well, come on, kid. It's just a toy. Yeah, it's disappointing that your toy broke, but in the scheme of things, it's really not that important. Nobody's dead. Nobody's hurt. It's not that expensive. There's plenty of toys in the world, and it might even be repairable. I don't really see what the big deal is, and I think you're overreacting. As you may imagine, that response is unlikely to lead to any kind of emotional connection with that child, and if you try to explain to the child that it's just a toy and that he can get another one, that is, if you try to address the problem on the level of its most superficial content, namely the toy is broken, you're not going to get anywhere. In fact, you're probably going to make the situation worse. However, this is the likely response of an adult imagining how he would respond under identical circumstances. On the other hand, instead of imagining yourself in the exact same circumstances as this individual, a better idea is to remember a situation in your own life that has created the same emotional reaction in you. You should then be able to better guess at what might actually be going on for the other person by extrapolating backward from the emotion to the circumstances instead of the other way around. In this case, you might consider asking yourself, what was going on in my own life the last time I was crying inconsolably? Oh, well, that was when my mother died. And why was I so upset? Because I felt that I had permanently lost someone very precious to me. Oh, that's what's going on here. On one level, the child is crying over a broken toy. However, on another deeper, more universal level, the child is crying because he has lost something that he loved. In fact, given his age and experience, this could be the biggest loss of his life, the loss of his most cherished treasure. Not everyone has had the experience of losing their favorite toy, and trying to imagine what that would feel like could be a cold approximation at best. However, almost everyone has had the experience of losing something precious to them. This is the universal experience that makes it possible to forge a connection with even radically different people. No matter how dissimilar the stories of our lives, the underlying themes remain largely the same. In this case, approaching the child with the attitude of, I too have lost something that I loved, is much more likely to produce an emotional connection than it's just a toy. The fact of the matter is, is that ideas tend to divide people and emotions tend to unite them. We all know what it feels like to be hurt, to be relieved, to be furious, to be anxious, to be consumed by desire. However, what hurts you might not hurt me, and vice versa. It sounds weird, but the key to connecting with others is to kind of not pay too much attention to what they actually say. This is circumstantial detail, and remaining on this level is what keeps conversation factual and uninteresting. The idea is to understand that what people are saying is not really the end goal, but a door through which you can enter into the living, pulsing, emotional reality of the other. If you can access that reality in yourself and approach the other with that understanding, then you're actually being empathetic. And if you can succeed in doing that, then you can forge a real emotional connection with pretty much anybody. What do you think? Have you used this skill in your own life? Let me know in the comments below. Thank you for listening.

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