Connection January, not Blue Monday

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Let’s embrace the spirit of Connection January, not dwell on Blue Monday.

Today is Blue Monday, apparently ‘the most difficult day of the year’, the day in the northern hemisphere when it’s still dark, cold and people tend to feel low.

I know this time of year is a challenge for some people, and yet it’s not only about 1 day- we can all have our good days and bad days, on any day of the year. Feeling low can happen to any of us at any time, and that’s important to talk about.

So rather than focus on Blue Monday, I want today to start Connection January.

Let’s make it the day we talk about possibilities, reach out for conversations, connect with people we’ve been meaning to, and bring us closer together.

Connection is one of my core values, and I am so lucky and grateful that I get to connect with my clients all over the world and this includes recently in France, the US, Sweden, Germany and Spain.

Plus I am lucky to connect with many of you here, through my networks and communities, virtually and in real life.

Today we celebrate connection and explore why we need it in the workplace today more than ever.

I share my insights on how to move beyond transactional communication by being intentional with our conversations and how to create space for genuine dialogue, even in fast-paced environments.

Connection is part of our essential human skills, and is not an optional soft skill.

What you will learn in this episode:

  • Why I want to create Connection January on this Blue Monday
  • Collaboration tools are not the same as connection
  • Invest in your relationships
  • How to create space for conversations in busy schedules
  • Set an intention to create connection
  • Be more curious
  • Listening more and ask more questions
  • Reframe soft skills as essential human skills

Find out more:

Transcript:

Hello, and a very warm welcome to Cultural Communication Confidence with me, Victoria Rennoldson. And, welcome to this episode where we’re talking about connection January, not Blue Monday. So the day that this particular episode is going out is sometimes known as Blue Monday. This is the third Monday in January, and in the year that I’m recording this, 2025, it’s the 20th of January, it’s known as Blue Monday because it is the day of the year that apparently a lot of people feel blue or low. 

In the Northern hemisphere, it’s still the depths of winter. It’s cold, it’s gloomy, and that impacts people’s moods. Now, I don’t doubt this for a moment, and in fact, I can imagine the weather impacts and, the seasons impact many of. However, I do want to challenge this in one way, which is I don’t think feeling low or feeling blue belongs to one day. In fact, I think we have both good days and bad days, whatever the time of the year is, whether it’s sunny or rainy or dark or cold. So I think it’s important to acknowledge it doesn’t just live on one day. In fact, I want to turn this around, and, rather than thinking about Blue Monday, I want you to think about connection January. 

So why does this matter? Well, I think we need to have more conversations about how do we connect to each other. Connection is incredibly important to me. In fact, connection is one of my core values, and it lives and, breathes through everything that I do. So I connect through this podcast. I love creating this podcast for you and connecting with you and hearing how you understand and receive it, what you take out of it. I love connecting through social media, and I have made some amazing relationships and connections that way. I’ve met up with people as they’ve flown into London, or I’ve been on my journeys and had brilliant conversations through my connections and people who’ve been guests on my podcast. I have amazing connections through the clients that I work with, and I’m so grateful and lucky I get to connect with people all over the world. Recently working with people originally from the US from France, Spain, from the Far east, really. I’ve been working with people all over the world, and that is something I’m deeply grateful for in my work. 

But connection isn’t always easy. And in fact, what I find in my work with leaders in global organizations and with teams is that somehow connection is even more challenging than ever. In theory, it should be easy, right? We have collaboration tools. We have tools that allow us to Connect in theory, technically at the press of a button. But I’m sure you’re aware that this isn’t genuine connection. This is just a tool, a method for us to talk to each other. It’s not actually having a genuine conversation that creates that connection. So how do we do this? How do we lean into conversations, particularly as the pace of work and the pace of our communication is speeding up rather than slowing down? I’m going to share a few perspectives on this today. 

For me, I think it’s really important to invest in your relationships to understand that if we’re only ever having transactional communication, if we’re only ever focused on our results and our outcomes from our meetings, we’re not really connecting with the rest of our team, truly, we’re not getting to know them, we’re not understanding what motivates them and we can’t truly understand each other. So I think it means a lot if we take this time to create more of the pauses to do this. And that’s where it starts. We need to create this space for the conversation. Because what I know myself from, equally working in the sort of workplace myself in my previous career, there just isn’t space and time for this. There is so little time at the beginning or the end of a meeting to have a good conversation and it ends up being quite surface level chit chat, surface level small talk. 

So to go deeper, you need to set the intention to, to have that connection, to have the conversation. So I want you to really consider that now, who is it that you want, to have a conversation with? Who is it that you want to have a more genuine connection with? How are you going to connect? Now if you’re in the same physical location, that might be easier. You might be able to think about how and when you might meet up, how you might have a bit more of a meeting which is focused around getting to know each other. But even if you’re in two separate locations and you don’t have the opportunity to travel to each other, you can still create that connection. And in previous podcast episodes we’ve talked about the real benefits of walking and talking. That was a really great episode with Lisa Partridge was my guest on the show and she talked about even being able to do that virtually. So having you both online on your phones, but still being able to walk and talk together and get to know each other. 

So think about how you can do this beyond just sitting in a Zoom or Teams meeting room and get creative with it. But it does start with the intention. Once you have that intention, once you’ve created that space, then get curious, really understand what motivates and interests the other person. Ask lots of questions. Don’t assume that you know your co workers and colleagues well and genuinely listen to the other person. Be super present. Don’t be worrying about the next thing. Really go into that meeting and conversation with no agenda beyond having that connection time. I think this is where we find the common ground. And ultimately, for me, this is all about being human. 

So often this type of connection is seen as soft skills, skills that are almost nice to have but not essential to work. I want to rewrite the script and make this absolutely about essential human skills. I think we need this absolutely more than ever. That’s why I’m really driving for connection. January, not Blue Monday. 

So let me ask you, who are you going to connect with? How are you going to make space for these conversations? And, really importantly, are we connected? Whether you’ve listened to this podcast for the very first time today, or whether you’ve been following the show for a while, are we genuinely connected? Have we made that connection on LinkedIn, for example? Have we communicated? I would love to know if you’ve never reached out to me, what you like about the show and what you have found particularly valuable about today’s episode. 

Let’s make more connections happen. Let’s make this world more connected, and let’s make this January more connected too. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode and I look forward to seeing you next time on the show.

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