How often do you experience loneliness in your life or at the workplace? What if you had a safe space where you could share your experiences while listening and connecting with others? When you’re an introvert, it’s easier to avoid communication, but what if you took the initiative to approach others and form a community where you actively listen and share without judgement?

In this episode of the Legendary Leaders Podcast, we have Cat Moore, an award-winning innovation fellow and the Director of Belonging at the University of Southern California. She's disrupting a national loneliness crisis from Gen Z to Boomers with creative, grassroots-driven innovations in friendship and belonging. She’s also a speaker, activist + consultant across sectors, partnering with leaders from faith-based orgs to tech and healthcare, the military to entertainment to create homegrown ecosystems of belonging using her simple You Belong™ experiences.

She graduated USC summa cum laude in philosophy with a focus on social ethics + community, but her CLICK™ method stems from 25 years of chronic loneliness and community-making in local LA cafes. She is working on her first book, "You belong: finding our way home to each other."

Listen in to learn how to communicate your feelings and actively listen to others to form connections aimed at ending loneliness. You will also learn how to create safe spaces for people to share their experiences and needs within the workplace systems.

Key Takeaways:

• How to avoid loneliness by communicating your feelings to others with similar feelings.
• Learning how to show up for each other so we can live with integrity and purpose.
• How listening to others shapes us into the dynamic of resonance and safety.
• How to transform our habits and become more connected with others.
• How to humanize workplace systems by creating meaningful conversations that build relationships.

Episode timeline:

• [1:13] Intro
• [8:23] How the recent years' events are pulling us away from rest and closer to burnout.
• [11:05] How to be honest and create space to express our feelings when experiencing loneliness.
• [13:55] Cat, on how she created a community of single mothers who supported each other during the pandemic.
• [17:44] The importance of creating spaces to see and value people as who they are, rather than their functions.
• [21:07] How Cat supports people experiencing loneliness as the Director of Belonging, having experienced it first-hand.
• [31:01] How to build confidence and trust, by sharing and actively listening to others.
• [34:34] The negative narratives she held for herself and how her pregnancy experience changed them.
• [43:59] The micro habits we can form and replace our habits of connecting with the world.
• [47:30] The power of initiating an empathetic and caring connection with others.
• [49:57] How Cat learned to form connections and relationships with simple deeds in a coffee shop.
• [55:51] How we can be honest with our experiences and what we need at the workplace.
• [1:03:42] Cat, on what she’s working on to continue supporting lonely people.

Quotes:

• “There’s too much work and when there’s too much work, you get out of balance.”- Cat Moore [8:44]
• “Everyone is in desperate need of places and people where they can show up and not have it all together.”- Cat Moore [27:34]
• “If we don’t feel heard, we have no possible way of moving forward with our lives in integrity and purpose.”- Cat Moore [28:27]
• “The more successful you are, the harder it is to admit where you really might need to be supported.”- Cat Moore [29:42]
• “It’s not about finding the solution for anybody; it’s about being there and actively fully listening.”- Cathleen Merkel [30:34]

Connect:

Find | Cat Moore

Business Website: www.Cat-Moore.com

On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cat-moore-15664462/

MICRO-WORKSHOPS: https://cat-moore.com/consult

NEWSLETTER: https://tinyletter.com/CatMoore

BIO:

Cat Moore is an award-winning innovation fellow and the Director of Belonging at the University of Southern California. She's disrupting a national loneliness crisis from Gen Z to Boomers with creative, grass roots-driven innovations in friendship and belonging. She’s also a speaker, activist + consultant across sectors, partnering with leaders from faith-based orgs to tech and healthcare, the military to entertainment to create homegrown ecosystems of belonging using her simple You Belong™ experiences. She graduated USC summa cum laude in philosophy with a focus on social ethics + community, but her CLICK™ method stems from 25 years of chronic loneliness and community-making in local LA cafes. She is working on her first book, "You belong: finding our way home to each other."

Find | Cathleen Merkel

At cathleenmerkel.com

On Instagram: @CathleenMerkel

On Facebook: @CathleenMerkelCoaching

On LinkedIn: @CathleenMerkel