Witness firsthand the power of camaraderie in my husband's transformative journey with F3—a unique workout group where sweat, laughter, and heartfelt conversations converge. As your guide, Sally Burlington, I'll unravel the profound impact that fitness, faith, and fellowship can have in forging indelible bonds, serving as the cornerstone of our discussion on the art of creating meaningful adult connections. Our latest Winter Well-Being installment is a tapestry woven with personal anecdotes, practical advice on vulnerability, active listening, and the simple yet impactful steps toward deeper, more fulfilling relationships.
Together, we'll reflect back on former friendships and deciding which lessons to pack for our journey ahead. Let's cherish this moment to pause, reflect, and celebrate the connections that make our lives richer and more vibrant.
Witness firsthand the power of camaraderie in my husband's transformative journey with F3—a unique workout group where sweat, laughter, and heartfelt conversations converge. As your guide, Sally Burlington, I'll unravel the profound impact that fitness, faith, and fellowship can have in forging indelible bonds, serving as the cornerstone of our discussion on the art of creating meaningful adult connections. Our latest Winter Well-Being installment is a tapestry woven with personal anecdotes, practical advice on vulnerability, active listening, and the simple yet impactful steps toward deeper, more fulfilling relationships.
Together, we'll reflect back on former friendships and deciding which lessons to pack for our journey ahead. Let's cherish this moment to pause, reflect, and celebrate the connections that make our lives richer and more vibrant.
To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com
Speaker 2:
Welcome back to the Create Harmony podcast. I am Sally Burlington and I am happy, happy, happy that you chose to join us today. So if you're new here, I'd like to tell you about what you can expect from our podcast. So in this place, we refresh your life, we raise your well-being and refocus you on peace and joy. So the way we do that is spending a lot of time on our gratitude practices to celebrate our blessings, as well as discussing how to discover small moments of joy throughout our everyday routines to raise our well-being and make ourselves feel good. So we're continuing through our Winter Well-Being series and this is episode 61. So far during Winter Well-Being, we've discussed deep listening, we've discussed house hushing, we've talked about the step-by-step process of creating a spa right in your own home as a practice of self-care, and we've talked about winter wellness tonics. And then last week we discussed finding new ways to nourish ourselves and looking for opportunities to nourish ourselves in our regular routines. So if you missed any of those topics, you may want to go back and listen to those episodes. So for today, we are going to focus on connections to others as part of our Winter Well-Being series. We talked about this in Winter Well-Being last year and I thought it would be good to revisit it again, because connections between others is so critically important to our peace and joy and, as you already know, connection to other people is one of the ways that we thrive. And over the last few years, our connections first they were interrupted and then they've really been reshaped. So in the many, many social media influences that I follow, I noticed a lot of discussion about how to make more meaningful adult friendships, how we as adults learn to connect with one another in more meaningful ways. And what I shared last year when we talked about this is that I've learned a thing or two about meaningful connections from my husband. So several years ago I'll tell you about how I learned this Several years ago, my husband got involved in a workout group and it's called F3.
Speaker 2:
So the way that it works is that men meet together in the early morning at various locations around town and they hold these workouts together and their focus is three things. That's why they call it F3. It's fitness, faith and fellowship. These are free workouts you don't have to join anybody, as welcome led by volunteers from the group. It's just a really popular thing in our area. So when husbands first start attending. This is sort of how things go. We've talked about this with my friends. They get up way early in the morning and they go to these super hard boot camp style workouts and then they drag themselves home and they shower and at some point during the day they're going to tell you many, many details about how the workout went. And it sounds sort of like that First we did burpees and then we carried a rock, and then we ran with our partners, and then we you know on and on and on.
Speaker 2:
And many of the other wives with husbands that are involved in this F3 have joked about how much these men talk about the things that they do while they're working out. So I have never explained to my husband the different moves that I do in yoga. I'm just saying I've just never done that. But also another part of joining this group is that you get a nickname that you go by and everybody calls you by your nickname. Nicknames are meaningless, but when we are out and about in town, my husband will frequently see another man and say, oh, there's earplugs, or science and math, or snappy. And sometimes he does not even know their real name, only their nickname. That's the only name he knows this person by.
Speaker 2:
And so what I'm telling you is there's a lot about this group that borders on ridiculous, and you're probably wondering why we're talking about this when we're talking about connections between others. But here's the thing At the beginning and the end of their workouts, they take a little time for sharing. Often men share things that they're working through or things that they're dealing with, and they really look to each other for support. The community of F3 men frequently checks out on each other when they seem down or when they've been through a divorce, or some of them have seen each other through stints in a rehab or the death of a parent or a loved one. I mean, this group is a place that they have found deep comfort, and when I look at it from the outside and I think about it, it looks like more than a goofy workout group. Those bonds seem real and it seems like they've maybe figured something out about adult friendships.
Speaker 2:
So I did a lot of soul searching and thought about this, about what is the secret. Why are those connections deeper between these guys? So I'm certainly not an expert, but what I took from my observation is that a connection like that takes some openness. You have to risk yourself, you have to come at the experience, willing to let people see who you really are. And on the other side of that, it takes some follow through. You can't create connections with others If you hear them share their deep, heartfelt info they're being open and you just say, oh, that's nice, and you move on with your day. You have to follow up and you have to pay attention, and all that requires you to get over yourself, so to speak. In other words, we have to shift our attention away from competing to promote our own agendas and our own productivity and our own goals towards truly listening and collaborating with others. And that is going to take work Now, because this is a podcast.
Speaker 2:
This is what I said last year this is a podcast about making small changes. It's about finding simple ways to access joy. So I thought that maybe we should discuss some baby steps that we could take in the direction of this meaningful connection. So the goal is the big goal, if you will is deeper connections, but it's okay if we take small little steps in order to get there. So maybe the first small step we should start with is determining what is the kind of relationship we're looking for. In other words, what do we want this to look like? There's no need for us to go to a whole lot of trouble and adding a lot of to-dos to our lists to build a relationship, only to discover it's really not the kind of friendship that we wanted in the first place.
Speaker 2:
So creating a vision for your friendships to me seems like a good first step. You could journal about this, or you could create a visual, or you can just think about it in your mind. Think about the people you know right now. Are there any of those people that lean in the direction that you would like to go for? A deeper friendship Meaning? Do you have any current relationships that have the qualities you're looking for in a deep friendship? But you just need to cultivate more interaction.
Speaker 2:
Perhaps the answer is focusing on quality rather than quantity, and I wonder if there are ways that we could think about connection that can be done over long distance. Maybe you don't live in the same geographical area with someone who you still want to have a deeper connection with. Could you send a note to them if they live in a different town, if you haven't connected in a while, or could you commit to catching up my phone chat or Marco Polo some sort of way. Use technology as your tool to maintain that friendship, even if they don't live right around the corner. And I wonder if you connected with a friend from farther away, does that bring a new energy into your life? Does that bring a special new blessing into your life? So another thing I've noticed and I talked about this last year is a trend towards conversation decks. These are decks of cards or books that have questions or prompts that get you moving in a more meaningful direction. So I like this idea and I kind of wonder if they would be best in a group setting. We talked when we talked about winter well being last year. I said I can't really picture myself getting out a conversation deck for a one on one coffee, but it might be perfect to deepen the connection between a group. If you're having a group get together, you could get out a conversation deck and maybe you're going to learn something new about someone that you've known for a long time. So try all of those ways to deepen your connections and those baby steps might lead you to more baby steps and before you know it, you've got stronger friendships.
Speaker 2:
So now, as part of our Winter Well-Being series. At the end of our episodes, we are including a Huga habit at the end. So, as you remember, huga is a focus on things that relate to comfort, coziness, and a lot of times it's associated with winter. So, for today, I'm going to encourage you to take a moment to make a list. So this simple Huga habit is a journaling exercise. Now, you may be in a situation right now that you're listening to this and you cannot make a list. You can't write anything down right now. If you are, you can just make the list in your head and maybe later you want to go back and give it more detail and flesh it out a little bit more. But you're going to make a list of all the things you like to do with your friends when you were a kid. So let's shift into our mindful posture. Let's settle ourselves down, let's think about our bodies and think about anywhere you can feel yourself holding tension and just let that go right now. Just release that tension. If you are able, take a deep breath, breathe in possibilities and breathe out gratitude and then, if it's appropriate for you to close your eyes, you can do that now and we'll begin our Huga habit.
Speaker 2:
So think about your childhood friendships and what types of things you did to have fun together. What did you value about your childhood friends? How did those relationships operate and what was good about those connections? Dwell on how those people touched your life. What were the qualities that they had that you value? What were the things you like to do?
Speaker 2:
While you're dwelling on that, is there anything that you can take inspiration from, from those relationships that you can apply to your adult life? Is there anything about those connections that applies today? Or, on the reverse, is there anything about those connections that needs to be omitted? Are there places that you have grown that friendships and connections don't apply for you anymore? Just think it through, and you can continue to think about these connections throughout the rest of your day today. But now we're going to bring our awareness back to where we started, back to our winter well-being on the podcast. Take a final deep breath, breathe in possibilities and breathe out gratitude. If you closed your eyes at the beginning, you can open them now, and now we're all back together. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're so glad that you are here to participate as we journey along through our winter well-being. We're getting close to the end of our series, even if we're not all the way at the end of winter, but we will have another installment next week and until then, peace.