Building Real and Meaningful Connections with Coach Lee Hopkins

Loneliness and feeling disconnected are common experiences today, affecting how we feel about life. The longing for real connection is stronger than ever. But it's not just about having lots of friends; it's about having meaningful connections that make us feel understood and valued. How do we close this gap and build relationships that truly matter? In this episode, I have the pleasure to chat with Coach Lee Hopkins, the founder of Patterns of Possibility. Coach Lee Hopkins is an expert in helping people build more meaningful connections in both their personal and professional lives. Throughout the episode, Coach Lee guides us through understanding the nuances of genuine connections, both online and offline. He talks about the complexities of modern-day interactions, offering actionable strategies to enhance the depth and authenticity of our relationships. Learn how small, intentional steps can lead to profound shifts in our relationships, bringing us closer to a life filled with genuine connection and fulfillment. --- Listen to the podcast here: Building Real and Meaningful Connections with Coach Lee Hopkins Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you selling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about loneliness, lack of connection. Now, you probably heard a lot of talk about the loneliness epidemic. One of the decisions I often cite in some of my presentations is that a survey was conducted around how many close friends people have, because loneliness is not just about how many people you’re around, it’s not just about isolation, it’s also about the meaningfulness, the depth of the connection. A survey conducted in 1990 showed that over 60 percent of all people said they had five or more close friends, how they would define as close friends. That same survey conducted in 2021 put 48 percent of all people in the one to four category for how many close friends they had and an alarming 12 percent actually reported having zero close friends and this is impacting just our quality of life in general so it’s good for us to kind of regroup and think a bit more about how we actually form meaningful relationships with other human beings. And to that topic, I bring you my guest today, Coach Lee Hopkins. Coach Lee Hopkins is a social connections coach, founder of a company called Patterns of Possibility. With this company, he uses a simple three-step process to help his clients find and maintain closeness in their friendships. --- Coach Lee Hopkins, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me here. I’m so glad to talk about this topic because it affects so many people. Let’s start with what’s affecting people. What are you observing in the world today, like right now, regarding the quality of our connections we’re making between human beings? The quality of our connections. What I observe is there’s all kinds of statistics out there. As you pointed out, there’s some statistics about the relationships that my own observations is searching through TikTok and being on social media, listening to what other people are experiencing as well as watching and seeing my own experiences is that we’re not as connected as we were before and I would love to just tackle that and look at it from a different angle because what I define as connection is a little bit different than what most people do. They think simply because we are focused on being online so much that we’re disconnected.Share on X Of course, that keeps us separated but even when we’re in person, we’re also not making the intentional kind of connections there too. We’re just like in spaces with people and not being connected. The phenomenon that I’ve noticed is we’re disconnected online and then we’re so unattached to people that when we get into spaces with people, we don’t know how to be either. And so disconnection is just pretty rampant. So is this a mindset that kind of penetrates both environments? Because when you’re online, you’re having three, four, eight, twenty conversations at once, and we all observe people that literally do that and they got 30 group texts and they’re on the Gram and the TikTok and all that. Does that mindset then penetrate your offline world so that when you’re in front of people, you’re still kind of operating under that same mode? Absolutely, it certainly does. That idea that you have to pretend, you have to be fake, you have to process or you don’t know how to deal with feelings right in the moment because you get all the time in the world to do it online, you’re behind the screen and you can just put your phone down and process and think and do what you need to do, but when it comes to meeting people in person, dealing with these emotions, whether it be good, bad, ugly, rejection, feeling sad, I don’t know how to express that to a person in front of me so I behave the same way. It’s the same mechanism that we use online and it ruins our relationships. It really does. I think we don’t honestly know how to connect. We don’t know how to be. And so are you seeing a generational divide? Now, I hate to be divisive on this issue because I don’t want to define people as being part of one group or another, there’s way more to who someone is, but one of the things I do observe is that when people talk about the difference between millennials like myself who are old enough to remember the world before we had smartphones everywhere we went, you know Zoomers, Gen Z, younger generation that doesn’t, are you observing a difference between how well people are making connections on that divide? I’m also a millennial, I’m an older millennial so I’m happy to make that separation just because we’ve had different experiences and it is worth it to acknowledge who we are as people and the way the world looked to us and those experiences if we’re going to connect with people so I love that you brought this up. I remember what it was like to have a house phone with a long cord. I also remember what it was like to have a cordless phone and to try to pretend that I could take it out into the street and still make a phone call when it was not possible. Now, we have these cell phones where we can just take everywhere and anywhere and then not only do we have this ability to communicate everywhere and anywhere, it exploded, we can do everything and anything, talk to anybody on this, and so the idea that it’s supposed to bring communication to us in our pocket and connection to us in our pocket, I think we’re overwhelmed with so many options. We don’t have the opportunity to really focus and think about how I feel connected to this person, what it is that I want to say, or recognize that perhaps when, back in the 90s, when I was growing up, is that phone call and being in that particular place is the time and is the focus for that person. The same with the internet. The internet was once a place that you went to, it was a computer that you sat down at, you logged on AOL, and you had conversations with people but you didn’t do it all the time. And that overwhelm, I think, gives us so many options and we have this fear of missing out on top of it, that we just don’t know where to really stay and really show ourselves to people and we don’t know how to if we could make a decision. It was easy to make that decision. So, let’s talk a little bit about that struggle because, obviously, and I’m not saying this is just one generation struggle, it’s just going to manifest differently, but what does that struggle look like? Because I think it’s natural for us humans to have the desire to create that connection so you’re probably dealing with a lot of people who really desire that connection but just for some reason can’t find the right manner in which to build that meaningful relationship. Yeah, I am talking to quite a few people with that. This is because I struggle with it on my own, just trying to figure out how to connect. What makes me interesting as a millennial to speak on this topic was because I knew what life was like without the gadgets and the easy, quick connections and conversation so I also didn’t develop the skills to be connected, I still felt disconnected from people even though I didn’t have a smartphone in my pocket when I was growing up. And I think that is true for the generations before me because there is a particular skill that we need to learn to really make authentic connections with others. And so when we look at the people who grew up with the cell phones and the easy technology and the constant “connection” and communication, and I would like to put connections in quotes, this full connection with people with the Instagram and the TikTok and commenting and constantly texting, there’s an element there that’s missing from both generations or all generations. And what I believe connection is and what I teach in my coaching is that connection means that you demonstrate that you understand how the other person feels about their experiences. And we love to gravitate and we love to look at generations because I can talk to you about, Remember a time when we sat at a computer to get online? Remember a time when we had this and we had that? These people don’t understand me and how I feel about my experiences. No, they don’t, because they grew up in different generation,” but the skill to make the connection requires you to understand your own feelings but also tap into other people and how they might feel. And a key piece of this is not just knowing that, just saying, “Oh, I know how they feel. Oh, they must be this way or they must…” No, no, no, you have to demonstrate to them through conversation that you understand. And they would shake their heads like, “Yeah, I get it,” and that’s the connection and it doesn’t happen if you’re not being intentional with that, with that skill,...