Kat Vellos

Episode 106
Brave UX

We Should Actually Get Together

In this episode of Brave UX, Kat Vellos shares with us why we need meaningful friendships 🥺, what we can do to design better ones 🥹, and how to safely navigate uncharted conversational waters 🌊.

Highlights include:

How did a conversation with a stranger change your life?
How do you ‘crack open the door’ to a more meaningful friendship?
What role does company culture play in enabling meaningful connection?
Should we have clear boundaries between our work life and home life?
Why are we getting lonelier when we have so many tools to connect?

March 21, 202301:17:06

Listen on:

Who is Kat Vellos?

Kat is the Principal of Studio KV, the vehicle through which she speaks, coaches and facilitates experiences that help people to create better workplace cultures and to cultivate more meaningful connections with each other 😊.

As the author and illustrator of "We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships" 📘, a book that builds on Kat’s extensive experience as a community organiser and workshop facilitator - she certainly knows a thing or two about cultivating connection!

Before starting Studio KV in early 2020, Kat was a Senior Product Designer at Slack 💬, where she worked in a fast-moving experiment-driven growth team that was making it easier for customers to convert from free to paid plans.

Kat has been profiled in Forbes and quoted in Fast Company for her work as the Founder and previous Community Leader of Bay Area Black Designers 🌉, a professional development community for Black digital designers and UX researchers.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world class UX lab; enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals.
My guest today is Kat Vellos. Kat is the principal of Studio KV, the vehicle through which she speaks coaches and facilitates experiences that help people to create better workplace cultures and to cultivate more meaningful connections with each other.
As the author and illustrator of, "We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships", a book that builds on Kat's extensive experience as a community organizer and workshop facilitator, as well as her deep research into the challenges of developing adult friendships. She certainly knows a thing or two about cultivating connection.
Before starting Studio KV in early 2020, Kat was a senior product designer at Slack where she worked in a fast moving, experiment driven growth team that was making it easier for customers to convert from free to paid plans. And immediately before Slack, Kat was a product designer at Pandora. The music service enjoyed by over 80 million people. In her time there, Kat worked across a range of teams, including new user experience, onboarding, growth, and new devices.
Kat has been profiled in Forbes and quoted in Fast Company for her work as the founder and previous community leader of Bay Area Black Designers, a professional development community for black digital designers and UX researchers.
As a generous contributor to the design community, Kat also regularly shares her wisdom on podcasts like this one, and at events such as TEDx, San Francisco Design Week, Lesbians Who Tech, Rosenfeld Media's Design Ops Summit, and Design for America.
With all that said, I'm now completely ready to learn more about Kat and experience greater health and wellbeing by finding out from her how to cultivate fulfilling friendships. Kat, hello and welcome to the show.
Kat Vellos:
Thank you so much for having me, Brendan. It's really wonderful to be here.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's really wonderful to have you here, Kat, I've very much been looking forward to this, the very first recording of a brave View X episode in 2023 with you on such an important topic, and I know there's a light side and a dark side to this topic, which we'll explore together with. But before we do that, I was really curious about a story you once told that I heard on another podcast, and that is about where you are from and how you left Florida. And I understand that when you were in your mid twenties, you went to start a new life on the west coast. Yes. But before you did that, you visited a place that I believe special to you a park that has a bunch of old trees in it. It's one of your favorite places. And there was a woman there painting. What did she say to you that has stuck with you ever since?
Kat Vellos:
Yeah, this is one of my favorite memories. So as you mentioned, I went to one of my favorite parks, and there was an older woman painting this beautiful scene. The park was is it has a mix of gardens and trees and flowers and little ponds and bridges. It was just a magical place. And she was painting this scene of one of the bridges with a pond, and there's a variety of plants, tropical plants of being Florida. And I walked by quietly and we nodded, and I was watching her and just watching her paint. And I noticed that she was painting not exactly the exact scene, she was adding a lot more flowers than were really there and some more lush foliage. And we didn't talk, but I was just noticing and I was smiling to myself and it was almost like she could read my mind.
She said, I know that my painting doesn't look exactly like this scene, but something I love is that, you know, can do whatever you want in your life. You know, can do anything that you want when you're being creative or when you're making your life. And I smiled and I said, yeah. And she paused and then she said, when I was your age, women couldn't just do whatever they wanted for their life or for their future. So just remember that you can always go and make whatever you want in your life or something. It's almost like she knew that I was about to go on this big life adventure journey and start my life over in a new city. It was kind of spooky actually, but in a really beautiful, warm way. And then I was like, wow, thank you. Yeah, this was really good advice. And we smiled and nodding. She went back to painting and I went, continued my walk. But it was this really affirming message from her and from the universe of saying, you're in this moment of transition and just remember that you can make the painting of your life anything you want it to be.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. There's a beautiful story and it, it's such a serendipitous sounding moment. Like you said, the universe just put you two in that place together, and for some reason, yeah, she felt compelled to tell you that. I was curious if you can cast your mind back to that moment. Yeah. Were her words something that you already knew to be true at that time, or was this quite a powerful and revelationary moment for you?
Kat Vellos:
I think it was something that I knew, I knew it enough to have made the decision in that time to say, okay, I'm going to move across the country. I'm going to go to a new city. I'm going to start over a whole new job. I'm going to do the whole thing from scratch. I knew enough to get myself to that place on my own, and I felt excited about it. Of course, there's also things you feel a little nervous about. You feel sad to leave behind people you really love, but I knew enough to make that choice. And so her saying that really just felt so affirming and encouragement from the universe, from the world to say, yes, I was saying yes to this big change, this big risk. And I was getting this reverberation or echo back that was like, yes, echo into the canyon, and then you hear them Yes. Coming back to you. So that's kind of how it felt.
Brendan Jarvis:
And have you always lived by those words?
Kat Vellos:
No, not always. I really think it took me some time to fully learn and accept those words. And I think it's a practice. I think even today, that was almost 20 years ago, but even today, I'm still practicing that, still reminding myself of that because I think we live in a world that so frequently wants to tell us to be something different than who we are or to live life in some kind of way that's predicted by someone other than yourself. And so I think it's a constant practice to remember that your life belongs to you and you can create it any way you want to.
Brendan Jarvis:
And the choice that you made to create the next chapter of your life was to leave behind a editorial magazine and investigative journalist type publication that you were working at as a, I believe as a graphic designer,
Kat Vellos:
As the art editorial art director there.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, as an art director. And while you've described in the past that the work is meaningful, it wasn't really having the impact to the extent that you wanted to. You weren't able to realize whatever that impact was, and you actually ended up going on to volunteer for a couple of years at AmeriCorps, as far as I understand, I dunno if I'm saying that correctly, but it's a volunteer.
Kat Vellos:
AmeriCorps. Yeah, AmeriCorps for those who aren't familiar, it's sort of like the Peace Corps, but domestic. And it wasn't that I felt the magazine wasn't having it's impact. I think the magazine was hugely impactful and really important to the community, and that's a huge part of why I stayed for so long. But I myself felt like I could be having a bigger impact than doing full-time design in that role. And in AmeriCorps, it's a service, it's a type of national service for those who aren't familiar with it. And there's all kinds of categories of service. You can do disaster relief, you can do education, you can do medical, you can do environmental. There's so many different ways to help and to support and serve in your country. And so I decide, I think I was Googling one day how to save the world or something like this, because I was really, really big in my activist community at the time, and I just wanted to do more. And so leaving my full-time job to be a full-time volunteer for a couple years in AmeriCorps was one way I wanted to do that in my twenties.
Brendan Jarvis:
It seems like a really brave decision and some of the ways that you spoke about then about how you can contribute back to your community, things like disaster relief and working with communities that are impoverished, those sorts of things. You've described your time at AmeriCorps as beautiful, but they also sound like quite confronting aspects of our society that we don't often like to pay as much attention to as we should. So this isn't a choice for everyone. So I was interested in, maybe it should be I was interested in this description that your reflection on it being beautiful, but also my projection that it might be quite confronting. What was it like and what was it that made it more beautiful than confronting, if that is the tension that could exist there?
Kat Vellos:
Great question. I was in a program that was education based. It was based in the public schools and things that were beautiful about it were the fact that at the time I wondered if I wanted to go back to school to be a teacher. And so it gave me a chance to be in an educational environment, assisting in the classroom, but not responsible for the whole classroom. I was not the teacher I was helping out and tutoring and things like that. And so it gave me a chance to see what it was like to work in an educational setting and a public school setting, and to work with kids who typically were struggling or falling behind. That's why they needed tutoring, that's why they needed extra attention. And so it gave me direct hand-to-hand in day-to-day experience right on the ground of what it was like to work in that setting.
And that was beautiful. I mean, the schools I got to be at were just lovely. And as you mentioned, many of them were under-resourced or underserved, and so they needed more support and is, I just think it's such a beautiful thing to feel so connected to your community and contributing to the improvement, improving the lives of other people. And so those were things that for really fulfilling about it. And certainly the things that we're confronting are some of those very same things working with kids who maybe didn't get breakfast that day or all week, or they're living in poverty or they don't quite have enough support already and that's part of the reason why they're falling behind. And just being reminded of those things can certainly be, as you call it, confronting or challenging or just if you're a very heart-centered person, those things can be tough to take in.
But I also felt such a great deal of inspiration around the work we were doing. A lot of that came directly from the work, and a lot of that came from the team that I was on. My AmeriCorps team, there was about 50 or 75 of us. It was a pretty big team that served this public school district and our director was one of the most incredible bosses I've ever had. She was so inspirational and so motivating. And so those were huge part of what made us then able to feel supported to do the service that we were doing.
Brendan Jarvis:
I want to pick up on your boss there being inspirational and motivating. What was it about her and the way she led that made her so,
Kat Vellos:
Wow, she's one of the most incredible people I've ever met. I mean, gosh, I think about her all the time. When I think about what it means to live an excellent life, to be an excellent person, she really embodied a lot of that. So her commitment and dedication to the mission of our AmeriCorps team, which was around supporting youth and supporting the community, was just powerful. And she held herself to a really high standard. And she also held us to a really high standard. Some people felt intimidated by her because she wouldn't let you slide. She wanted you to be great. And in that way, she really, I think, pushed people to be sharp, have your stuff together, and to really do a tremendous job because she used to have this saying that the service we were doing was an awesome responsibility. And the way that she even just encapsulates that is, this is really awesome and it's also a really huge responsibility, so get it right, [laugh] kind of thing. It was very, very motivating.
Brendan Jarvis:
It's making me recall a book that I read recently by Marshall Goldsmith, which I believe is called The Earned Life, and Marshall's an executive leadership coach for some pretty amazing people actually. And one of the things that he talks about in the book is this conversation that, or prompt or more, it's a challenge that can come to us from various people in our lives, which is the conversation of I think you can do better. And that for me was what I was recalling when you were describing the standards that your boss held people to. And those people are so valuable and important to you if you can listen to what they're asking you to do because they can help you to grow and develop in ways that you otherwise may not have.
Kat Vellos:
Yeah, she just really, really believed in people and really believed that everyone was possible and capable of greatness.
Brendan Jarvis:
Kat, as someone who's never volunteered in that way, who's never been as closely connected to, I think you gave the example of children that have come to school and not had breakfast, people that are living pretty challenging lives. I was curious to know where you put that hard stuff.
Kat Vellos:
I think you just hold it in your heart. It's not possible to save the world. No, there really isn't an answer in Google for that, but you just
Brendan Jarvis:
G PT maybe. I
Kat Vellos:
Don't know if that's saving the world at all, but I think you just hold it in your heart and you just do what you can
Brendan Jarvis:
Talk about something slightly different. And that is this idea of identity, and this is clearly a design focused podcast, and design is an identity that I would imagine most of the people listening to this podcast carry. And I read something on your blog, which was posted back in May of 2022, and I'll just you now what you said there. You said, my degree is in design and I've been actively designing for around two decades. I'll always be a designer at heart, but I question how much longer I want to make this one of my primary professional identities. So what is it that's shifted for you as of late that's called into question this professional identity as a designer for you?
Kat Vellos:
Yeah, good question. It's a tough question, and I think it's been slow to be answered. Even for myself, one of the things that has provoked this question of am I still a designer? How do I identify professionally? What does that mean? A number of things have just for me, made me wonder, do I still say that? One is when my book came out and I didn't know what was going to happen, I thought I was going to keep working at Slack and just have a book out, but very, very quickly within a couple of weeks, it was based on the amount of inbound requests I was getting to do different things than being a senior product designer on a growth team. I had to make a choice of am I going to say yes to what the world is really asking me to do right now in response to this book that I wrote?
Or am I going to say yes to the day job that I've been at for a few years? And I chose to say yes to the world, to those invitations and to explore what would happen if I just kept saying yes to that path. And some of that path since then has involved still doing many things that look like user experience design or product design. I've done a lot of consulting and I've worked with different clients on improving products typically that are related to social wellness, which is of course what my book is about. And I've also done a lot of things that I think people in the design community, particularly the digital design community, would not call design. I still call it design. In fact, it's a different kind of experience design when you help create I R L experiences, face-to-face experiences, life design experiences.
To me, this is still design, but I know that for peers and colleagues who are in this box of what it means to be a digital designer, some of them don't see it that way. They may not get it, they may not approve of it, they may not understand it. They might be like, oh, that's something different. I have a very expansive view of design. And so to me it is experience design. It's just not for a website or an app or screen. It's the real experience design. And many people call that facilitation or gathering. It's a different realm. And I know for many other people who are in my facilitation community, my facilitation colleagues refer to what they do as experience design because it is, you're designing an experience for other people and it's not mediated by a retina screen. It's mediated in the world in conversation and interaction and in so many other modalities of connection, right? Of interaction. So I still think of it as experience design and interaction design, but it's just outside of a screen. Don't know how much the design community sees that gets that or respects that. And so then I'm like, oh, maybe I need to stop calling myself a designer because it's not that kind of designer. You know what
Brendan Jarvis:
I mean? Yeah. It's a struggle that design, as amorphous as that term has become, as a community, as loose as that has become, is struggling with a hundred percent the different aperture. I suppose, that you can look at what it is that different designers do, and whether or not there's enough connection between those back to a cohesive body or practice is definitely something that I've heard other guests speak about. At your expansive view on design as fairly evident in some of the things that I've listened to you talk about in the past and also that I've read, you've described design as the art of intentionality. And I found myself reading that and going, yeah, that's exactly what that is. Nodding along. And then part of me was like, I don't know if I fully understand what you mean by that. And seeing as well, I'm talking to you now, I thought would be a great opportunity to ask you to dive into that a little bit more.
Kat Vellos:
Totally. Yeah. When I think about design and the intention and purpose and imagination and planning and research and all of those things that go into designing anything, whether it's a chair, a door, an app, a website, a retreat weekend or a new kind of college experience, let's say. There's so many kinds of things you can design and hopefully if you have a strong design process, all of those different aspects will be a part of it. And so in that way, anyone can be a designer if they bring that level of thought and intention and purpose to what they're doing. They're not just throwing spaghetti at the wall. To me there, there's something about the purpose and the intention that goes into envisioning a type of result and doing everything you can to bring that result into being in how the plans are set up. That to me is that practice of intentionality and that is design.
Now, there's also something else I'm thinking about as you ask me this question, which then says, is the design enough? Right? Because when then does execution and action actually make the thing real? Because, so for example, I love to keep a running list of ideas. Ideas for projects I think would be really cool ideas for things I want to write. I just have more ideas than I could ever possibly complete in this lifetime. But aside from coming up with ideas, it needs to be made real. So you can come up with a good design, you can have a good idea, but if it doesn't then get made real, even in a attempt or in a prototype or in a V1 V two, you never get to V five, whatever if you don't try to make the thing real. Now, I wonder is that still designed or is designed as the first part? There's something to be said for the action and execution part of it as well, and that's when it becomes real.
Brendan Jarvis:
So you acted more real, [laugh] more real, and you acted on this calling that came after the book was published. There's a fork in the road there that you articulated the mm-hmm. Stay as a senior product designer and see where that career trajectory goes or make the brave choice that you did, which is to go, Hey, there's the world telling me something here that there's a need or a group of people that I can serve through the work that I'm doing, and I'm going to go and do that. And you've described yourself previously as an introvert yet, which means that from the way I've heard you describe this is that social interaction can be quite taxing. Yet you decided to pursue a course of purpose where you have regular, deeper, meaningful conversations with people. And so for me, I was like that. How do you hold those two things in your head or your heart at the same time? How do they fit together?
Kat Vellos:
Well, having deep and meaningful conversations with people is not the domain of either introverts or extroverts. [laugh] being an introvert for me and for many introverts, has to do with where and how we gain energy and acknowledging that even though I love deep and meaningful conversations, whether I'm having small talk or whether I'm having a really deep and meaningful conversation, either way, the expense of energy that goes into it is going to happen anyway. I'm going to feel tired after a party or whatever. Anyways, I'm going to feel a little bit, I need a break after a long conversation anyways. And because my energy well is going to go down after a social experience, I want it to be really good because I want it to be worth the drain that's going to come. And so maybe it's a efficiency thing. Maybe I'm just selfish for the good stuff, I don't know.
But since I'm going to lose energy in a social interaction anyhow, I want it to be really, really awesome. I want it to be really good. And I've heard a lot of the introverts in my reader community say the exact same thing to me and to express This is why they also myself get really frustrated with small talk and would rather just not talk than have small talk. That is me very often as well. I'm not shy. A lot of people think introverts are shy, like, oh, what do you mean you want to go to a party? Why do you want to have all these conversations? And it's like, I love people. I love interacting in ways that are fulfilling, and I'm not shy. I will talk to anybody. And so those are some common misconceptions that get layered on to introversion and to say, more than likely the introverts in your life probably do want to have a really meaningful conversation.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. I identify as an introvert as well, although I think I masquerade pretty well as an extrovert. Or maybe I'm somewhere, I'm ambivert. There's also amber or something. Right. Yeah, I'm probably somewhere in there. And I've been thinking about what you were saying in preparation for today, and I have this phrase that I've come to call these social interactions with friends where it never really progresses much past the small talk. And I think about this as a, you are, you're alone, but you're together. So you're alone together. And I've recently ended a couple of friendships cause of this, which might sound a little extreme, but they're just after years, there just didn't seem to be any meaningful benefit going either way for us to continue in friendship. I wasn't sure that there was a friendship there. And this feeling of never really being able to get to real depth with someone, feeling like you've got a longing to know them or for them to know you at a deeper level, but not being able to get there for me was way more taxing than actually having, I believe we are having quite a deep conversation about something.
And so as a result, I, I've backed away from those friends and I was curious, is this, am I alone in this? Am I being rash in my way that I'm allocating my time into who I'm spending with? Or is this something that you've heard or that you've felt yourself that that's quite a common feeling or is at least not just it's not just me that has lived that.
Kat Vellos:
Yeah, I definitely want to let you know you're not alone. And in fact, it is a very, very common experience that many of the adults who find their way to my work tell me is that they know people or they have friends, but they don't feel like they're getting as fulfilling of interaction or conversation or depth that they really, really wish for. It seems like the friendships just stay on the surface. It feels like they kind of just do the same kind of light things and light conversation, but it lacks the kind of depth and richness of a more meaty, like hearty conversation and connection and transitioning from that light place. The image that always comes to my mind is the difference between snorkeling and scuba diving and or swimming, even snor. So swimming, snorkeling and scuba diving. And so a lot of people are swimming and on a good day they can get to snorkeling, but to get to scuba diving, it's tough. Us in real life, you got to take training, you got to go to a class.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Yep, yep. I appreciate this being a diver. Yeah,
Kat Vellos:
Yeah, yeah. And it can be dangerous to scuba dive your health, your breathing, all the bends. I guess I've never scuba dived, I've only snorkeled, but it's this craving I hear for in people wanting that scuba experience in their connection and being like, oh gosh, how do I get down there? All I have is this snorkel tube. I need some help.
Brendan Jarvis:
How much of this do you suspect, if at all, has to do with our realization as we age of our own mortality and that every second, literally we live, we are getting closer to our last?
Kat Vellos:
Yeah, I think it definitely, I mean, do have folks who are a part of my gathering, community reader, community newsletter community, et cetera, from twenties all the way up to seventies. So it's a range of ages. Although I would say the most of the community and the group who are really asking for this are definitely in the middle age of life. So thirties, forties, fifties. And perhaps it is that idea of our mortality. I definitely think about my mortality a lot. Not in the morbid way, but in a way that's like, this is it. This is the only life we're going to have. What do you really want it to be filled with? And what are you doing to make that happen?
Brendan Jarvis:
It's such a good question to ask and regularly, and I really hope for those of you that are listening to this, that you just take a moment now, maybe pause the podcast and actually think about that. Have a good think about that and whether or not you feel like you are living life in the way that's best serving, that very grim, but also a beautiful reality that we're in here for a short time.
Kat Vellos:
Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned your community, and I believe that's called Better Than Small Talk.
Kat Vellos:
Oh, it's taken on a bunch of different names. I like to experiment and create different kinds of gatherings and events and groups and short-term communities. And so I've done a number of different ones over the last many years. In the last few years, I would say Better Than Small Talk was certainly group I was running as I was working on the book. And then I reached a certain point where I was like, okay, I really need to buckle down and finish this book. So I kind of stopped facilitating better than small talk then. But I have made the conversation cards available on the website for anybody who wants to download them, print them out, and go. I also in the pandemic, ran a community called Connection Club, which was for people who really wanted to be more intentional around maintaining their friendships through the art of letter writing, as well as making new friends with the people who came to that group as well on a weekly basis. And I'm working on something new this year called Cultivating Connection. And again, as the name sounds, it's for people who are really wanting to be intentional around cultivating connection in their lives.
Brendan Jarvis:
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of that, which I'm very keen to do, I wanted to zoom out a little bit or maybe dig down a little deeper depending on which metaphor you want to run with. And it's something that you said previously, which I'll quote you again now. Sure. You said, I think that my mission in life and the things that I bring to this work and the reasons why I care about it so much, certainly have been through some of the experiences I've had in the working world. And I'll say also from experiences of not connection, but disconnection. I care about belonging because I know what a lack of belonging feels like. So everyone listening to this, including myself, we've all gone through our own personal hard times, feeling disconnected from people around us, from the world. And I wanted to acknowledge what you were talking about there by asking you, what is it that you have experienced that has become so formative to the amount of energy and intention and momentum that you've thrown behind helping adults, designers but more broadly speaking, human adults to mm-hmm. Create more meaningful connections. What is the thing that gives you the drive to continue to do this work?
Kat Vellos:
It's a mix of really truly believing. Everyone deserves this, and it pains me to know how many people are living without it. I know what it's like to go through moments of disconnection and loneliness. And I also, I'm remembering right now, a time when I really learned that really clearly, because I mentioned I'm an introvert. I've been, I'm very happy in my own company. And for the first part of my life up until my mid twenties, I didn't totally understand what people meant when they said they felt lonely. I moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I knew what it was to feel like a little bit of an outsider to feel like I'm not popular and they don't know me, and I'm the new kid and I'm weird. Okay, fine. But it wasn't the same things being lonely. Cause I was like, I have my books.
I'm cool. I'm happy with that. And then in my teens and twenties, I started to make really, really good friends and what I would call best friends. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. And now I get it. I get it even more deeply. And then later on in my twenties, I had the first experience of really feeling lonely of that craving to be with people who really know me and see me and understand me, and they're available to me when I am available to them. And there's this mutual readiness and willingness to be there to with each other. And I had the experience of being like, whoa, I want that, but none of the people who I want to share that with live near me. They all live in another state or another city and the people that are in my state and city aren't available because they're busy for the next four to six weeks.
I haven't booked time in their calendar, so I'm not going to see them for weeks. And it was like, man, this really sucks. And I really understood what it was like to feel lonely for the first time. And I was like, whoa, what is this? And it was really this kind of late twenties actually, I just feel like it was more in my thirties, was when I moved to the Bay Area. That experience was so illuminating to me that I was like, this sucks. Nobody should have to feel this way, [laugh], because I know how good it can be. And when I decided to use the UX process to research and design and create this book, it was really on that mission of I know it can be better. We can do better for each other. Here's how we can try to solve this problem collectively, together. Here's some ideas, let's try them and see, because it's too important to our health and happiness and it's too important to the success and wellbeing of our society to let this slide, to let 50 to 60% of the population feel lonely on a regular basis, which is what the stats are here in the United States. That's not okay for people and it's not okay for our society.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now, I believe that the title of your book we Should Get Together is actually referencing, and I'll paraphrase you here, this frustration that adults feel when it comes to friendship, because people joke that they're going to die texting back and forth to each other. We should totally get together. And yet we never really managed to find the time or the will to make it happen. And that sounds funny. We can all laugh about that. It's an experience that I feel is fairly universal as far as the people that I know. So I don't want to cast too wide a brush here, but it's fairly well understood that time poorness that we have and that it affects our friendships. Yet there's a really dark side, a much darker underlying reality to the sense of disconnection, isn't there?
Kat Vellos:
And the title of the book is both a play this thing that we just throw around and we just say all the time, even when people don't even mean it, they're like, yeah, we chili, get together, we should get together. And then we don't do it. And it's also the answer to the problem is we should probably get together.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you do have some answers in the book, right? Because you've called it the Secret to adult friendship, and I don't want to be as brash or as blunt to ask you directly what is the secret? But if someone's listening or as curious potentially living in some loneliness, what is a sensible first step for them to take to address that?
Kat Vellos:
The first step is to really pause and first look at yourself and your life and what you need, because everybody has a different appetite for connection. And it's important to clarify, are you feeling this kind of hunger for connection because you're not getting enough interaction with people in your life, or is it because you're not getting the right type of interaction? Does you can have lots of people around you in the wrong type and you can feel lonely in a crowd, or you can have very few people, but it's the right type and you feel so fed and fulfilled even from a small number of people. So it's important to understand, is it that you don't have enough people that you feel close to or that you have access to, or are you not getting the kind of connection and interaction that you need? Once you've clarified that, then look at, well, what are the things that are getting in the way?
And then what are some actions you can take to respond to those particular challenges or places of friction? And so in the book, there's four main buckets that emerged from my research, which were hypermobility, busyness, relationships and family, and difficulty establishing intimacy, which is what I heard you describing earlier with these friends that you only small talked with, and you can get deeper. That difficulty establishing intimacy is a big one. And so a person should reflect and say, well, which one of these or two of these, or maybe it's all of them, who knows? For a lot of us, it is all of them. And those are the things that are impacting our access to friendship. And for each of those categories, I have a wide range of different essays and action steps. At the end of every single section, there's one or two action steps that you can take this week right away if you want to address that particular challenge. So it's not just like, here's all the things that are wrong. There's also a variety of different ideas and experiences which are designed to help you cultivate that kind of
Brendan Jarvis:
Connection. So it's highly practical. It's as much addressing the challenge as it is a sort of practical ways of actually improving the status quo.
Kat Vellos:
It's kind of like a recipe book for mm-hmm. Improving your friendships.
Brendan Jarvis:
We live in a hyperconnected world, and I know that the meanings of words are really important in conveying the intention of what I'm saying here. So what I'm meaning is that we have all the social media and all the technology tools for us to engage and interact with each other when we can't be in person. So how can we have in one hand what appears to be all the means to be more connected than ever before? Yet you referenced earlier that there's 50 to 60% of the population in America, which is growing. This percentage is growing over time, that are feeling lonely and alone, that aren't feeling connected. So how do these two things fit together?
Kat Vellos:
One thing that social media is really good at is helping us create parasocial relationships. And a parasocial relationship is not, I'll explain this. It's not a mutually invested and contributing relationship. So a parasocial relationship for those who aren't familiar with the term is the imaginary sense of closeness that we feel when we spend a lot of time observing and consuming information about someone else's life. The term was coined in the fifties by some psychologists here in the States who noticed that when the rise of popular media and television led to people having a lot more access to information about celebrities and the more that they watched celebrities consumed information about celebrities kind of created this affectionate relationship in their mind, [laugh] about this celebrity that they really admire or thing is attractive or whatever. They were creating this parasocial relationship, which is this likes fault sense of closeness.
Because on the other side, that celebrity might not even know that you exist, they don't even know that you watch their movie, that you read every article that they're in, whatever. And what social media does is it gives us an opportunity to create parasocial relationships with people in our life by passively sharing information and passively consuming information about each other. Maybe not even responding in a comment or even liking it. Maybe you'll give it a thumbs up or like or whatever. But it's not the same thing as having a moment of connection where you both feel and experience that moment of connection. And because the scroll and the feed and the algorithm and all those things are designed to help us just keep scrolling and keep passively consuming this information about each other, unfortunately that doesn't deliver the exact same feelings of fulfillment and growth and connection that happen when you have a real one-on-one interaction with somebody, whether it's a phone call eye contact, a phone call, what's a phone call, a walk, a hangout, a party, any of these other higher fidelity methods of interaction are bound to lead to more closeness than just watching a picture and putting, clicking the heart and then moving on with your day.
I'm not saying it's bad or all social media should end. There's an efficiency to keeping in touch with many people that way, but it's not a substitute. It's not a substitute. It's more like a side dish or a supplement, not your whole meal
Brendan Jarvis:
Almost. It sounds like if you are diet, your connection diet is weighted too heavily to yes, parasocial relationships. And that is actually what drives and feeds that feeling of longing and alone and being alone. And we talked earlier on about you gave the analogy of swimming, snorkeling and scuba diving and the various levels of, I suppose, skill and risk that are required to do those activities in the context of conversation. Right? And there's a wonderful phrase that you've used to describe taking a risk with someone to deepen your relationship with them. And I'll quote you now, you've said you've described it as to crack open the door to having a different kind of conversation. So how do you safely crack open the door? Is this something that you need to do? You need to knock first. What is the safe way to do that?
Kat Vellos:
Yes, definitely knock first. And the knocking is the experience of saying what your idea is, why you think it's a good a, why you want to do it in the first place so the only person understands where's this coming from? And then to make an invitation getting their consent to opt in or opt out of that door being opened. Yes.
Brendan Jarvis:
So we did with the podcast, yes, I message you, I described that I like to get to depth. So this is a consent seeking process.
Kat Vellos:
Exactly. And what that does is if you do it, you know that you're not going to accidentally spring something on somebody that they're not ready for. They're like, whoa, I didn't say I would do that. So stop. And if you get the yes, then what you get to do then is you build up this mutual enthusiasm or mutual curiosity to let's go do this thing together. And one of it doesn't have to be scary, it doesn't have to be complicated. It's really just requires a little bit of vulnerability to self-disclose what you're doing, why you want to do it, invite the other person to join you and make it really easy for them to say yes or no. Let me know if you want an example of that because I have quite a few.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, please. An example would be great.
Kat Vellos:
Yeah. So I'll give one small example and then one kind of larger example, and I'll just use myself as an example. So I once had a friend, I'm still friends with this person, but I had a friend. And in this friendship I noticed that we typically talked about the same few topics and it was fine. I really love our conversations, but I also wanted to explore some other things in our conversations. I just wanted to freshen it up. And one of the things I noticed just from observing her life and her Instagram or whatever [laugh] is she really likes spending a lot of time in nature. I really love nature, but she's more in, she'll do a lot of camping and hiking, and she goes further places in nature than I do. And I realized this was something we could connect about. And I was also curious.
So I asked her one day before one of our upcoming phone calls, I said, Hey, I really liked this camping picture you had posted on Instagram. Would you be open one day to having a conversation where we talk about our experiences in nature? And she was like, yeah, I would love that. And so we had a really lovely chat and we each shared going back and forth, sharing a story or a memory about a time we had a really positive experience in nature. And it was one of my favorite conversations that we've had because the stories that she shared with me and that I even got to reflect on and share stories I may not have told anybody for years were so descriptive and rich and with visual detail that I felt like I was in the place that she was describing to me, and she felt like she was in mine.
And so even though we weren't there in the moment, we got to share this experience of place and memory together around something we both love is nature. So that was a light experience, just a way to shake things up in your conversation and to learn something about a friend that you might know for years and you've never talked about that with them. Another example that was a little bit higher risk, a little bit of a bigger jump was I was working on the book and in my own life, thinking a lot about how to have better friendships and how to have more clarity and connection. And it was the start of a new year, and so I decided to be really clear with the people in my friend and an acquaintance network about my hopes of having closer friendships with them. And so I made a little short list of the people that I wanted to reach out to.
And then I made, I'm such a nerd, I made a survey. I'm like, for the UX people out there, maybe you're going to feel me. I won't feel like such a weirdo, but I legit made a survey. I was like, hello, and welcome to the new year. One of my goals this year is to have closer friendships. And you all of you receiving this email because I love our friendship and I would love to have a closer friendship with you. I would love to hear about what would make that feel really good for you and what you're open and available for. And I will also share what I am open and available for. So I shared this really broad range of here's all the times I'm available, here's the kinds of things I would love to do. Tell me about you. And they could fill out this little three question survey that was like, how do you feel about the amount of time we spend together?
Is it not enough, just right or too much? What kinds of things would you like to do together? The kinds of things we've been doing, or a bunch of new things are stuff we've never done before, and then it's an open-ended field. How do you feel about this? And it was pretty lightweight. Don't send somebody a 25 questions survey, but the idea is to really understand, to not guess or assume what somebody else thinks, but to actually ask them. And it was really illuminating because what I found out was one of my friends that I wanted to spend more time with told me that she felt that we actually spent the right amount of time together. So she wasn't saying anything's wrong, but she was just saying, no, I think this is the right amount. And ironically, she had asked a different friend that same question that she wanted to spend more time with, and they hung out even less than we did, and that person told her that they felt like that was the right amount of time.
So they had a little bit, and that friend felt like it was enough, and me and her had a little bit more and I wanted more, and she felt like that was enough. So it's like you got to be humble. Try not to get feelings hurt. The goal is clarity. The goal is to learn, and data is just information that helps you decide what to do. So I knew not to spend a lot of time reaching out to her more than I was, and to invest more in the friend maybe who responded and said, I want to see you so much more and here's all the things I want to do. I was like, cool. I know that you're a willing and available audience who actually is craving more than we're getting. So that's something you can do in your friendships. If you want to get super nerdy and data driven about it, try to make it warm and inviting so it doesn't just feel like a robotic survey, but if you have friends who are playful and into nerdy things like asking each other survey questions, you can do that.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, we talked a bit earlier on about how design is the art of intentionality, and it's pretty clear what the intention behind sending someone a survey like that is, or even in the first example that you gave of just asking your friend if they would be willing to have a conversation about a fairly, my assumption here is a fairly safe aspect of their person that you hadn't previously explored the outdoors. How do you mitigate the risk if there is any of coming across to you? You spoke robotics, so making it warm, but coming across with two overt and intention is there any risk of ruining the romance or this notion that we have around friendship of how it's this lovely evolving, implicit relationship that should unfold and beauty and splendor and everyone gets each other and connects really well? Is there a calibration per friend that you have to consider when you are making an approach like that or how you make that approach?
Kat Vellos:
Great question. Have you read the Five Love Languages?
Brendan Jarvis:
No, but I've been told Mine is the small acts of service or something to that description. So I've heard of
Kat Vellos:
It. Your question reminds me of that because the idea there is that there's five different love languages, and when somebody is doing or speaking your love language, you're bound to feel much better, more seen, more firm, more love, more cared about than if they speak to you in their love language. And so when you think about taking this risk to make it more over overt or to make it more visible or public or transparent, for some people who maybe, as you said, you used the word romantic who have this romanticized idea of friendship, things should just happen. It should just happen magically, right? Sure. It's great if things happen magically, but it's not a guarantee that that's going to happen. And for other people, they're more bound to get excited if they can actually be a part of the planning process. And the planning process might just be as simple as a very short conversation that gets at clarity and mutual goal and mutual enthusiasm and really understanding what is it that you want? Here's some ideas that I have too, and how can they overlap? And I'm the kind of person who gets glad about the Clarity [laugh] because it takes away the guesswork. It takes away this idea of you got to be psychic and read somebody's mind to know what do they want out of this friendship? What do I want? Are they disappointed? I'm disappointed. It just takes away that guesswork and the kind of mental effort just spinning your wheels that you have to do if you just talk about
Brendan Jarvis:
It. There's an episode recently on a podcast called Hidden Brain, which came out just private.
Kat Vellos:
I love Hidden Brain.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, right. So you probably heard of this one, which was just before the holiday season. There was an episode on looking at gift giving.
Kat Vellos:
I love, I actually linked to that in my blog post, my gift Giving. Yes.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's similar to what you're saying, right? It's like rather than make up a story about what you think your dear loved one or dear friend would like as a present for their birthday. Yeah, just ask them and people worry that it ruins the mystery in the magic of Giving a gift. But according to this episode, anyway, it was one of the most effective ways of ensuring that what they received was something that they valued and thought well, of the giver, in which case it would be you.
Kat Vellos:
Yeah. People think that asking what somebody wants as a gift is not thoughtful. You're supposed to just come up with a thoughtful gift just by thinking in your own head. But frequently the research shows that if you give them thing that they actually truly want, that feels like the most awful thing to do because you check to see what they really want.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Almost like it seems like it's too good to be true, but it it's actually what works. Yeah. We were speaking about design as the art of intentionality. There's also a common reference to the art of conversation and human relationships in particular. Friendships are really based on conversation, and we've been talking about in our conversation about how do you get those conversations to a level, level of depth that is mutually wanted. Yeah. There's also risk though, that we've acknowledged in doing that. So as you get further into uncharted territory with someone, there are things that can go wrong. So how do you navigate the tension between not going far enough and therefore not having a satisfying emotionally and intellectually satisfying conversation with someone to going too far with someone and then being perceived as overly invasive or at putting, putting in jeopardy the friendship as a result of pushing things too far? How do you do that? Well,
Kat Vellos:
I definitely think it's something that takes thoughtfulness and intention and a carefulness, but it's something that if it's coming from this place of warmth and the careful caring in a way, you're less likely to make mistakes and the other person is more likely to understand that if you make a mistake, it's just a mistake. It's not necessarily coming from this nefarious place. One way to do that, as I mentioned before, is to check for consent to ask, Hey, I've been wondering how open if you and me are friends, Brendan, right? And we normally, let's say we normally talk about work and the TV shows and what we're cooking or whatever, pretty easy light stuff, but I feel like talking to you about something more deep, I might say, Hey, Brendan, I know we normally talk about work and TV shows and what we're cooking, but I'm curious, how open are you to talking about relationships or your history, your past, or spirituality?
Are those kinds of things, stuff that you're open to talking about, you might say to me, yeah, I'm so glad that you asked. I would love to add those things to the stuff we talk about. Or you might say to me, I don't really think about that stuff. I don't really appeal to me. I don't really want to talk about that, or It doesn't really cross my mind. That's fine. Either answer is fine. I'm just going for clarity, and if I get a sense that Brendan doesn't really think about this, or he is not really someone who wants to talk about it a whole lot, then I know not to spring it onto you or bring it up to you. I need to go look someplace else. Or you might totally surprise me and be like, oh my God, I'm so glad you said that.
I have been wanting to have deeper conversations with you about some of this stuff, and I didn't know if I could bring it up with you, but I would love to talk about that. And here's another one, two, or three things that I would love to chat about. What do you think? It's kind of creating a menu together of the conversation that gets to live in your friendship, and it's just checking to see, oh, do you [laugh] a dietary restriction around talking about finances or something? Versus is this something that you're actually excited about or interested to talk about
Brendan Jarvis:
Too? It's almost like there's a body of methods or techniques that you can bear in mind and use, yet, it's almost like an interview, like a user interview where you might have your discussion guide, but you don't go from question one to question 10 in order and you leave space for questions that you hadn't even conceived before you start talking.
Kat Vellos:
Exactly.
Brendan Jarvis:
Exactly. You have to use your sensibilities, right? This is an exercise and sensibilities as much as in technique.
Kat Vellos:
Yes, absolutely.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now, you talked earlier on about the, I think it was a Cigna research that cited that 61% of Americans felt lonely on a regular basis, which was actually up from the year prior, which was in 2018 where it was 54%. So this is marching on, and that was prior that 2020 report, which was on 2019. Data came out before the pandemic, so things weren't looking good heading into, and you've talked about how the workplace, and I think this was mentioned in the report, which is where it come came from, is the workplace is one of the places where people place their highest hopes on making friends. And it makes sense to me. If you think about our education as children, we make a lot of our friends and the place that we spend a lot of our time outside of our homes, so it's natural for that to flow onto the workplace. But it's pretty sobering to think that those stats, I imagine, are fairly well reflected across, say, where I live in New Zealand. There'll be a similarity there for sure. We live fairly hectic lives here as well, and I know every country's got its unique points, but there will be some symptoms that are shared across different countries. Is it ironic that all this loneliness is happening at places which we call companies?
Kat Vellos:
Yes and no. Because in the thing that's ironic to me about it is that we spend so much time, typically at a company with coworkers who could theoretically become your friends. Sometimes they don't. And when people reminisce about how easy it was to make friends in their youth, they're like, oh, it was so easy in school, whether it's grade school or high school or college, university, they're, it was so easy because you just spent all this time with these people. You were around them all day long, and of course you
Brendan Jarvis:
Were in your company,
Kat Vellos:
You were in their company all day long, and of course you didn't have all the adult responsibilities, so you had all this free time after school, the weekends, clubs, whatever,
Brendan Jarvis:
No day drinking. Yeah, those kind of things.
Kat Vellos:
[laugh], right? And then in adulthood, it's like you spend all your time in the company of these coworkers, but people don't always make the leap to, yeah, this your new classmates. Mm-hmm. Maybe make friends here.
Brendan Jarvis:
Almost like a pretense, right? There's an armor, there's almost like suit of armor that we wear in commercial settings. There's a, for some reason, I don't know what it is, if that's something that you've experienced,
Kat Vellos:
It is something I've experienced, I used to call it office theater where you have to perform your role as this job, as this person, as this job title. And there's expectations or assumptions about what it looks like to be in that role. What people in that role say and do, how they act, they dress, oh my gosh, the [laugh], the anxiety I've heard from designers describing the perfectionism that they encounter and the fear of judgment that they encounter in the workplace is unreal. And so there's this sense of not always getting to be yourself. And if you don't feel like you can be yourself, it's going to be really hard to create authentic feeling friendships because you're going to be so self-conscious and anxious all the time about being judged or rejected. And gosh, is it hard to make a real friend when that is the mood and vibe that you are rolling in?
Brendan Jarvis:
And you often hear companies and managers talk about their want for their people to bring their whole selves to work. Yet it seems that it's more like there's more to that. It's more like we want you to bring your whole selves less the parts that we prefer you'd leave at home, the kind of things that we are not comfortable addressing or dealing with those dimensions of people's personalities that people might not have the skills or the sensitivity to really embrace. So should there be clear boundaries for us between our work lives and our home lives, is it best or even safest for us to keep some of that stuff to ourselves?
Kat Vellos:
This is a very individual decision. Definitely. There's not one answer. For some people, the boundary between work and the rest of their life is a brick wall. They're like, does not cross is no door. Do not ask, not enter [laugh] poker face. So face. And that is it. They just want to be like Clark Kent, man of mystery. You will never know that he is actually Superman. Yeah, you will never know. The line is very firm. The boundary is there. And on the other hand, there's people that live their life like an open book and want that boundary to be very porous and flexible, and it's a fairy individual choice. And it can even vary from company to company. You could be a hard line boundary about work and life in one place, and then at your very next job experience, a totally different culture, different group of people, different life situation, and you might be completely open.
So it's a super personal and it's also, I think super timely, like condition based situation based. And it's okay to let yourself be flexible about that. And to get even more granular, you might decide that at this job, at this company, you have a very firm boundary between your work and the rest of your life. But with that person and that person, you feel super safe. And so you actually flex that boundary a little bit more in the safety of your friendship, your colleagueship with that one or two people. It is also okay to do that.
Brendan Jarvis:
You've addressed a very important, and what could sometimes be an uncomfortable area of workplace culture as it relates to people that you've described as tokenized or alienated. And in terms of their ability to feel comfortable letting that armor, letting that shield down. You've said, I just want to quote you now because it's much better in your words than the words I'm trying to find. Sure. You said many tokenized or alienated folks worry that they'll be passed up for a promotion if they challenge the people in charge, they worry that they'll be told that their lack, that they lack executive presence. If they share their feelings and emotions, they're afraid they'll get ostracized for pointing out things that need improvement. Now, if you look, this is me now, so if you look at the numbers of women and people of color in executive positions, they'd be right, those people to feel that way, to not feel brave enough to voice those feelings and opinions because they're already being excluded and they weren't going to get picked anyway, were they?
Kat Vellos:
Yeah. It's real. And it can be especially emotionally distressing to be in a situation where you feel like the rubric is different for different people, where if a woman shares her emotions or frustration about something at work, she's seen as not executive presence, too emotional, too
Brendan Jarvis:
Hysterical,
Kat Vellos:
Hysterical, whatever. But if her colleague who's a man shares his frustrations or emotions, he's seen as being really passionate about the work and having a really strong vision and having a strong backbone and standing up for what he believes is, is totally different rubric. It's a totally different measuring stick of how they're being judged and evaluated. And this happens all the time. It happens across race, it happens across gender. And it's one of the hugest frustrations that I've heard from the designers I've interviewed about their experiences of loneliness in the design industry, loneliness and connection that many of them talked about connection too. But this was one of the things that leads to people feeling really isolated in their company and even wondering if they need to stay in the design industry, wondering if it's a design culture problem.
Brendan Jarvis:
I want to come to that, but first I want to hone in on something that I found quite shocking that you talked about, and it relates to this sense of connection that different people feel at work, and it's some research that you'd reference by LinkedIn in Future Forum, which found that black workers have felt a 50% boost in their feelings of belonging during the pandemic pandemic while working from home.
Kat Vellos:
Yes.
Brendan Jarvis:
So
Kat Vellos:
That's shocking to you.
Brendan Jarvis:
It is shocking to me because come, well, because what that suggests is that when black workers are in a physical workplace that they feel less connected, yet when they're able to work in their own environment, they feel more connected. And to me, those two things, they shouldn't, in my perfect world, they shouldn't really fit together. My assumption, my operating assumption is when you are with people in physical proximity with them you should feel a great sense of belonging connection. So it didn't stack up for me, and I wanted to ask you about this. Why is that?
Kat Vellos:
Mm-hmm. What this illuminates is how much of a silent and highly invisible struggle black folks like myself and queer folks like myself and any other kind of marginalized group who is going to a workplace where they don't feel totally supported to be themselves, to feel encouraged, to feel like they're in a diverse and supportive, encouraging environment, how much the silent and invisible psychological pressure is to be in that space and act like everything is fine. And when you have the freedom, as we saw in the pandemic with folks almost instantly, suddenly going to so much remote work, suddenly that pressure is alleviated to encounter microaggressions or to deal with actual aggressions in the workplace when that is alleviated, it was not a surprise to me at all. That feeling of ease and belonging and just getting to relax a little bit from the psychological strain of like, okay, here we go. Here we go again into the office. What's going to happen today? It is a constant strain and it's usually invisible to people who are not a part of that marginalized community. Again, whether it's someone who's dealing with a disability, someone who's from a marginalized and sys historically systematically excluded group, whatever it might be, it's a learning opportunity for everybody else to get some empathy about what it's like. [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
A huge folks, it's huge. It's a huge indictment on what we think we are doing when we're at work. If we are not part of one of those groups, it's quite disturbing and it's obviously far more disturbing if you are a person from one of those marginalized groups. So don't get me wrong here, but it's really disturbing for me to consider that it's actually better for black workers in this case to work from home for their mental health than it is for them to work in a physical work environment with people, I suppose, like me that aren't from that group like that. To me, that is very, and it's probably quite rightly so, very disturbing and very uncomfortable, something for everyone to think about.
Kat Vellos:
Yeah, I mean, the ideal situation wouldn't be to have black workers work from home a hundred percent of the time. The ideal situation is to actually create a work environment where people feel really safe and at ease so that they want to go to work and they're not subject to the onslaughts that make that a challenging situation based on race, gender, all the other others, let's say. And so that's the ideal situation is to actually create healthy workplaces where that is not the thing you fear. So that going into the office is actually the best situation. In the absence of that, then for some people, the best situation is actually to work remotely. And I talked to, when I did this survey of all the designers to see how they were feeling during the pandemic related to connection and disconnection. This was something that I heard. Also, there was a designer I interviewed who was the only woman on her team, and she felt more inclusion and belonging working at home than she did in the office with a bunch of guys. And she was the only woman, and she often felt left out and not always respected or on the same playing field. And it was equalized when it was like, okay, we're all on email and Slack or teams or whatever it is, and this is it [laugh]. Like
Brendan Jarvis:
I can't help but wonder if it's actually better or if it's just that it's not present, that it's just buried somehow. Maybe it's almost like you're not subjecting yourself to that environment, so therefore you feel more connected when, as you've said, quite rightly so. That's the environment. That's not the problem. And the ideal is not to feel that way there. And you talked about fair and fair is a fairly universal human emotion. And from that survey that you conducted with designers, I think it was over 150, and these were designers that worked in enterprise, so in teams, not freelancers, people that were in a work environment, you found that fair is one of the main drivers for people feeling lonely at work. And it's this fear of rocking the boat, finding themselves in the water without a life preserver or at the very worst with someone holding their head under actually being actively terrorized to some degree at work by your colleagues.
That's a very real emotion you've suggested that we need at work for people to feel safe enough to speak candidly, whether they're complaining or whether they're just checking in or joking with colleagues. And to do that, they need to have, there needs to be some rope, I suppose, extended for people to get things wrong because in a culture where you're not allowed to make any mistakes, going to lead to people not venturing out and being willing to take risks. At least that's my assumption. So what is your observation of the workplaces that you've been in, the ones that you in conversation with, the people you're in conversation and where they work. Do you get a sense that perhaps people are retreating into themselves to too much of a greater degree currently we're being too self-censoring or not willing to take enough risk to actually develop those workplace relationships that will help appease that sense of loneliness? Is there something like that going on, or is there something more complex or different that is actually driving that fear and there's a better solution to it than just taking a few more risks and conversation?
Kat Vellos:
A lot of it comes down to the culture that's created inside the organization. And just as we gave the example earlier of a one-to-one, a small group, a larger group, it's the same within a company. There's the overarching culture within that company and what the true [laugh] values and characteristics are, even if they vary from what the printed stated ones are on the wall, and then there's the subculture, then that typically follows within a specific department or within a specific team with your actual, the people you work with day-to-day, shoulder to shoulder. And that can have also a very different culture than the larger culture as well. It can be more toxic or more perfect. And so that experience of who you're working with closely day-to-day tends to have a higher impact on people's experience of what they think that company is like and how they would rate that company than the far away values on the wall thing. It's what is your day-to-day experience with the people that you work the most closely with?
Brendan Jarvis:
So it's highly contextual, so it's not appropriate to just suggest that people need to take a little bit more risk. They have to think about the risk that they're talking, taking in conversation with others in the context of the subculture and the broader culture that they operate in.
Kat Vellos:
And for the people who are the people managers, they have such an awesome responsibility around creating the culture that is going to be the most supportive for everybody who is within their purview, their realm.
Brendan Jarvis:
Okay. I'm mindful of time. We are coming close to
Kat Vellos:
The end. Oh, we're so close
Brendan Jarvis:
The end. So close end. So I want to quote you one last time. Sure. Before we bring the show down to a close, and it's referring back to an interview that I read that you gave on arts.com and you said, when you are young and early in your career, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that in order to maintain your professional reputation, you can't rock the boat. That you can't say anything that complicates or slows down the process, but that kind of self-censoring is damaging to the soul and the business and the worlds we are trying to create. I wish I knew at the start of my career that it is always a better choice to open your mouth and take that risk. I know now that I am grateful every day for the freedom and empowerment that this knowledge gives me. So which boats do you regret not rocking or not rocking sooner, and which boat do you want to rock next?
Kat Vellos:
Oh my God, what an awesome question. One boat I regret not rocking sooner was actually sticking up for myself more in situations where I didn't or I just went along or let myself get pushed around a bit and the boats I want to rock next. Wow, that's a good one. I feel really happy in the last few years ironically, since working for myself. It's a lot easier to say what you want to say when you're your own boss. I'm in a really happy place right now with that. I don't really feel like a lot of boat rocking. I need, honestly, I feel like the things I share right now many of which you've quoted from my talk and the blog post on my site called the Other L Word, it's about loneliness in the design world. Honestly, I feel like that stuff is kind of boat rocky for folks particularly for companies that aren't having this conversation.
But to me, it is absolutely worth it because so many designers who have interviewed for this article and this talk and for this part of the work that I do feel have told me directly that they appreciate that I say things that they don't feel like they can say. The risk for them is too high to say it, and I understand it and I empathize it with it, and I've been there before. And so it feels like an awesome responsibility that I get to say those things now on their behalf and on behalf of the me that I wish had somebody who would've said it for me, then [laugh]. And I hope that it just helps make a healthier, better design community for everyone.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, Kat, thank you for saying them. Thank you for rocking the boat. You've certainly given me plenty of important things to think about, and I have no doubt that you've given those to the people listening as well. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
Kat Vellos:
Thank you so much for having me here. This was a wonderful conversation.
Brendan Jarvis:
Oh, you're most welcome. It's definitely been my pleasure. Kat, if people want to connect with you and find out what you are up to, you've got many amazing things going on, including I believe there's a new 2023 calendar that's come out.
Kat Vellos:
Yes!
Brendan Jarvis:
What's the best way for them to connect with you and get in, get all those good things in their newsfeed or wherever they may want to get them?
Kat Vellos:
Here's the calendar to having better conversations that, and all of my other tools for connection are at, WeShouldGetTogether.com. You can also hop on my newsletter there. I would love to invite you to the gatherings and workshops and events that I do, and so that's all at WeShouldGetTogether.com. If anybody wants to collaborate or work together or have me come and give a talk at your ERG or whatever it might be head to KatVellos.com. That's my booking site and there's more information about me there. And I am also on Instagram, but I'm using social a little bit less this year. I'm really, really doubling down on the deeper, stronger conversations, and that's typically with the people in my newsletter. So I would love to connect and I would also be happy to connect with you any other time. Brendan, thank you so much again for having me.
Brendan Jarvis:
Thank you, Kat, and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've been covering will be in the show notes, including where you can find Kat, her book - Let's Get Together - the Better Than Small Talk card decks, the 2023 Better Conversations Calendar and all the other things that Kat's mentioned and we've covered.
If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe and just tell someone else about the podcast if you feel that they would get value from these conversations.
If you want to reach out to me, you can find my LinkedIn profile linked to at the bottom of the show notes or just search Brendan Jarvis on LinkedIn, or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz, and until next time, keep being brave.

Kat Vellos

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