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Episode 10: June 4, 2019

Shaylyn Romney Garrett: 4 Cultural Norms That Keep Us from Connecting

Shaylyn joins Wellness 3.0 to talk about the cultural norms that keep us from connecting and the monthly challenges she takes on to bring her back to connection and community.
Episode 10: June 4, 2019

Shaylyn Romney Garrett: 4 Cultural Norms That Keep Us from Connecting

Shaylyn joins Wellness 3.0 to talk about the cultural norms that keep us from connecting and the monthly challenges she takes on to bring her back to connection and community.

Episode Overview

Today’s guest is Shaylyn Romney Garrett, a writer who has dedicated all of 2019 to reconnecting — you’ll hear a lot about her journey in this episode. Shaylyn has spent her whole life studying, experimenting with, being fascinated and frightened by community, yet she thinks she has less community than anyone else. On her blog, Project Reconnect, Shaylyn takes on a new challenge every month to bring her back to community, connection, and relationship.

Listen on to find out about Shaylyn’s monthly reconnection challenges, including what’s been the hardest, what holds us back from hosting people in our homes, how meeting your neighbors can make all the difference, the dark side of our individualistic culture and the cultural norms that keep us from connecting.

They’ll also discuss…

  • Why we’re threatened by loneliness and isolation and the pill for loneliness being tested
  • Self-care vs. community care
  • The cultural norms that keep people from connecting
  • The importance of leading with vulnerability instead of your accomplishments
  • What constitutes a real connection
  • Why perfection is the enemy of connection
  • How the definition of neighborliness has changed, and why it’s so vital for us to make an effort to meet our neighbors
  • What holds us back from hosting people in our homes
  • How Shaylyn’s path to reconnection has affected her parenting choices

Cultural norms like individualism, busyness, perfection, and privacy keep us from connecting. There are consequences on a societal level for only seeking connection when you need to connect, and Shaylyn challenges us to seek connection not selfishly, but because others might need to connect too. Shaylyn talks about how the solution to loneliness can be found in reaching out and caring for our neighbors, and that community, connection, and social wellness are essential to being happy, healthy, and thriving.

Social Wellness Challenge

Go meet your neighbors! 

If you wake up every morning feeling lonely, set the intention of opening yourself up. Open your front door, sit on your front porch, open your garage, go do yard work out in the front yard — just to signal to people that you’re there. Open a space to connect. There are people walking around you with deep hurt who need someone to reach out to.

Links

 

Shaylyn’s Blog — Project Reconnect

Weave: The Social Fabriq Project via the Aspen Institute  

American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us — Book by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell

The Vanishing Neighbor — Book by Marc J. Dunkelman

The Second Mountain — Book by David Brooks

The Power of Meaning — Book by Emily Esfahani Smith

Bowling Alone —  Book by Robert D. Putnam

This Week’s Guest

Shaylyn Romney Garrett

 

Shaylyn is an accomplished writer whose work is published in Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s award-winning book, Amazing Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, and is a staff writer for  Weave: The Social Fabric Project. She’s also a successful social entrepreneur who spent 6 years living in Jordan, where she co-founded the nonprofit Think Unlimited, focused on social innovation for Arab youth in the Middle East.

Shaylyn graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Peace Corps volunteer. In 2011, she won the prestigious Draper Richards Kaplan Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship, was awarded membership to the Clinton Global Initiative and has been a TEDx speaker. To top it all off, she’s a certified Holistic Health Coach and a permaculturalist!

I think social wellness is the feeling of being woven into something bigger than yourself. Not subsumed by it so that you lose your identity, but integrated into it in a way that if you were missing, the thing would fall apart. A tightly woven community is a safety net for everyone.

 

 

Shaylyn Romney Garrett

Author, Project Reconnect, Weave: The Social Fabric Project

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