Leaders' Playground

15: Rooted in Connection: How trees can teach humans to build stronger connections

• Irene Salter, PhD

Share episode

The other day, my husband and I were looking at the impact of a recent heat wave on the trees near our property. Some trees were doing okay, others were dying. Why? We consider access to resources, the type of tree, the amount of shade, but ultimately, I think it comes down to the connection between trees -- whether they're all alone in a field or in relationship with others.

Just as trees thrive in connected communities, so do we as humans. The Harvard Study of Adult Development shows that connectedness is key to health and happiness. There's lots of other data as well from workplaces and neighborhoods. In this episode, I’ll share practical strategies for deepening your relationships and building a supportive network, both at work and in your personal life. Join me to explore how nurturing our social ecosystems can make a real difference.

Resources:

For complete show notes, transcript, and free downloadable resources go to: https://www.irenesalter.com/podcast

Speaker 1:

Welcome back to the Leader's Playground. Did you know that trees can talk to one another? They do. From the outside, they look like these totally stoic, independent solo entities standing alone in a field, but they talk to one another. They're connected underground and through the air. The ones that thrive are connected and, lo and behold, the same thing holds true for people too. So in this episode we're going to go into the science of connectedness, both in trees and in people. Here we go. Hi, thank you for listening to the Leader's Playground, the podcast for leaders who wish their work would feel more like play. Leadership can be lonely, overwhelming and just plain crazy-making. We are here to rekindle your spark. I'm Irene Salter, your host and a PhD neuroscientist and science educator with a passion for helping people thrive, not just survive. Please click that follow button so you don't miss a single episode.

Speaker 1:

Every day, my husband and I tend to go for a walk in the morning, and recently there's been a couple heat waves and we were noticing that a couple of the trees on our property were really suffering from the heat. Honestly, I think some of the trees aren't going to make it. My husband has been providing extra water to certain trees, especially the ones closest to the house, but even with the extra water, several of them were really sunburned. Most notably, I think that five big, beautiful, mature oaks on the flats might not make it. My question, though is it really access to water that's driving the problem? We were looking at some other hypotheses as we walked. See, four of the five are blue oaks, and those blue oaks thrive under very different conditions than the other oaks that happen to be on our property. There's valley oaks, scrub oaks, live oaks. Maybe it's an identity thing unique to that particular species. Maybe the blue oaks just aren't as robust and drought tolerant. I noticed that the ones most densely clustered together on the hillside and those in the far corner across the dry creek bed are actually doing okay. The ones that are standing solo on the flat meadows, those blue oaks they're farther from other trees. Those were the ones that were suffering the most, so a different hypothesis could be. It was the ones that were clustered together, providing shade for one another, that allowed for them to survive better. The ones that maybe were all alone in the sun had to deal with the heat on their own, and that one could be the problem. So maybe it's the shade, which also made me think of Suzanne Simard.

Speaker 1:

She's the author of a book all about forest ecology, and what she and the other forest ecologists discovered was how trees communicate, that they actually talk to one another. In just the last few years, astonishing new science has shown that trees aren't just standing solo, but actually interconnected with their neighbors. Both plant and animal Trees will share information like hey, there's some empty space over here, or watch out for the bark beetles. The trees also share nutrients like carbon dioxide, water and sugar. Trees are surprisingly talkative, using all sorts of different kinds of communication channels they use electrical signals, they use airborne molecules and there's even this vast root network supported by fungi. It's so cool. Suzanne and others found that trees that were isolated from one another don't survive well, while those with rich, interconnected networks were far more resilient to stressors like heat. So maybe my dying oak trees were dying because they were lonely standing in a meadow by themselves, unable to communicate or share nutrients and resources with their neighbors when they needed it most.

Speaker 1:

Now, my husband and I didn't reach a conclusion on that walk, but all of those hypotheses. Is it water supply? Is it species differences? Is it the shade? Is it the sharing of information and nutrients. All of those questions were bubbling in my head when I got back to my desk. I started on our work and got on with my day.

Speaker 1:

One of my appointments was with a leader who was feeling isolated and lonely. Connection and belonging and collaboration means so much to her, but she was struggling to find any of that feeling of connection right now at work, given some recent staffing changes and some conflict with a co-worker. So, maybe not surprisingly, all of those same hypotheses came to mind. Is it that she was lacking water or, in her case, supplies? Did she lack money, support or time to be able to make the connection she wanted? Could it be a species thing, an identity thing, something unique to her character or her DNA, like the difference between a blue oak and a live oak? Could it be an issue of shade, whether she has the opportunity to rest and delegate? Does she have to hold all the responsibility on her own? Or, lastly, could it be a connection issue Somehow, the ways that she shares information and resources and can do things together as a team within a group? Now, the actual resolution my client and I came to is not important and anyways it's confidential, but it was so interesting to me the parallels I saw between a barely surviving tree on my property and a barely surviving tree on my property and a barely surviving leader in my practice.

Speaker 1:

There's many hypotheses out there about what the actual problem is. Each one leads to a slightly different solution. How can we choose? Well, there was a group of scientists who were facing a similar conundrum. They started a study back in 1938. It's called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. They began with 724 participants, all men at that time but then those men married and they started studying their wives and then they started having kids. So they started studying their children, then their children's children. They watched all of these people, all of these families, fall in and out of love, land jobs, lose jobs, grow kids, grow grandkids and eventually die.

Speaker 1:

And the big question behind it all what is it that leads to health and happiness? Is it a supply issue? Is it access to education, jobs, money, support systems? Is it an identity issue, something like skin color or IQ? That's part of who you are? Is it a shade issue, like how much responsibility a person has? Like how much responsibility a person has? No, none of those were the key, and it wasn't blood pressure or cholesterol, or obesity, or exercise or smoking or any of those other things that lead to health and happiness. The thing that led to health and happiness was connectedness.

Speaker 1:

The number one predictor was the quality of relationships. Okay, fine, sure, maybe good relationships make you happier. Do they make you healthier? How could they make you healthier? How does having good friends or a great marriage prevent heart attacks or type 2 diabetes or arthritis or cancer? How could that possibly work? Or arthritis or cancer? How could that possibly work?

Speaker 1:

The answer, it seems, is how our relationships help us navigate stress. Now we're all going to get, naturally, stressed out. There's going to be fights with our colleagues, a huge deadline, unexpected equipment failures, there's going to be trauma, there's going to be death in the family. There's going to be all sorts of things, and any one of those can send us into fight or flight mode. That's normal and natural and just part of what it means to be alive. But we will come back to baseline with the help of our friends and loved ones. We vent, we get a hug and then we feel better.

Speaker 1:

But if you don't have healthy, supportive relationships, if you're standing all alone in a field there's nobody to help bring your stress system back down to baseline. Your body stays in low level fight or flight that wears down on your physiology. This is part of why I offer a leadership circle every year, this judgment-free, encouraging space, so people don't have to feel alone. It's that place where you can ask dumb questions and get real help. You don't have to feel embarrassed, nobody will judge you. It's someone to hold you accountable and help you achieve your biggest goals. It's so that you don't have to stand alone in that field.

Speaker 1:

Which brings us to the fundamental thing about us and our humanness. We are fundamentally social beings. We're born needing each other. We're born able to relate to one another, to read each other's signals and respond to those cues. And that's exactly what forest ecologists were finding out about the trees. Even trees which seem so stoic, so separate and independent on the outside, they are fundamentally social beings too. They're born needing one another. They're born able to relate to each other. When baby trees are stressed because they can't get enough light in the shade of a mature forest, or because they're stressed when they don't have roots that are deep enough to pull water from underground, their mother trees use the root network that links them together and sends that information or that water onto them. Onto them, acacia trees that are getting munched on by giraffes will send airborne signals to nearby other trees, alerting them to the danger, so that their neighbors can detect the warning and can pump bitter-tasting tannins into their leaves as a giraffe deterrent. Suzanne Simard says in her book, it doesn't make evolutionary sense for trees to behave like resource-grabbing individualists. They live longest and last the longest and reproduced most often in a healthy, stable forest. That's why they've evolved to help their neighbors, and it's the exact same for us.

Speaker 1:

So take a pause. How can you expand your social networks to create richer, deeper relationships? As with all things, it's about replicating the bright spots and conducting tiny, small-scale experiments to make those bright spots flourish. What I mean by bright spots is looking for the places where you already have relationships that feel good. Where in the world do you feel a little less lonely and more connected to others? Maybe it's within your family, maybe it's with a friend, perhaps it's at church or school. Perhaps there's one colleague at work that's especially kind. Maybe you feel more connected when you're playing sports or at the gym, or perhaps it's a memory of being in theater or orchestra or art class with friends in high school. Maybe there's a friend that you really deeply love, that you've lost touch with. Any one of those is a bright spot. Once you have identified that bright spot, how can you do something small to nourish that bright spot and make it shine just a little brighter? If you find connection at your kid's school, maybe volunteer. If there's a colleague at work who makes you feel less lonely, could you send them a note thanking them for their kindness or go out to coffee with them at a lunch break. If you feel more connected at the gym, could you make a point to go just one extra day a week? Is there something that you enjoy doing, like theater or dance or reading books or riding dirt bikes, that you might be able to do with others by joining a club or taking a class? And if there's a friend you haven't contacted in a long time, could you reach out and reestablish a connection. Any one of those small-scale experiments is just that. It's an experiment. It's a small little action that could grow into something or might not, but it's a small action that you could try to find out. Okay, back to the show.

Speaker 1:

There are so many ways that this Harvard study about loneliness can play out In workplaces. One of the best studies is through the Gallup 12. It's the most used survey of employee engagement. One of the 12 questions that they have is do you have a best friend at work? And a lot of people have wondered why does it have to be a best friend? Can't it just be a good friend? Well, the Gallup has kept that question because having a best friend and not just a good friend at work predicts actual business outcomes. It predicts things like profitability and safety. Workers with a best friend at work are significantly more likely to engage customers and internal partners. They get more done in less time. They innovate and share ideas. They enjoy their work, they don't quit, they feel satisfied and, in fact, since the pandemic, those connections have gotten stronger, not weaker.

Speaker 1:

This finding also plays out in neighborhoods. One study looked at the factors that impact the crime rate in a given area and the one thing that made the biggest difference wasn't the number of police patrols or the quality of the schools or the density of the housing. The biggest factor in how to reduce the crime rate in a neighborhood was the number of people you knew by name within a 15-minute walk of your house. How many neighbors can you name within a 15-minute walk. That's what reduced the crime rate. It also impacts huge social gatherings.

Speaker 1:

In episode four I talk about collective effervescence, that joyful, exuberant social cohesion that we experience when a huge number of people move together as one. Places like concerts, churches, sports arenas, political gatherings, dance clubs, parades, all of those things, the large social gatherings, the places where we can feel connected, all of those places there's a health benefit, there's a joy and a happiness that comes from taking part. So I've mentioned it before, but it's worth saying again People are healthier and happier because they're connected. That loneliness is just as dangerous to your health as smoking half a pack of cigarettes a day or being obese. Now, if you come back then to Jason and I and the oak trees, we decided not to focus on watering the struggling trees. It might get them through this year, but the next heat wave or drought year would probably spell trouble. Instead, we on our property are going to focus on the bright spots. The meadow isn't doing well for some, but there are a few individual trees that are. We think we're going to give those trees some company. We might collect the acorns of the best surviving trees, get those seedlings started in pots and plant them in those unprotected, unmowed areas so that the mom's roots can intertwine and support their babies. It's kind of like offering a little help for natural selection, in a way that's focused on community and the collective, and you can do that in your life too.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so, so much for listening to the Leader's Playground. I would love to thank my connections, my community, the people in my practice that make me shine Tyler Lakami, robin Canfield and Tessa Borquez. Thank you for nourishing me from the very roots of my being. In the show notes, you're going to find a link to Suzanne Simard's book, to that Harvard study that I mentioned, and lots and lots more to help you find the connectedness you might want.

Speaker 1:

Finally, would you please do me two favors. Maybe you know someone that's standing alone in a meadow and needs more of a support network. If so, could you please text them a link to this show? Not only will it give them some resources, it'll deepen the connection that you two already share. And secondly, please click that follow button on Spotify, apple, youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. That will ensure that you find out about the next episode, where we are going to go into the science behind the recent Pixar movie Inside Out. Do emotions control our actions? Where does our identity come from? And, most intriguingly, can anything in the movie help make work feel more like play? Well, you can find out next time here at the Leaders Playground.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Irene Salter, PhD

Host