Moving Towards More Community with Lisa Sansom
What can we do today to make life better for ourselves and the people around us? Perhaps that involves living more fully in community. That is the point of view that emerged in a discussion with Lisa Sansom about her beliefs. Lisa is a speaker, coach, and trainer who is constantly spreading useful ideas from positive psychology research. She loves practical tools that help people try something new. As she puts it, “Immediate implementation is so much fun.”
To watch the entire conversation, click here or watch the embedded video below.
Senia: What do you believe that others might not believe?
Lisa: I have a lot of beliefs. I’m very keen on getting on soap boxes, but most people in my field would agree with me on most of them. The belief I picked for today is that living in single-family, detached homes is vastly overrated.
I really think that we are meant to live in community. I think about our ancestors living around a communal campfire. I imagine everybody looked after the children, people banded together to look after all the community needs, and people looked after the ones that got sick or were struggling because they knew what was going on. A person didn’t have to ask for help. Other people just pitched in.
Over the generations, we got this idea that we should live away from other people. We tend to live not only by ourselves, but by ourselves in buildings that isolate us physically from other people. Now we can drive into the garage and go from indoor garage into the house. The houses are all the way on the front of the property, and people have big fenced-in backyards where outdoor time happens. They don’t have to see anybody or know the neighbors. They’re expected to be self-sufficient with their own stashes of food, first aid supplies, and tools. Self-sufficiency means living on our own in a nuclear family where we do not reach out for help or need to talk to other people. In some ways, it’s very convenient.
I’m very much an ambivert. I’m fine being at home during this pandemic time. I don’t need to be with a whole bunch of other people. But life sure is easier when we are around a whole bunch of other people, even though it’s more convenient to be on our own with everything we need right at our fingertips. I think we’ve gained convenience by trading off what is actually better for us, both individually and collectively.
Senia: How did you come by this belief?
Lisa: I’ve never really had the experience of living in community like the one I imagine. Our society doesn’t really lend itself to it. But I have had the experience of living far away from my community. My in-laws live two hours away in one direction, and my parents live four hours away in another direction. We have lived in this town for about 15 years. We have a good life here, but we had to pay for childcare. We’ve had to rush around and warp our lives when a kid gets sick or we get sick or the car breaks down or the washing machine breaks down. Being self-sufficient really, really hurts sometimes.
My oldest son was born in France. We were living in Paris for a year. Everybody said, “Ooh, Paris for a year. That must have been awesome.” It was, but it was also phenomenally difficult. Think about being new parents time zones away from parents, support groups, and friends before video-conferencing. When we were up at four in the morning with a crying baby, there was literally nobody around to talk to or get help from. People came to visit, but they were there to walk the Champs-Élysées and see the Eiffel tower. They might babysit to say thanks, but then they’d leave, and we’d be on our own again.
We were brand new parents. We thought, “Oh, how hard can it be? We’re going to have a baby six times zones away from our families. Sure, no problem.” It was brutally difficult. I ended up getting appendicitis. We had some problems with the baby. Now I look back and say, “Wow, we were really dumb to move so far away from our community.”
We got through it and everything’s fine now, but if we had stayed with our community during those really needy years, we would have been able to tap into the people that we needed and probably would have built a better community around our kids. They would have gotten to know their family better. Maybe the reason I think the community experience is so important is that I have had the opposite.
Right now, I’m seeing people have difficulty asking for help. Wayne Baker, a positive organizational scholar, talks about the importance of asking for help, as does Heidi Grant Halvorson. Why is it so hard to ask for help when we have built-in compassion? When humans notice suffering, we have a built-in action impulse to alleviate it. We would all help somebody else, but we never ask for help. Why is there this imbalance between giving help and asking for it?
I’ve read nothing on this. This is totally my soap box. I don’t think humans were ever meant to need to ask for help. I think we were meant to notice other people’s suffering and to compassionately alleviate suffering without being asked. We can only do that through communal living.
In communities, we notice differences in people. For example, I might look at you and think, “Senia’s usually smiling, energetic, and buoyant, but today her energy is lower.” That might look very normal for someone who didn’t know you, but because I see you day in and day out, I know how you engage with the world. I might say, “Hey, Senia, are you okay today? You look a little bit off.” But I can only notice that there might be some suffering by seeing you on a regular basis.
Senia: What solution would you like to see?
Lisa: The most important thing is that we need social connections. I don’t like the current term, social distancing. What’s better is physical distancing with social connection. We need to have regular conversations with people. We can get out for walks with a close friend, wear masks, keep six feet apart, whatever we need to do, but we need to have deep relationships with at least a couple of people who are not inside our households so someone knows what’s going on with us. Be in touch often. When we call elderly parents only once a week, everybody can put on brave faces. We can see past those brave faces with regular contact.
I believe we all need at least one person who is not in our own houses. The people in our houses might be suffering from the same things we are. We need really strong, deep social connections with people outside our households on a regular basis. We need to be able to let defenses down and not have to put on a brave face.
I exchange messages with my very best friend in the whole world pretty much every single day. We know what is going on in each other’s lives. If we don’t hear from each other in a while, we’ll reach out and say, “Hey, what’s going on with you? Haven’t heard from you in a while. Is everything okay?”
Having someone that notices that I’m off takes some of the burden off me. I can also reach out and ask, “Hey, do you have a few minutes? I need to lay something on you. Am I the idiot in this situation? Give me a real sanity check here. I feel so upset about this. Somebody just betrayed my trust. I just need to rant for a while.”
Senia: What’s one thought that you would like to leave with people?
Lisa: It is about compassion. Notice and alleviate suffering wherever you can. Especially with recent events, especially with extreme political divides, there are people suffering all over the place. When I see somebody in the grocery store who is struggling with moving a heavy item, I don’t stop and ask them what their political beliefs are, or how many kids they have, or how much money they make. When you see a person in need, go help.
Senia: If you could snap your fingers and almost everybody in the world were to take some action, what would you want that action to be?
Lisa: I would love for people to take a deep breath, put a hand on their hearts, and recall something that is really meaningful to them.
Photo by Rawpixelimages from Dreamstime
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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.