Hello, wonderful person!
I’ve been meeting way more people this week than I have in the past weeks!
Updates
- One of our new Ugeddit members during our Deep Dive on Overcoming Procrastination opened up and shared so much about their life and our conversation even spilled over into our coaches office hours, where they said they were even comfortable having others listen to our coaching session in our video chat! That was massive
- I spent over 4 hours in person with a Japanese girl named Shuri from Sendai, Japan! Her and I met just 1 week ago, and she’s been in Canada for only 2 weeks! We were with her friend, Mami, as well, who’s been here for only 1 month
- Despite the language barriers, we shared with each other a lot about Japanese vs Canadian culture, English vs Japanese terminology, grammar, language, and most importantly, what they enjoy the most about being in Canada, what differences they noticed between Japan and Canada that they appreciate, and much more
- One of the things they were most excited to try was an A&W burger, which to me is completely normal, but to them there’s only 1 A&W in all of Japan and it’s, well, Japanese, so an “English” A&W is novel for them. We went to one and ordered burgers, and their faces melted when they bit into them; they said it was delicious
- On Saturday, May 20th, I met with yet another two people in person, one is a member of Ugeddit’s community, and the other is another Japanese person, a guy named Yusuke from Osaka, Japan! Him and I met just 2 weeks ago on Bumble, and he’s been in Canada for 10 months. We spent over 6 hours together!
- We had a lot of fun chatting about differences between Japanese and Canadian (at least from our personal experiences growing up) school life, work culture, societal standards, conversational gestures, and even the linguistics and language patterns of Japanese vs English
- One thing Yusuke asked me about was what is the meaning of ✌️air quotes✌️ or “finger quotes”. Even as aware as I am about body language, I totally forgot that doing ✌️air quotes✌️ is not a thing in Japan. It was not easy to come up with a way of describing air quotes that would make sense, but the one Yusuke understood well was “When the person uses air quotes, it means they’re telling you the meaning of the word is not the same as the normal meaning”. We both laughed at how many times I used the word “meaning”, but he still understood, and appreciated how much effort I put into thinking about explaining it well
- I met with a fellow founder on Monday who said he appreciated the questions I shared with him the last time we met, because he used them to think of a new approach to growing his community events.
- During this meeting, we brainstormed some more stuff, and I shared some user experience types of questions he could ask that will more directly get answers from his members about what they would appreciate and enjoy the most during the events, to grow his number of happy attendees
- I started putting together my XD (Experience Design) advising/consulting website to clearly explain the value of what XD is, what it means, and how it brings huge value to businesses, communities, relationships, and more
- New clients for this will help me support how much I can put into Ugeddit to make sure it survives and grows in its ability to support and accelerate people’s improvement of their social skills, relationships, and self-confidence
- And in the photo for this whole post (Yusuke captured it to remember the fun we all had)
- For our poses, you know those certain ✌️financial freedom✌️ types of businesses you see online? The poses we’re making is us doing a parody of the poses we see from 90% of networking people in those types of businesses. We also joked about the only things missing were our suits, a white couch, and behind us either a highrise building window, Ferraris and Bugattis, or a private jet 😆
- The funny sentence is Yusuke practising the difference between the letters “R” and “L” in English (Japanese doesn’t differentiate these sounds), using examples we practised throughout the day. We came up with hilariously complex sentences that used the words “right” and “light” over and over again, and he decided to type it on his Instagram lol
Next steps
- Our next Open CNC Practice is Monday May 22nd at 9am PST. If you want to learn CNC, you can join our Discord, and join the event! Or if you can’t make it, after you join, you can share in the #feedback channel what times work well for you
- I’m working on the XD (Experience design consulting) site, so I’ll share updates on how this is going and let you know once it’s up. If you know anyone in the meantime who’d want to learn about this already, let them know they can reach out to me for a quick chat
How you can help
- If you know someone who wants to improve their social & people skills, relationships, or confidence, let them know they can use Ugeddit’s free CNC (Core Needs Communication) system to do that, and they can join our community to learn about it and practise it with others