Article by Sabine Rats, business colleague of ICG member Wim Buedts, Independent Minds.
Somewhere along the way, talking to a stranger started to feel risky, not relaxed. Better to say nothing than to bother someone who probably isn’t interested anyway.
In my work, I watch that fear dissolve, nearly every time.
Put people together in a room, on- or off-line, and ask them what they really think.
Within an hour they open up, faster and more warmly than everything we’re told about a disconnected world would predict. With me, as the researcher. And, more strikingly and even better, with each other.
Two things seem to pull them in. The simple pleasure of hearing how someone else sees it, and learning something you hadn’t thought of. And the quiet relief of being recognised, of someone nodding and saying: yes, I think that too.
Here’s what strikes me most. The thing that holds us back is almost always a misread.
Psychologists have measured it. We expect a conversation with a stranger to be awkward, so much so that we would often rather sit in silence. And afterwards we underestimate how much the other person actually enjoyed us.
We assume nobody wants to hear what we have to say. They almost always do. And sometimes the thing we are most sure nobody wants to hear is exactly what sets everyone else free.
One moment I still think about. A room of mothers, talking about public transport. Most complained cheerfully. Toddler screaming on the bus, buggy with lots of shopping bags, the whole carriage sighing. An anecdote. Something to laugh about at the school gate.
One of them went quiet.
She had five children and the bags to match. On that bus, she takes up room, and she feels every glance that says so. Then she said it. When her child screams and the bags are everywhere and the whole carriage has to move around her, it is not an anecdote.
It is a verdict. Not on her children. On her.
So she walks. Forty minutes, five children and full bags, rather than fifteen minutes of being looked at. She had never said that out loud. She said it because she heard a stranger tell the same story without shame.
The boxes do not fall away because we agree to ignore them. They fall away when someone finally feels safe enough to name them.
How much room we take up, how visible we feel, how sure we are that we belong. The things we assume divide us turn out to be remarkably thin, once we are actually listening to each other.
Which makes me wonder whether we have the story wrong. Maybe connection was never something we lost. Maybe it is a muscle we have stopped using, in a world that keeps handing us reasons not to start.
The appetite is still there.
Give people the room, and they will still reach for each other.
