Welcome to Day 13 of 31 Days of Connection! Stop by the first day of the series to get all the links to the posts as they are published.

Connect Through Hospitality

Hospitality is the friendly reception and entertainment of guests. In order to use hospitality for connection, those guests should be people that you are trying to build better relationships with. And though you can offer hospitality to a large group of people, for our purposes I suggest offering hospitality to smaller, more manageable groups so you have the time to have meaningful conversation with everybody.

Hospitality used to be almost automatic – everybody invited people over. Somewhere along the way, this silly idea crept in that our homes must be decorated perfectly and meticulously cleaned with elaborate menu and activity offerings for our guests. What happened to inviting friends over at the last minute to a comfortable, mostly-clean, lived-in home, serving whatever you were going to eat for dinner anyway? Don’t let this the hospitality myths stop you from connecting.

Step on out of that comfort zone and try simple hospitality. It doesn’t need to be extravagant. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t even need to be planned way ahead. It doesn’t have to be a meal. I like what Tsh from The Art of Simple says about it:

What I’ve learned is that hospitality isn’t about the state of my home or complexity of my meals. It’s about showing people I love them in simple ways. With coffee. Or beer. Or by allowing them into my mess so they can see that perfection isn’t a prerequisite to being loved by our family – not for us, not for them.

It means welcoming people in, no matter what.

By welcoming people into your home, you have a chance to really connect and build new and better personal relationships. You might even build better professional relationships if you take hospitality a step further and extend it to coworkers and/or clients.

Day 13 Daily Connection Challenge:
Plan a super simple way that you can offer hospitality to friends or family this week (Coffee and dessert? Afternoon tea? Watch a game and drink a beer? A crafting evening?) and invite them over. If schedules don’t allow, plan for when it will work or invite somebody else.

Thank you for joining me for Day 13 of 31 Days of Connection! I hope you are finding some encouragement to work on connecting more and better with those around you. See you again on Day 14!