MARK MANSON = Author. Thinker. Life Enthusiast. Previous Lesson Next Lesson LESSON 8: GOING DEEP CONNEC TE COURSE ae Jt Goinc DEEP We’ ve now learned how to relate your own stories, ideas and experiences to the stories, ideas and experiences to others on the fly. Hopefully you’ ve already noticed an improved ability to do this in your conversations since you began the course. Well, this is how we actually take things deep with people. As you relate stories, ideas and experiences to one another, back and forth, you slowly make each of them more personal and vulnerable as you go along. ~ A first conversational chunk may be about your job and what you like to do. - A person responds with a story about their previous job and how much they didn’t like it. — You go a bit deeper by talking about how much you hate being stuck doing things you don’t like to do, that you have a bit of a rebellious streak in you. - They respond in how their brother is the same way. - You ask them how their relationship with their brother is, if they get along. ~ They answer and explain that yeah, for the most part they do, but it’s kind of complicated. ~ You tell them a brief history of your relationship with your siblings and how much it’s grown and changed over the years. If you look at the example conversation above, you’ ve gone from talking about your job to talking about the complicate relationships with your siblings in a span of probably 20-30 minutes. This is ultimately how people get to know each other and feel connected to one another. While we all have a diverse range of surface-level experiences — our jobs, our physical traits, where we live, what we eat, what we do for fun — we all have 99% of the same underlying, deeper experiences — family relationships, intimate relationships, insecurities, uncertainty, ambition, etc. It’s these underlying emotional experiences where we connect with one another and feel empathy and a deeper fulfillment from our interactions. It’s one thing to find out you and someone else play the same video game. It’s another thing to find out that you both harbor similar beliefs and perceptions about society and prefer to get lost in fantasy than deal with bullshit you don’t like. The former is a superficial commonality. The latter is a deeper alliance of needs and interests. EXERCISE: Write a deeper story based on a random word. As the second part of the exercise, reply with deeper stories in real conversations in P » Teply Ps your life. Use words in the stories people tell you as jump-off points for your own stories. NOTE: The written exercise mentioned in the video was part of the old course the video was recorded for. You can either ignore the written exercises or do them on your own. RANDOM WORD GENERATOR Previous Lesson Next Lesson