GM.
That’s “Good Morning”, in case you’re not on Twitter.
That’s what we in the “web3-nft” delegation do every morning.
We wake up and get on twitter to post those two letters.
Nothing special. Just a greeting.
Sometimes with words of wisdom, daily affirmations, a picture, or some AI art.
The replies are similar. GM. GM. GM all around.
I know you might still be trying to wrap their heads around our love for overpriced jpegs and pixels.
And a crowd roaring ‘GM…GM’ to one another may just seem like another form of weird web3 behavior.
Don’t be so quick to write it off just yet.
There seems to be something deeper going on here.
It might have something to do with the core of our humanity and seeking anchors of connections.
The pain of loneliness
When I was a teenager and my older siblings had moved to the US for university, the house had become dead silent.
Every day I came back home, my friends from the neighborhood would play basketball together.
One day, I made an error and gave my basketball to a cousin. He didn’t return it for weeks.
The first day after I gave him that ball, I got back from school.
There was no electricity.
No tv to watch.
No radio to listen to.
No basketball to play.
Within a few minutes, it dawned on me – I was in the depth of loneliness and that pain strained my entire body.
I waved between boredom, sadness, and anger with each passing day “wondering where the hell my basketball was”
When I finally got it back, I did not realize how much joy that bouncing ball brought to me. I played for hours until it was bedtime.
That basketball saved me from loneliness.
When was the moment you realized that being on your own meant you actually had to deal with yourself?
Not the distraction from the tv or the company of a friendly conversation.
Just you, yourself, and your thoughts.
We are social animals. We don’t like being alone.
The pain of loneliness is known to be so severe that back in the days, one of the major forms of punishment in society was shunning and ostracization.
The punished person was pushed out of common society and left to slowly wither away in isolation. (Cold, right?)
When we are left alone for too long, we soon get depressed and want to be around people.
Our modern day selves have developed rigid and binary definitions of who we are.
“Oh! I’m an extrovert, I have to be around people. I can’t manage being on my own.”
On the other end of the pendulum is the reserved character, sticking to the wall, saying: “I’m an introvert, I love being on my own. People drain me.”
Most of us swing between these two poles.
One day, you want to be around people. The next day you want to be on your own.
Do you know which days you will choose to live in solitude or around people?
Is it situational? Are you counting on your mood to dictate what to choose? Leaving your own happiness to chance.
Although a huge part of our happiness depends on relationships, we put minimal effort on relationships with ourselves and others.
Have you thought about taking an active approach in transforming your relationship with yourself and the people in your life?
6 ways to bring balance to your relationships:
The balancing act of being alone and around people is a lifelong process to master.
Being around people can be enjoyable but it can also make you miserable, especially if you don’t know yourself.
Your ability to control and transform relationships will help you live a more connected and enjoyable life.
Here are six ways to think about improving your relationships through connection.
1. Have your rituals
Fight against loneliness with rituals.
Saying “Good morning” as trivial as it may seem is a way to transform relationships.
Most people want to be seen, heard, and valued.
When those innate criteria are met, we feel connected to people, forming what Baya Voce, a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner, calls “the anchor of connections.”
To create strong anchors of connections we have to build simple rituals.
Most people connect rituals to religious ceremonies but rituals are just repeated action with intention.
It’s rituals that brought communities around fires to tell stories.
It’s a ritual when a group of friends meet up on a regular basis to play poker or sit together to drink wine.
It provides the anchor to go back to especially when life throws the unexpected your way.
“to build real anchors of connections is not about what you go get, but what you come back to”
~ Baya Voce
What are your repeated actions with intention? Don’t downplay these little acts of repetition. They are helping you validate your existence and build fulfilling relationships.
Develop some rituals that you can easily go back to to create anchors of connection with people.
2. Love your fam
It’s a family and friend round.
No! I’m not talking about seed investment in your next business venture.
I’m talking about your circle. Your clique!
Like Don Corleone said: “You can do anything but never go against the family”
OK…OK…This is not a hit job but the Godfather was dropping some gems of knowledge there.
The strongest relationships we build are with family.
When social connection with family is strong, people tend to be more confident.
When there is a shared goal, good communication for feedback, and opportunities for the collective group’s skill to match increasing challenges, we tend to feel happier in our family units.
But what do you do when your family has different goals? Do you try to change them?
It is not about transforming other people but transforming the relationships you have with them.
You don’t get to choose your family but you get to choose to love and support them and their goals.
3. Choose your friends
Erykah Badu said on her song Apple Tree that “she picks her friends like she picks her fruits, her granny told her that when she was only a youth”
On and on and on and on, the story goes.
We make friends, then lose them. Life changes. People move across regions. Contacts are lost. New ones made.
Friendships can provide us the opportunities to be ourselves and fully express who we are.
As humans, we develop two sets of skills – instrumental and expressive.
Instrumental skills are those that we learn to survive in our environment – getting food and developing intellectual tools – reading and writing.
Expressive skills demonstrate our ability to share and externalize our subjective experience with other people. Singing a song about how you feel is an example.
While we use our instrumental skills at work, we tend to show our expressive skills with our friends.
Since you get to choose your friends, you can choose relationships that give you and your friends common goals, offering rewarding opportunities for action, expression, and growth.
“friendships allows us to express parts of our beings that we seldom have the opportunity to act out otherwise”
~ FLOW
You can’t choose family but you can choose friends.
Seek out and nuture quality friendships that allow you to grow and express yourself in ways you can’t in other areas of life.
4. Find balance at work
Enjoying work is all about playing the game but not the type of game you might be thinking about.
When I started my first job out of grad school, we would get on calls with the client and spend the first 15 minutes talking about the weather.
That drove me crazy.
“Really? How long are we going to talk about this! The weather in Texas is hot – that’s it. End of story. What else are we talking about?”
I later realized that was just part of the game we played.
The corporate dance before the hammer came down.
The sneakish ritual of pleasantries before boring schedules and timelines were discussed.
Work is what you make of it and your team can make or break your experience at work.
They can be the source of joy or they can be the constant pain that makes you zoom past the office break room like the speedrunner in the latest pumas.
You might not be able to choose who you work with but you can choose the relationship game you play.
Let your colleague’s goals be part of yours. It might take longer to get to your personal goal but the journey will be more enjoyable.
Understand the goals of your coworkers. Choose the mindset to help them reach their goals while working on yours.
5. Nurture a hobby
“The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention”
~ FLOW
Your most important relationship is the one with yourself.
When I moved back to Nigeria to start my business, a lot of my friends would see me and say “Are you even in this country? We never see you around.”
When I was back in the US – same thing: “Where have you been? No one sees you.”
Those years, I spent a lot of time on my own.
If I wasn’t working on my business or hanging out with the fam, I was working on a few of my hobbies like making beats, or writing.
On average, we spend one third of our lives alone.
When you are alone you want to find order.
The easiest is entertainment, drugs, sex, anything that will bring immediate pleasure and distract from the disorder and entropy in your mind.
The people that thrive in alone time, are the ones that take up activities that order their consciousness and lead to growth.
You can do this by developing a hobby. It helps with discipline, focus, and self-awareness.
This can be anything from reading, exercising, to writing, carpentry, and gardening. These activities provide opportunities for self-directed control and growth.
6. Meditate (and journal)
Adversity is an opportunity for enjoyment.
Your ability to transform an adverse situation into enjoyable moments is a rare gift.
In 2014, I tore my achilles playing basketball.
I was confronted by the new limitations of my body.
I couldn’t do things that were once immediate. A simple task such as getting into the bathtub required a focused and properly-planned out strategy.
My mind was all over the place. That’s when I started meditating.
I started with only 4 minutes everyday. Each year, I increased the challenge and now do 22 minutes everyday.
Meditation has brought a lot of benefits.
It has allowed me to sharpen focus, reduce anxiety, and bring awareness to the variety of thoughts swinging through my mind.
Ultimately, it has allowed me to practice bringing order to your consciousness. Journaling has a similar effect.
Life throws adversity and the unexpected our way. These adversities can be opportunities for growth.
Develop a practice to observe your thoughts and feelings with meditation or journaling.
Learn how to be alone and thrive in solitude because even when adversity hits, you are the only one in charge of controlling your consciousness.
Final thoughts
You can live a more balanced life.
A bulk of our happiness comes from our relationships.
Improve your relationships with people by developing rituals, choosing friends, loving your family, and finding balance at work.
You can’t rely solely on other people for your happiness.
Develop your relationship with yourself by nurturing a hobby and learning how to bring order to your consciousness with activities such as meditation or journaling.
Ward off the pain of loneliness even when you’re alone.
You have the power to create more happiness, fulfillment, and connection in your life.
It all starts with simple acts of intention.
So when I say “GM” to you today.
Say it back.
