Hello folks, it's Friday again, nearly the weekend. And whether you're going to be curled upon the sofa or out and about, I hope you're going to do what feeds you. And that might mean rest. It might mean productivity. But there are no rules here because sometimes what you need isn't about being introverted or extroverted.

It's about where your energy is sitting right now.

If your social battery is already full from last week, a quiet weekend might lift your spirits more than a social one.

But if you've been running on an empty,

maybe an atom with a mate or even a smile from a stranger,

is just what you need.

Which brings me on to something that I've been thinking about lately.

A concept called social capital,

which I know sounds a bit technical,

but it's really just about human connection.

Imagine an internal fuel tank that fills up whenever we feel connected to somebody else.

Now that can come from a deep, heartfelt chat with a friend, but also just literally a passing smile on the train or a quick

hello in the supermarket aisle. In transactional analysis, these can get referred to as strokes. You either

give a stroke or you receive a stroke. And these strokes, this social capital, is what binds us all together, not through

grand gestures, but the everyday moments that say, I see you. Like when I went to the supermarket

the other week for some bread, I ended up changing my mind, putting something back and then going to get a big massive French stick, because French stick, in it?

So I was walking down this aisle with this giant bread stick, poking out the basket. This woman clocks it and says to a son, oh, we need one of them. And I could see she was about a head in the wrong direction.

So I just sort of pointed her towards the right aisle. That's all. And she smiled. And I smiled.

And that was it. Just a tiny throwaway interaction that just fills up our tank, just a little bit.

And these moments, these seemingly little strokes,

they aren't nothing. They're the glue that holds our social fabric together. And the more of them

we have, the more resilient we feel, the more likely to cope well with stress we are, to empathise

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