Connection Takes a Secure Base

A rip tide caught up two teenage boys on boogie boards, and was sweeping them out to sea. Their family, horrified, swam out to rescue them – and were themselves trapped by that rip tide. All eight were on their way to watery doom.

But when people on the beach realized what was going on, they instantly formed a human chain reaching out into the ocean, and rescued them all. And once those rip tide victims were safe, everyone in that chain just went back to what they had been doing before.

That spontaneous act of shared compassion happened almost a year ago at the public beach in Panama City, Florida. Such a welling up of coordinated altruism among a random scattering of strangers speaks to a capacity latent in all of us, just waiting for the right circumstance: the magic of connection.

Every outstanding leader, every high-performing team, engages in that magic, with emotional intelligence as the driver.

Crucial to such harmonization of effort: the empathy and relationship management competencies.

In our private lives such connection can be in relationships of all kinds from love and parenting to friendship, communities and far beyond. I’ll be part of an exploration of those heart-to-heart links in Chemistry of Connection, a workshop this August at Omega Institute near Rhinebeck, New York.

In the fourth season of this collaboration I’ll join my wife Tara Bennett-Goleman, whose book Mind Whispering in part inspired this program. She shows how emotional patterns, often learned early in life, can either foster connectedness or separate us - and how we can learn to recognize these modes of connection and enhance them, in what she calls an “inner secure base.” 

As developmental psychologists tell us, in a secure base we feel confident, safe, seen, able to take smart risks, and open to others.

And we need a secure base throughout life. Connecting to colleagues, direct reports, coaching clients – or anyone – from this secure base feeling fosters relationships that work. The best leaders, team members, and client managers do this, and get the best results.

Mindful discernment and empathic attunement, as Tara describes, help us track signs of disconnection, where distorted perceptions lead to misunderstandings. Awareness, compassion and repatterning disconnected emotional habits foster a secure base, individually and collectively.

As RJ Sadowski shows with his work in “horsemindship,” a shared secure base can operate across species. Horses, too, want to ‘join up” in connection with their human friends, though their willingness often goes unrecognized. But just a few fundamentals help us spot these cues and forge a human-equine connection – one with direct horse whispering principles for people, with direct implications for relationships at work.

One principle here: don’t put your goal before the relationship.

In a previous round of this workshop a highly successful senior sales executive put it, “I use predatory tactics to make a sale – and then I feel awful afterward.” The most high-performing sales people and client managers, research has found, value continued relationships more than making a particular sale.

One of the most challenging tasks of leadership is conflict resolution - and secure base connection offers an antidote to conflict, and can become a basis for resolving disagreements. Aaron Wolf, a hydrologist at the Oregon State University, has long mediated disputes among hostile nations and groups who nonetheless must find a way to cooperate to manage a shared river or water system. Finding commonalities in our spiritual or emotional lives, he shows, begins to forge bridges across such divides.

In any relationship—from inner, to interpersonal, to global—if we engage from what disconnects us, we’re far less likely to work through our differences. A secure base begins inside us, and can radiate outward to our families, colleagues, and well beyond to build interconnection at every level.

If you’re interested, please join me August 10-12 at Omega Institute, near Rhinebeck, New York for the Chemistry of Connection workshop.