Matt Boyce On The Factors Of Human Connection And The Benefits Of Routine

Founder and Managing Director of the Human Connection Project, Matt Boyce, recognised through his own mental health struggles that Australians are spending increasingly less time connecting with one another, which is gravely impacting our mental health.

After the sudden passing of Matt’s best friend Justin, he realised he wasn’t as connected to his community as he thought he was. He was left feeling alone and isolated and now works to ensure no one is left feeling like that again.

Human Connection Project aims to be the largest proactive human connection and mental health lead organisation across the globe. To do this, HCP is building platforms of support, resources and education to help guide society on their own mental health journey before reactive measures are needed.

Matt discusses the concept of human connection along with its collective benefits, as well as how and why we should establish routines as individuals and entrepreneurs.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - Could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to your passion of connecting people and improving mental health?

[Matt Boyce] - Yeah, I guess for me it's a bit of a lifelong journey. I was a carpenter by trade in Western Australia originally, and I've found I was always the guy on site that would essentially bring people together. I'm not sure if it was the energy I was putting out or perhaps people just knew I was open for a chat, but I'd find in the smoko room, or the lunch break for those that aren't tradies, I was always the person that was trying to get people to open up about their struggles, whether it was at home with their wife, or their kids were playing up at school, et cetera. And then I moved to Brisbane to chase the rugby league dream. And when I moved here I thought I had to be somebody who I wasn't.

I walked around site with a bit of a mask on. I had a few tattoos, I was young, I was athletic and I kind of went to work every day trying to pretend to be some tough guy that I wasn't. And slowly the person who brought people together over in the smoko shed or over the lunch break was suddenly sitting on his own during the lunch break.

It wasn't until I ripped off the metaphorical mask and it was quite literally one day I just went, "this is ridiculous. Who am I pretending to be?"

You would have had this story before, but I started skipping up and down the hallways singing Whitney Houston, just living in my absolute best life. I then found it got to lunchtime and suddenly one bloke would sit next to me and then two blokes would sit next to me.

And then suddenly I'm essentially having these toolbox meetings around people's mental health and how they're dealing with stuff and how to connect better with their kids. And then five years ago, I tragically lost my best mate in an accident. As somebody who thought he was really connected to his community, to his network, to his friends and family, not that I wasn't, it's just that I thought I wasn't as connected as I was and I was isolated and super lonely.

I thought how many other people are going through this at the moment where the depression hits, and a lot of people's depression is caused by chemical imbalances. But my depression was caused from my environment. I had shut people out, I put walls up and I was disconnected.

Now my life goal and life journey is to educate people on what human connection actually is. Because it's an easy term to say, but to actually measure it and define it and put it into practise is a really difficult thing to know.

That's I guess what we do every single day is educate and support and define human connection for people.

Wonderful. That's a great lead into the project that you're involved with; a social enterprise called Human Connection Project. So tell us a little bit more about the specific projects you're involved with and why do people need to be more connected? What sort of outcomes do they see or can organisations see from this?

The Human Connection Project, is a multilayered social enterprise working to educate people on exactly that question. What is human connection? What are the outcomes of being more connected and how do we actually strive towards that?

To answer the first aspect of what is human connection, human connection is the ability to be vulnerable with one another. We have three defining pillars we use, which are empathy, leadership and empowerment.

Human connection is to be empathetic towards both yourself and other people. Empathy in the sense that I can understand why I'm feeling like this, or empathy as in I can understand why Tom's going through a certain thing and I can put myself in his shoes and help him get through it.

The first aspect of empathy is defining that there's two sides of the coin. There is the positive and the negative. A lot of us focus on the negative side, empathy in the sense of when someone's going through a hard time. I have to understand that. I have to sit in their shoes. But what a lot of us forget is that we can be empathetic towards people in positive times as well. An example I use is a lot of people are changing their businesses right now and perhaps your partner's changed his or her business model. And you can be empathetic in the sense that this is exciting. They've changed the business model and it's actually succeeding and it's moving forward and you can show empathy in that sense!

The second pillar is leadership. Leadership, to define in a quick little podcast is pretty difficult, but leadership is first you lead yourself. You actually follow through on what you say you're going to do. And then leadership in the sense that leadership isn't a job title. That's not a position you hold in a team, in a job, in a business. Leadership is the ability to look to your left and look to your right and see who's struggling and see how you can help them come along the journey.

The third aspect is that of empowerment, and empowerment and leadership have a lot of similarities. Empowerment is empowering people to make changes in their lives and also empowering yourself to make changes in your life as well. I guess going through things, changing, reiterating, iteration after iteration, changing who you are as a person. And empowerment to me is, I had a really great chat with somebody yesterday, a great friend of mine, and we talked about empowerment is if you have to tell people your values day after day, for instance, tell people that I'm a man of integrity, chances are you're trying to convince yourself in the time being. So let your actions empower your values.

Live a life of integrity rather than trying to tell people you're a man of integrity.

And what that's going to achieve, for your question around organisations, what would that achieve for them? It's going to do a magnitude of things. First thing it's going to do is it's going to keep longer tenures. People are going to want to be a part of that organisation for a lot longer. More connected workforces are more productive. That's a given. So if Mark from accounts can have a really good relationship from Sally from IT and they can bounce ideas off each other and they feel connected to ask for help when they need it, then the business is going to move forward. And you know as well as I do now, that businesses laid with that passion and that people first perspective are more often than not, more successful than businesses that don't. They're just three really simple ways that organisations will benefit from human connection.

I think hearing about that particularly now with that we are seeing these huge shifts in the way that people work and connect, even over the last few weeks with the Coronavirus saga, it just brings to the forefront how important all of this is, right? Do you have any practical tips on how you think people can best adapt to this new environment, and what can be done then to ensure that people maintain positive mental health in an age where things are shifting and changing so rapidly?

I think now more than ever is, and it's a term that a lot of people are using in their copy now, but it's true now more than ever; we need human connection. A couple of things that we can do to adapt to the new environment to make sure our mental health is in a good place first and foremost is to keep a good routine.

When I think of routine, everyone has one. You and I both have one, it's just whether it's productive for the day ahead or destructive.

So the morning routine for me consists of a handful of things. The first thing is jumping out of bed into a cold shower and I don't get into cold showers because of the science for your organs. There's plenty of that out there. And if you want to Google it, you simply have to write cold showers and you'll have paper after the paper on the benefits. But what I do it for is it's uncomfortable and if I can convince myself to get in a cold shower at four o'clock in the morning and get through that uncomfortable period, that's a score on the board for Matt, straight away, first thing of the day, and I'm getting a score on the board for myself and I'm proving myself that I can get through uncomfortable situations.

The second thing is I make my bed not for any other reason, but it's just another score on the board for Matt. You're trying to build up your tally because there's going to be times where you lose points throughout the day, as long as you can build up a tally. Then I brain dump, which is my version of saying journaling. A lot of people don't like the term journaling. What I do, is I just take thoughts in my head and put them on pen and paper or I pop them into a notes on my phone. And then for me, it's movement or meditation. I think we have to be clear here Tom, that routine isn't regiment.

If one day you feel like meditating, fantastic. If one day you feel like going for a run and you hate the idea of meditation, then that's great as well. Routine can bend and mould to who you are on that day. It's not a structure. We're not in the military, we don't have to do things how we've planned them.

So keeping a really good morning routine is first and foremost. And then secondly is that human connection element and making sure we're sitting at ergonomic desks that are set up for your body. So elbows should be 90 degrees, you should definitely get away from your computer for an absolute minimum of an hour a day.

Make sure you're getting out in the sunlight. If it's cloudy, just get outside anyway. Get some fresh air. Just these little things that now that we're working from home, we find people are doing bigger hours than ever and they're oscillating themselves because they think jumping on a Zoom call with their work team is enough human connection for the day. But it's really important that we're jumping on video calls with friends and family outside of work and disassociating, having an area in your house which is the office or the work space and then that's it. Don't take your laptop to the lounge room, don't take your laptop to the bedroom. We need to make that clear separation.

Some great tips there Matt, and in working with a lot of social entrepreneurs ourselves, we can see how this situation is greatly affecting a lot of us. Right? And it's been a pleasure to be working with you as well as part of our Elevate+ Accelerator Program.

It can be really hard to push through these first few weeks of setting that routine and sticking to it, which can then lead to those improved mental health or physical outcomes as well. So how can we all set up those routines to then work towards kicking the goals that we really came to achieve?

For me it's a perspective thing. I'm fortunate that I've been in the athlete world for a lot of my life so far. I try to take a 14,000 foot view on most things. So what I mean by that is in any given day you're going to be putting out fires. That's a given.

As an entrepreneur, your job is essentially to put out fires in your business and make sure that you survive for another day. So taking a 14,000 foot view means to just take it with a little bit of perspective.

We can get so caught up in things and especially when a lot of entrepreneurs work from their home regardless of COVID-19. For a lot of us, this isn't going to be any different than usual, but it's important that we take that step back, we change our perspective and go, "okay, this is what's happening right now."

What's the worst case scenario to come out of this problem? And can I live with that worst case scenario? So for instance, if your business is under a lot of pressure now and you're being forced to, (I'm wary of using the word pivot), change what your business is... And we're doing this as we speak, we're changing our entire business model… Instead of getting caught up in the nuts and bolts of it, and trying to make everything perfect, it's just a matter of zooming out saying, "okay, this is where we are now. This is what the current market is.

How do we now change our business to suit that market and suit that demand? Because we can be sitting in our home office trying to change our business and build a completely different business that no one actually wants right now just because it's our perspective and we think that's what they need.

You need to zoom out, see where the market is, see where the demand is, and change your business to suit that. Because this is a market that we have never seen before. Our grandparents have never seen a market like this before. So to be able to sit in your home office and think you've got a handle on it, I think it's potentially a little bit naive.

Let's talk about a few projects then. What projects or organisations have you come across perhaps recently that are creating some great positive social change, particularly in these tough times?

Right. There's hundreds to be honest with you, so I can probably rattle off four in a really short period of time. The first being Orange Sky Laundry. They're obviously in person laundry services for the homeless and they have needed to pivot their whole business model to continue. A lot of these people don't get excited over Orange Sky Laundry because they get clean clothes. They get excited about the business because they've got a friend, they've got someone who's coming to wash their clothes and connect with them.

The second would be someone we both know very closely; David Toohey from Mind For Me. He's got a startup platform that Australia needs now more than ever. It provides the ability to get help into communities via an app, a platform.

Another one, Nicholas Robertson from SwapU gives everyone the ability to swap products. A lot of people sitting at their home right now might look over their shoulder and realise they've got [things to swap]. I'm doing it right as we speak and I’ve 48 books on my bookshelf. I've read them all, they're all sitting there void now. Why would I keep them? I could swap them for something that I need in everyday life.

That's just a really quick rattle off of people that have got a business right now that they haven't had to pivot. Their business is set up and I think social enterprises are fortunate in the sense that we exist for passion and we exist for change in the world regardless.

Matt, to finish off, you spoke about those 48 books on your bookshelf. I'm really curious to hear what those books are and what you'd recommend to our listeners.

I like the book question and I’ve got a couple to share. The first one is an obvious one for the Human Connection Project is Lost Connections by Johann Hari. It's an absolute fantastic read, very educational. But the second one, and I forget the author's name, but the book's called Essentialism and what that is, and I think that's so prevalent right now, is it kind of changes your perspective to focus on what's actually important.

We've got business owners now that are spending so much time at home that they think they suddenly need to create a TikTok profile because that's the next biggest thing. And it's like, no, stay with what's important. Focus on what your business model is and focus on how you can make that more relevant today rather than jumping across onto another platform. So there would be my two books, Lost Connections and Essentialism.