Thursday 15th June: Why we turn towards each other

I wonder why we B&Bers relish our morning talks, and what makes catching up with each other as enjoyable as the swim. Of course there’s lots of reasons why our conversations work, and one of them is because we ‘turn towards’ more often than we ‘turn away.’ Turning towards is both a physical thing – you literally turn towards the person you are talking to. And its an emotional thing too, in that we are accepting offers or bids from other people for attention, conversation or affection.

John Gottman’s (www.gottman.com) research on married couples found that couples that stayed married turned towards one another 86% of the time, while couples that divorced turned towards each other about a third of the time. In the commercial world sales people that turn towards customers are more likely to build the coveted ‘trusted adviser’ relationship. How do you ‘turn towards’ more often? Its starts with giving the other person all of your attention and listening to them – what the words and body is saying – and responding like you noticed, you cared.

Here are some of our conversationalists this morning.

Here’s turning towards you,

Pete Anthony

The swim in numeric form 

Swimmers: 111 (felt like 108.528512)

Newbies: 1 (felt like 2)

Temperature: 16.7 (felt like 12.976207)

Winter swimming
The B&B Winter swimming season starts on 1st June. Although the water temperature may be a little colder than you might like, there are several advantages of swimming in winter, including flat seas, good visibility and no bluebottles. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that you can also qualify for a winter badge by swimming a minimum of 20 times between 1st June and 31st August. You must also swim in at least 7 different weeks. If you manage to do all of your qualifying swims without a wetsuit (or other thermal enhancing equipment), you will also qualify for the coveted WWW badge (Winter without wetsuit). Start now, and don’t forget to log your swims to qualify.