My mom waited in the Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon. The family car that ferried us to swim team practices and where countless sisterly feuds erupted. I ran into the small convenience store to buy gum. I smiled as I slid a dime across the counter. The cashier smiled and added, “A smile is contagious.”
The cashier named a collective power my ten-year-old self hadn’t identified. Children live in their bodies. Less captive of the swirling thoughts of the mind, their emotions easily find outward expression. As a result, they participate in one of life’s greatest pleasures. Human connection.
Beauty, joy, love, experienced for a fleeting moment amongst strangers, trickle into our spirits like rain drops.
Everyday interactions uplift. They impact, beyond the emotional boost. What has transpired becomes an influential playmate to our imaginations, our creativity, our dream making.
Never underestimate what one exchange can do.
I’m dubbing this catalytic community! A catalyst doesn’t create energy — it activates energy that already exists. That’s exactly what these interactions do: they don’t manufacture joy or connection from nothing, they unlock something in you that was dormant.
Look for an opening. Strike up a conversation with the sales clerk at Trader Joes, asking, “How’s your day been?” or wave at the baby in front of you on the plane. Recently, I faced a hard decision. I felt cut-off, so tightly spun, that I couldn’t access those moments that would help me jostle my stuckness.
But then it happened, two school age girls ran down the sidewalk, laughing. The little one chased the older one, who was ways ahead. Their carefreeness cracked my cocoon shell. I could have ignored the opening that urged me to join, but I didn’t. I hopped playfully in front of the older sister, with, “Gotcha!” She squealed with delight, as did her little sister, who had now caught up! Their dad grinned widely at me as we passed. Life had let itself back in.
At Jane Ain’t Done Yet, we share personal experiences and how those help or hinder dream making. BUT, what we write about is also rooted in research. If you want to check out the research, have a look below.
We also put together a worksheet to help you build your Catalytic Community. To access it as well as the worksheets that accompany Jane Ain’t Done Yet articles past and future, become a paid subscriber. Click below to access the worksheet on how to create a Catalytic Community.
“We are better together” is not a tagline. It is the power of the collective.
Research Notes:
1. People wrongly expect that interacting with a stranger will be less pleasant than sitting in isolation → Epley & Schroeder
Epley and Schroeder ran a series of experiments on Chicago commuters and found that people who were asked to have a genuine conversation with a stranger on their train reported significantly higher wellbeing than those who sat in solitude or behaved as commuters normally do — despite predicting beforehand that talking to a stranger would be unpleasant. The result held even among self-described introverts. The cashier encounter Jane describes is exactly this: a brief, unexpected exchange that delivered more than either party anticipated.
Source: Epley, N. & Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly Seeking Solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
2. Positive social interactions outside close relationships compound into lasting mood and resilience → Barbara Fredrickson, Broaden-and-Build Theory
Fredrickson’s research on positivity resonance shows that micro-moments of genuine connection — even with strangers — broaden a person’s momentary awareness and build lasting psychological resources including resilience, creativity, and energy. Crucially, she identifies an “upward spiral” effect: each small positive encounter makes the next one more likely, because it opens the person to noticing further connection. Jane’s observation that a catalytic moment “begets another such moment” is a precise lay description of this spiral.
Source: Fredrickson, B.L. (2013). Love 2.0. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
3. We systematically underestimate the willingness of strangers to engage → Nicholas Epley and colleagues, “Liking Gap” research
Separate from the commuter study, research on what’s been called the “liking gap” finds that after a conversation with a stranger, people consistently underestimate how much the other person enjoyed talking with them and how positively they were perceived. This mismatch — we feel warmer toward the stranger than we assume they feel toward us — is one of the psychological barriers that keeps people from initiating the very moments Jane is advocating for. Knowing the gap exists is itself an argument for jumping in anyway.
Source: Boothby, E.J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G.M., & Clark, M.S. (2018). The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think? Psychological Science.