We need each other to do great things
Elizabeth Cooper grew up in Japan and Brazil where she learned to connect with a wide variety of people.
Elizabeth completed Jaunty’s six-week course which she’s found extremely helpful in her professional as well as personal life.
“I think everything we do is fundamentally based in social skills because humans are social beings.”
“In a city we’re always interacting with people or not taking the opportunity to interact. You can contribute more to the world if you have strong meaningful relationships with other people.” Elizabeth loves connecting a wide variety of people and groups to our social intelligence workshops through her work with Jaunty.
At Jaunty we strongly believe that everyone, no matter where they’re at with their people skills and social anxiety, can benefit from honing their social intelligence.
Since moving to the Bay Area four years ago, Elizabeth has, “Developed connections with a wide variety of people who are really lovely; people who nurture the path that I’m on.” Now after completing Jaunty’s course, she feels she’s more playful with people and is having more fun in her daily life. She also says her confidence and assertiveness have improved, both of which have helped her make important professional connections.
Elizabeth recently completed a hugely successful speaker series for her coaching business. “I interviewed 30 experts in the fields of ‘health at every size,’ body positivity, sexuality, fitness, and fashion. I did video interviews with them about radical self-love for queer and trans* people and released one every day for a month starting in Pride month.” It was an ambitious project that required Elizabeth to reach out to some of her heroes.
Elizabeth found one of her speakers at the SF LGBT Center Gala where she went in with the specific goal of connecting with people. She had gotten a lot of solid practice approaching and striking up conversations with strangers thanks to Jaunty, so she felt more comfortable putting herself out there in that way.
At the gala she met a “very sweet, blind, gay man,” Belo Cipriani, who agreed to an interview. He came to Elizabeth’s house and they ate pie together. Not only did Elizabeth get a great interview, but he got Elizabeth an interview in the Bay Area Reporter. All in a very meaningful and fruitful connection.
Elizabeth feels her Jaunty social intelligence skills helped her feel more relaxed and confident reaching out to people for the speaker series, and conducting interviews. She used specific techniques she’d learned to help build rapport, create stronger connections, and feel more competent in the process.
If she hadn’t done Jaunty, “I think I wouldn’t have necessarily connected with them on a personal level as much. I would have been a little more business oriented.”
And how did the speaker series turn out? “People loved it. It was so overwhelmingly positive. People wrote that it literally changed their lives. It provided hope and inspiration and shifts in their psyche. People wrote that they were crying happy tears.” Folks watching wrote in saying Elizabeth seemed really warm and confident.
In addition to using her social intelligence skills for her business, Elizabeth appreciates the way Jaunty has helped her connect with strangers.
“One of the most helpful and exciting things about being in the [Jaunty] course was having the structure and assignments to interact with strangers. I didn’t realize how much I was missing out on in terms of the connection and joy that you can get from just saying hi to someone you’re sitting next to on the subway. I think people are really yearning and wanting those connections but don’t know how to do it.”
She found the specific exercises really helpful and fun. Who would benefit from Jaunty?
“I think people who are open and wanting structure and community to nudge them in the direction of becoming more fully who they are and connecting more authentically from within that place,” Elizabeth says. “If they feel like there’s more to life and connection is lacking in their life and want to turn up the volume on that channel. I think we have that potential and it makes all of us stronger to have that connection. I think there’s this illusion in our society to do things on our own, that you have to prove yourself in order to be in company. But it’s flipped. We need each other to do great things.”
