How to Build Instant Community...
In Front of the Room

By Lee Glickstein

Indigenous peoples maintain continuous physical contact with infants until they begin crawling on their own impulse, usually at six to eight months. As a result, these children grow up without self-consciousness, feeling absolutely at home in their bodies and in their tribe. Belonging is the assumption.

In modern Western childbirth by contrast, we are often traumatically separated from mom, sleep alone and isolated, and are subjected to parenting techniques and controls that undermine our natural learning process. As a result, in the West the sense of alienation and not belonging is epidemic, and so pervasive we are hardly aware of it.

This profound sense of not belonging kicks in big time when we face a group, which is why we are beset, sometimes terrorized, by performance anxiety.

The good news is that when we become aware of this dynamic, and realize that most of our listeners are essentially starving to belong even though it is not visible in their outward appearance, we have the power to place our first and ongoing priority on allowing them to belong. This takes all the focus off our self and onto serving them. By allowing them to belong, we belong.

You can allow them an instant doorway into belonging by simply taking a full, luxurious breath into your own being before saying a word. Speak to one person at a time as you regard them with respect and continue to take breaths between spoken paragraphs. This is a challenge because our own discomfort with silence and our need to do something kicks in precisely when we are the center of attention. But until we know in our bones how to make our audience feel at home in their bodies and in the room, their attention will wander, their listening will diminish, and our anxiety will flourish.

Practicing what I call Relational Presence is the primary way out of this loop. When you develop your natural capacity to be with a group of any size one person at a time, as if they were the only person in the world, you have the secret of creating instant belonging in a world of separation.