Daniel Coyle

And that's what you find at the core of all flourishing groups, because those are moments when relationships get born, when communities stops being a noun and starts being a verb.

What happened in the mind,

was that after they circled up like that they started self-organizing around big obvious problems like where are we going to sleep let's get a sleeping area organized what should we do with this food how are we going to divide that up they started working on that they developed these rituals at each meal they developed these habits of being guardian angels for each other one would sleep the other one would keep an eye on they'd pair up basically safety buddy

And they developed little games they would play down there.

And so it's not to say it was easy at all.

It was an incredible amount of suffering.

But it was those bonds of community that allowed them, those bonds formed in moments when they stopped.

Not in moments when they did something.

They formed in moments when they stopped, they let go of control, and they really inhabited this mystery of where do we want to go together?

that's the pattern i saw in all of these places they weren't on autopilot like we think of the when you said autopilot in the modern world i really think that's deeply true and our world teaches us to build a lot of habits and to stay in this narrow mode of attention all the time and to automate our lives but what these places show what the flourishing groups and people show is that it's not about automation it's about animation

It's about creating moments where you stop and really see what is happening in life around you and connects to it.

And there's some fascinating, it all sounds very woo-woo in a way, but there's some, what I found in the course of writing the book is there's a ton of super fascinating studies and research and point of view about how our attention operates that really shows the mechanism beneath these moments.

They're not just magical moments of groovy connection that we know each other now.

It's like,

In our brains, we're actually switching from one narrow attention system to a relational attention system.

And those two attention systems are between our ears all the time.

And our challenge is to balance them and turn them on when they're appropriate and create moments of meaningful connection through activating our relational attention.

And the argument that I make in the book is that it's not magic.

It can be done if you learn how to use like awakening cues, if you learn how to manage the balance of how your attention functions and sense when you're in one mode and sense when you're in another mode and create spaces that activate this broader, warmer, healthier relational attention.

It looks incredibly common, A, right?