Josh Goldberg | Deeper Relationships & Service

So when we think about the idea of service and deeper relationships, in many ways it hits at the core of how posttraumatic growth looks at the idea of service. Because you all are taught, and you have this notion of service that’s incredibly vast and bold and courageous and amazing. And in some ways, being able to connect and relate to human beings in a society that’s so disconnected, that’s filled with loneliness and despair, is often the greatest act of service that you can possibly engage in. And that’s an amazing thing when we think about deeper relationships and service—because you get to be the partner and the friend and the spouse and the colleague and the guide that you wanted to have.

I always think about the struggles that I had, and I think about the lack of support I received. But for a few very kind people, I wouldn’t have been here. But there should have been more. There could have been more. And I didn’t know how to ask, and they didn’t know how to give. And so I dedicate my life to trying not just to be a guide but to train lots more guides. Because we desperately need people who can help other folks, who can help guide other folks—people who can help other people realize that they don’t have to be a victim, that they don’t have to accept diminishment, they don’t have to accept a new normal—to realize that their birthright is posttraumatic growth.

We have got to democratize this idea of mental health and make sure that we all recognize that, in the words of Vikram Patel, “Mental health is too important to be left to mental health professionals alone.” So when we think about deeper relationships and service, the first thing we think about is the capacity to listen deeply to another human being without interrupting and without trying to solve their problems. Listening deeply, recognizing that after the first pause comes the deep truth. And if you just sit with another person and you allow them to let go and unburden themselves of things they’ve held on to—for fear of judgment, for an inability to explain, or even worry about what other people might think—if you can sit with them and you can listen to them, it is one of the most profound acts of kindness and service. And it’s something that simply doesn’t happen enough.

Most people listen with the intent of responding. It takes our brain .06 seconds to come up with a response, and yet if you measure conversations, people respond within .02 seconds. What does that mean? It means that we’re thinking about a response while we’re listening to the other person. We’re not listening to understand. And what we have to do is cultivate the ability to listen deeply from here—not here. We need to seek to understand another person’s experience and another person’s story.

The second thing we have to do is to share. It’s the willingness and the capacity to share our story, experiences, and struggle—and more importantly than that, to share our hope with other people. When we talk about it—when I talk about the fact that I was this close to taking my life, that I was filled with anxiety and depression and panic attacks and sleeplessness, that I engaged in behaviors I’m not proud of—when I talk about that with other people and they’re in that place, they realize there’s hope. That they’re not stuck. That they don’t have to stay there. That that’s not their destiny. And they realize as well that they’re not alone. They realize that there’s not something unique about them. There’s not something uniquely wrong with them. That they’re not a special snowflake who somehow broke. They realize they’re on a journey, and that journey can keep going.

And that piece of being willing and able to share your story—our story—is so powerful and so profound. And the key to doing it well is to figure out how to do it in a way that’s healthy for you. Because if you share your story in ways that you’re not comfortable with, with people you don’t trust, it can be bad for you. It can be unhealthy. So the question is: how do you tell it well? Well, the goal is to tell it in a way where it feels like you’re observing a prior version of yourself. And I can only say from my perspective that I often look back and I think about the life I lived before, and it feels like it was a different person—a different version of me—and I don’t feel that emotional level of connection, that challenge that I have when I talk about it now.

We’ve talked about this idea that connection is the key to life and that meaningful relationships are key to a good life. So when you think about acts of service, you don’t form deeper relationships so that you can go perform service. Deeper relationships are the acts of service. And they go both ways. They’re mutual—mutually beneficial, mutually honest and authentic, mutually courageous.

And so that’s what I want you to think about. I want you to think about deeper relationships and building relationships and listening and sharing as acts of profound service in a society where people feel alone, and they don’t feel heard, and they don’t feel listened to, and they don’t feel seen, and they don’t feel valued.

So think about three things. First, reflect on a time in your life where somebody else helped you create and maintain deeper relationships. The second is to describe a time in your life when you helped somebody else create and maintain deeper relationships—when you insisted on honesty and accountability and authenticity and connection. Could be with you or could have been with somebody else. And the third is: how can you use your skills, strength, ability, experience, and struggle to help others create and maintain deeper relationships? How can you help coach others to listen, to share, to recognize the importance of connection, to value other people, to treat other people with kindness and patience, to treat other people as you’d want to be treated? How do you inject that into a world that has far too many transactional relationships and lonely and isolated human beings? The world needs you.