Reclaiming Conversations
A Practical Guide to Revive Human Connection in Sheffield
Introduction
Sheffield is full of amazing people with mixed and mashed life experience, sharing memories of being teenagers in decades from the 1960s through to today, our city has gradually evolved, holding on to its character by this mixture of generations still connected in the workplace and through what’s left of our community hubs.
But as our world rapidly moves to the virtual, ever more focused on profit and loss, capitalism is infecting humanity. People are beginning to relate in very transactional ways - they’re focused primarily on the question “what’s in it for me?” and when a strong case can’t be made, the answer is “I haven’t got the time”. Where’s the profit in caring? Our worth is subtly suggested to equal our spending power - so if you’re young, old, disabled, disadvantaged by your race, gender or sexuality, not interested in ‘the grind’ but by genuine human service like caring, creative art and so on, then you’re worth less in this toxic slide of society…
In the very near future, even the ‘super successful’ managers, consultants and professionals will be bitten hard by the arrival of Artificial Intelligence which is creative on demand and vastly more efficient at anything you can do over a remote link… GPs, therapists, educators, customer service, marketing, banking, NHS middle managers, any kind of administration… everything is up for grabs to be initially supplemented and then replaced for pennies per day of compute-power in the cloud.
Basically, anything relying on technical knowledge today, which can be delivered online will be impacted by Artificial Intelligence from now on. You’re already using AI every day (it’s embedded in our power grid, smartphones and any cloud services), it’s only going to become more pervasive and more powerful.
So where does that leave us? What about our mortgage in 5 years if our job as a manager is taken by one person using AI doing 10 managers’ workload? can we create 10 times as much work to occupy human workers, when AI is constantly improving?
So we have a very short time to prepare ourselves for the interesting times ahead - what skills can we improve, that will help us to navigate this scary pace of change coming? What investment of our time will give the biggest reward?
Well, if you’re a professional or a student, learn to use AI for yourself now - it’s actually extremely easy - like google on steroids, instead of typing in a key word and wading through the adverts to find a website on the general subject, which you then search for your answer… you just type the question in English (or Urdu, or whatever language you like) and the AI bot will answer directly in your language. Try it now and bookmark the site here : Perplexity.AI
That’s AI based search - it’s amazing and easy to use. The next thing is Claude.AI - that’s a more conversational chat bot - a free AI assistant to help explain any subject in conversational language. You just talk to it like a friend over a live link in text, and have a conversation on any topic. Your kids will use this for their homework, and then as a super personal tutor - they will in fact lead the way to grasping AI and using it naturally.
You also have pi.AI which is a bit like an AI therapist - tell it your problems and it will listen and help you find a new, positive way to deal with life.
It’s all very exciting right now, if you have and use the tools above - but thinking ahead a few months this is going to be extremely destabilising for our jobs market and nobody can predict how it will pan out. There’s huge potential for all of us to benefit, but those with privileged access to resources will certainly do their best to widen the gap and make the rest of us worse off… that’s the world they’re winning right now, but it doesn’t have to be that way, at all.
I would argue that, for the vast majority of Sheffielders the best investment of your time right now is to develop your human communication skills - they never, ever go out of date. If you learn how to chat with people naturally, with kindness, compassion and creativity then you will be well equipped to deal with whatever challenges life sends, and just as importantly, with a great network of genuine friends who will have your back in a crisis.
So where do we begin? I have a guide in mind, but I realise now that I’ve taken a good chunk of your time reading this intro! I will wait for some feedback, to see if people want to read this guide, but here’s the outline :
Phase 1: Breaking the Ice
Practice the easiest greetings, smiles, listening and observation
Phase 2: Nurturing Curiosity
Get curious about people, take more of an interest and start asking questions to show you care.
Phase 3: Exploring Perspectives
Look for common ground and expand from there to discover other people’s views and life experience. Now we’re into conversation.
Phase 4: Empathetic Dialogues
Get a bit deeper into the more meaningful stuff to you and to them, the emotional challenges, the shared ambitions for life.
Phase 5: Meaningful Connection
Putting it all together into developing life long, meaningful friendships.
I hope that makes sense and gave you some value, please let me know in the comments below, or message me or call me or let’s meet for a cuppa and a chat!
Guess what? I’m working as hard as I can right now to do what I recommend above… I hope it makes sense to you, to do the same. Have a relaxing weekend, hopefully with friends, family and loved ones.
When meeting others I, like some lack some confidence just in case you put your foot in it. Political correctness is one thing, the other is simply if you cannot explain what you mean in their language you may be judged to be anti something when you are quite the opposite. The fear of being judged is gets stronger.
On the other hand before retirement my job meant I had to communicate to other with an expert in my role confidence & also question other especially when I really thought something was just not right.
Meeting with strangers is rather awkward especially when the conversation is something that is not part of your greater knowledge for example like art. I like it but couldn't talk with confidence about it. I am sure many have the same. The newsletter makes sense, the problem is the places to use the skillset which actually is part of the lost natural human behaviour are reducing. It may be because of the internet, working from home is one aspect. When people are in a comfortable environment like walking in the countryside or a pub it generally comes naturally and breaks down barriers. The result is positive. Hope this makes some sort of sense.