Connections are the Healthy Investments for the Future
Keynote: Rob Lawless
Connection feeds belonging, and for Rob Lawless, the world is full of connections. For him, since 2015, it has been about 10,000 connections by way of spending at least one hour getting to know that many people. Visiting the ACUI Annual Conference, Lawless was ready to provide an update on belonging and connectedness after 10 years and over 6,000 new connections.
But first, he admitted, he had the college student union and those that run them to credit for his interest in belonging and meeting people. “I was not supposed to be on this path. I was studying finance at Penn State and thinking about a job consulting,” he said. “But I am really a success story of the work you do because when you meet people at Penn State you meet them at the HUB(student center), and when you meet there, you meet at the fish tank. So when I left, I was always wondering, where is my fish tank? It’s not my degree or the classes that drove the value I got out of that experience; it was the people that I met.”
Missing the authentic connection he’d experienced in college, he set off on his current journey, and the responses have been overwhelmingly positive. At the heart of his approach is what he calls the FRIEND framework—a strategic method for understanding people’s stories:
- Family
- Relationships
- Industry (career and education path)
- Entertainment (hobbies outside work)
- Needs
- Dreams for the future
“It’s hard to create authentic connections. We’ve become keyboard warriors and social media leads to polarization,” he said. “But research shows, and this was 2,000 people studied over 85 years, that the biggest contributor to long-term health is connections. And getting to know others’ stories brings about an increased sense of belonging.”
Lawless encouraged listeners to set a connection goal, even if it were only one connection a month, and use a framework of questions that can include categories of interest like birth, childhood, education, career, and the future. “There’s more to connections than just networking or dating; at its most basic level, we’ve increased our sense of belonging.”
“Just remember that specifics will always move a conversation forward, while generalizations will kill you,” he said. “Seek to find the specifics about people and that will provide you the opportunity for more questions.”
