How to ease yourself into being a host
Hosting can mean a lot of different things on the outside; on the inside, it's about stewarding human connection
Hello dear Connector,
Welcome to this week’s edition of Connection Hub.
As a reminder, next Thursday (14th March) from 6-8pm UK time, I’m offering a free workshop on how you can tweak your identity and self-beliefs through Authentic Relating. If you’d like to attend, please email me and I’ll send you a Zoom link.
Hope to see you there!
Today’s post is all about hosting. What does it mean to host? Why do we host anything? What happens when we do? How does that change us? These are some of questions we’ll explore below.
I started this Substack as a resource for those who aspire to be stewards of human connection. I’m not calling them leaders, community-builders, or even facilitators.
Perhaps, the closest word to describe who I’m writing for is “hosts.” That’s because hosting can happen in all sorts of ways, and it doesn’t require any formal role. What it requires is the courage to invite other people into a new experience. Once they join, it’s about taking responsibility to make that experience happen.
This definition is broad on purpose. The idea of hosting needs to be inclusive if we want to account for the labour people put in to hold others in different ways.
A host can be a parent orchestrating a morning for her kids to set them up for a successful school day. A host can be a social worker coming to check on his clients in their home. A host can also be the clients who tidy up the living room and make tea to welcome their social worker. A host can be a president running a meeting with her advisors. A host can be a friend who offers help with mediating a conflict. A host can be a dad who organizes a day trip for his family. A host can be a supermarket cashier who offers little moments of connection to customers as they pay for their groceries.
Hosting can happen virtually any time when you have capacity and awareness to care not just about your experience, but also — those around you.
Before hosting gets too abstract, let me say that in this piece, I will focus primarily on the more intuitive examples of hosting — such as throwing a dinner party, leading a meeting, organizing an event, or running a workshop.
However, I feel it’s important to highlight that hosting can take many forms — some of which are almost invisible. With that in mind, what defines a host in my book is the ability to do two things:
1) Make an invitation
2) “Hold” the experience you said you would.
With that in mind, let’s move on to the question that may be on many people’s minds.
Why would anyone choose to host?
Hosting an event, party, or meeting takes work. A lot of that work is kind of invisible. It requires not only tangible, logistic planning — but also, emotional labour behind the scenes.
In my experience, there are three main challenges related to that.
First, hosting puts a lot of responsibility on you. Second, it zeroes in on serving others, which means that you need to put your needs on hold to provide quality experience for others. Finally, it can also be nerve-wracking because orchestrating something for a group of humans means you need to adapt to all the things they will (or won’t) do that you had no chance in hell to anticipate.
And yet, people choose to host. More than that — they choose to host proactively, for free, and often, despite not having enough resources. If you’ve even been involved in organizing an elaborate house party just for the sake of it, you know what I’m talking about.
Why is that? Why would anyone choose to host?
I believe we host not despite the hardships enlisted in the first paragraph — we host because of them. Taking responsibility, doing something for others, and teasing your nervous system as you upend the plan and adapt — these are all very good reasons for hosting.
Recently, Richard Bartlett (the co-founder of Loomio, the Microsolidarity network, and a few other projects), published an interesting Substack post. He proposed that your capacity to host is a direct measure of your agency. The number of people and length of experiences you’re able to hold is a reflection of how much impact you’re capable of making.
I enjoyed toying with this idea — and not just because it offers a neat roadmap for how to increase personal agency (I love neat roadmaps!). It’s also because it made me think that hosting is directly related to our self-development — which largely happens in relationship to others:
“Development happens spontaneously in the right social context. The vertical axis starts at 5 people. It intentionally does not start at 1, because individualistic self-development is a scam. Oh, you’re going to use your self, to improve your self? Good luck with that. Everything that lives, grows inside something else. If you want to change yourself, change what you’re inside of. Your self will change when you change who you spend time with and how you spend that time with them.”
The more psychological maturity you develop, the better host you can be. But the opposite can also be true. The more you practice hosting — and especially, co-hosting with others — the more you develop as a human being.
Coming back to the three big challenges of hosting, here’s how I see them impacting our growth.
Taking responsibility for others helps you grow. It teaches you how to put your stuff — discomfort, laziness, and self-doubt just to name a few — aside for the sake of delivering what you said you would.
Doing something for other people’s benefit teaches you humility. You may discover that, a lot of the time, hosting is about getting out of the way and not interfering in process. Other times, it can be about putting your ego on the line to keep the group on track. There’s humility in both.
Finally, hosting improves your resilience and shows you how to keep calm in the face of uncertainty. If you’re anything like me, you may fantasize about a plan which is so good that all you need to do is follow it. But if you ever hosted anything, you know this rarely happens. The golden nugget for your self-development is learning how to deal with uncertainty. This forces you to strengthen your internal locus of control, regardless of what happens on the outside.
These three challenges keep me eager to do more and more of hosting. Meeting them head-on provides the kind of learning and development that I can’t get anywhere else.
Don’t be a chill host — be an enabling one
One of Priya Parker’s taglines is “don’t be a chill host.” This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be relaxed and welcoming. Rather, what she’s saying is: “don’t defer your hosting responsibility under the guise of being relaxed and welcoming.”
Good hosting should enable people. This is what it’s for. When people are hosted well, they become able to try out things they wouldn’t dare to otherwise. This can be anything from chatting to a stranger, to wearing a strange costume, to freestyle rapping.
How does the act of hosting achieve that? Priya Parker frames it as three key responsibility that a host has to:
Protect their guests
Equalize their guests
Connect their guests.
What does that mean?
Protect
Protecting your guests is, in short, about removing obstacles to an experience. In her book, Parker writes about Alamo Drafthouse, a chain of movie theaters in Austin, TX that created (and reinforced!) a strict “non-texting” policy during screenings. They recognized that pulling out phones is disruptive to a good movie experience. In most cinemas, customers had to deal with that disruption by themselves — which usually meant either putting up with the flashing phone screens, or risking an unpleasant dispute with a defensive texter.
Alamo Drafthouse decided that it was their responsibility as hosts to protect their guests from texters. They introduced an explicit rule where texting during screenings would not be tolerated. People who broke the rule during screening got asked to leave.
Protecting your guests can look different in different situations. Saving a friend from an uncomfortable conversation with a drunk uncle, keeping people on track with the agenda you had agreed on, or setting up an activity that gives everyone a chance to speak — these are all examples of “protecting your guests.”
This brings us to the next responsibility of hosting.
Equalize
Power is something most people feel uncomfortable discussing. Having power is often associated with something bad or even shameful. Just the other day I was reminded of that when I told a friend that I saw her as a powerful presence. She then told me that she immediately felt uncomfortable and embarrassed.
Meanwhile, power isn’t good or bad — it just is. Similarly to a pen which can be used to write a love letter or sign a declaration of war, power is a resource in the hands of those who have it. As a host, you usually have the most power in the setting you created.
A helpful thing to as a host is to equalize power between your guests. This way, they can interact as equals. As Priya Parker put it:
“Most gatherings benefit from guests leaving their titles and degrees at the door. However, the coat check for their pretenses is you. If you don’t hang them up, no one else will.”
I realized the importance of this by not taking enough care to equalize power.
In the first Authentic Relating staff training I ran, I failed to account for the manager being in the room with other members of staff. I put them all into group exercises without acknowledging the power dynamics. A few people told me afterwards that some activities we did felt strange to do with their boss. They wished I would have done something to equalize power first — or at least acknowledged it.
Connect
Finally, once you made sure your guests are protected and interacting from a more equal playing field — your job as a host is to connect them. There can be many goals for gathering people. But an underlying purpose is almost always for them to connect with each other.
If you didn’t care about connection, why would you be putting in the effort to bring them together?
There are various ways to help people connect — from offering ice-breakers, to designing the space in specific ways. How exactly you’ll do that depends on the nature of your gathering, the resources you have available, as well as your skills as a host.
No matter what you do, it’s important to consider one thing: creating connection takes energy and cognitive resources. You can help people preserve those by making less consequential decisions for them.
For example: by assigning people seats at a wedding, you spare them the awkward moment of deciding where or next to whom to sit. By announcing how long each part of the meeting with last (and then, keeping the time), you lessen the cognitive load that your team would otherwise use to track that. When you offer a question at a dinner table, you spare your guests the effort of figuring out a conversation topic.
From there, people have more capacity to focus on connection. By making decisions as a host, you’re doing your guests or participants a favour.
Don’t be a chill host — be an enabling one. Protecting, equalizing, and helping your guests connect will help them show up in ways they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
Grow into a “way of being” of a host
Like I said in the beginning, I don’t believe hosting is limited to some specific roles. Rather, it’s about being able and willing to invite people into a new experience — and then, create conditions to make it happen.
That willingness and ability is connected to where you are in your personal growth journey. Are you able to take responsibility? Are you willing to create something for others? Do you have resources to support you through the stress connected to the uncertainty of being a host?
Chances are, you can do all these things to some extent. You don’t need to be able to host a conference or festival straight away. It may be that you start with inviting three friends over for a themed dinner party. Or, hosting a mini-workshop for your colleagues about something you’ve learned in the past months. Or, you know… anything that can help you ease into the way of being of a host.
Assess your current capacity. Pick your hosting “battles.” From there, you can grow your hosting capacity and agency as you go.
there’s a lot of great stuff in here but really my main thought is “that is such an incredibly charming photo!” 😂