Piloting Your Life: Crew Chats
In Piloting Your Life (the book) I share why it’s so important for us to be intentional about building and enriching our friendships. Friendships are critical for our mental and physical health both now and in the future. Good, solid, reliable friendships can save our lives.
I am encouraging women to build their Crews and get together at least once a month with friends to normalize conversations around midlife and have Crew Chats. What’s a Crew Chat?
The What: I have a vision where all women everywhere feel loved, supported, and inspired to live their best lives. We can’t do this alone. We could all use a flight crew (or two or three!) as we navigate our lives. What if we scheduled regular times to meet up and have conversations around provocative midlife topics? And what if we included some education with those conversations? This is where Crew Chats come into play. Think of it as Table Topics but just for us midlife women.
The How: I see this as a group of four to five (primarily) women getting together every week, every month, or every other month over snacks and bubbly (alcoholic or otherwise) to talk about what we never talk about. These can be women you want to get to know better . . . or ones you already know really well and want to maintain a strong connection with. Pick a Crew Chief for each Crew Chat to lead the conversation and pose the questions. Feel free to come up with your own based on what you’ve read in the news, a pain (or pleasure) point in your life, or just plain curiosity.
Crew Chat Tips: Set a consistent time and place to meet on a regular basis, whether it’s weekly (wouldn’t that be nice?), monthly, or every other month. This is best done in a comfortable and private place.
- Keep the Crew to four to five. Any bigger and it turns into a party that separates into smaller crews.
- Whatever is said at the Crew table, stays at the Crew table.
- Be supportive, and ask probing questions. Go deep!
- Laughter, tears, anger, and vulnerability are encouraged
With Crew Chats, we can kill a few birdies with one stone:
— Build and enrich friendships
— Break taboos and normalize conversations around midlife
— Help us feel less isolated and alone
I’ll be sharing ideas of Crew Chats here in the blog, in monthly Piloting Your Life (the podcast), and on Pinterest.
Create your Crews (you can have more than one), schedule some time to get together, and start chatting and shattering the taboos and misconceptions and loneliness in and around midlife!
Terri
Piloting Your Life: Crew Chats
P.S. If you have ideas for Crew Chats, send me a note pilotingyourlife@gmail.com or add a Comment. TM
