Introduction
There is a particular kind of hesitation that arrives when someone you haven't spoken to in a while crosses your mind. You remember their laugh, a conversation, perhaps something kind they did for you. For a moment, reaching out seems obvious. Then another thought intervenes: It has been too long.
Maybe they are busy. Maybe they have forgotten you. Maybe a message after so much silence would feel awkward. So you put your phone down, promise yourself you will do it another day, and carry on. The connection is still there, but the silence grows a little longer.
What if the brave part of maintaining a relationship is not the first hello, but the next one, especially when nobody is expecting it?
Why This Post Matters
We are surrounded by ways to connect and remarkably skilled at letting connections fade. A name sits in our contacts. A former colleague appears in a feed. Someone we once cared about becomes a person we mean to call. None of this necessarily signals indifference. Often it signals a life so full that relationships get whatever attention remains.
The trouble is that a relationship cannot be maintained by good intentions alone. It needs some evidence that we remember, that we care, that we are willing to make the first move without knowing whether the gesture will be returned.
That is the idea at the centre of Janice Porter's approach to connection. The host of Relationships Rule podcast teaches people to build relationships through curiosity, follow-through and thoughtful attention. But the most striking part of our conversation was not a networking tactic. It was a deceptively simple question she keeps near her computer: Who needs to hear from me today?
The Silence That Nobody Intended
A relationship rarely ends with an official announcement. Sometimes two people simply stop calling. The weeks become months. The longer the gap, the more difficult it feels to interrupt it. We begin to imagine explanations for the silence, even when nothing has actually happened between us.
During our conversation, I shared a personal rule: when someone I have not spoken with in a long time comes to mind, I try to pick up the phone. Not because every call leads to some remarkable revelation, but because the timing has sometimes mattered in ways I could not have predicted.
Janice offered a similar perspective. A fellow podcaster she knew through online conversations had been on her mind. When she finally emailed, an immediate reply from the woman's husband brought painful news: the woman had died a couple of weeks earlier. Janice was saddened, and the experience made the reality of a relationship formed through a screen feel unmistakable.
It is an uncomfortable reminder that we do not always know what is happening in someone else's life. Nor can we know how many opportunities for a small act of care are still available. That is not a reason to reach out in fear. It is a reason to stop treating the impulse to connect as unimportant.
The Note That Arrived at the Right Time
For Janice Porter, nurturing a relationship can be as tangible as sending a card. She told me a story that helped shape her own practice. It concerned a mentor who thought of the organist at his church, a woman who had played the hymns week after week. He sent her a simple thank-you card, with no special occasion attached.
Later, the organist explained that she had been ready to quit. The complaints had accumulated: why this hymn, why not that one, why had she made a different choice? She was exhausted by the criticism. On the day she was about to call the church, something prompted her to check the mailbox. The card was waiting.
A brief acknowledgment did not solve every problem in her life. But it changed that moment. She felt seen for something that had become thankless. The note arrived without its sender knowing how badly it was needed.
“But send the unexpected note or card. Send a card to someone when they least expect it, because the the the weird thing about that is it always comes at the right time. I mean, I've got stories about things where it can give you shivers where you've sent a card and someone has sent a message back saying, You're not gonna believe this, but that card just arrived at the right time. And you you had no idea.”
— Janice Porter
Host of Relationships Rule
That is what makes an unexpected gesture so powerful. It does not demand a response. It does not ask the other person to buy something, recommend us or make time for a meeting. It simply says: I thought of you, and I wanted you to know.
Follow-Up Is a Form of Care
It is easy to mistake a collection of contacts for a network of relationships. The difference is what happens after the introduction. At a conference, a party or an online meeting, we say we will call next week. We mean it in the moment. Then the next week arrives and the promise disappears beneath everything else.
Janice Porter was clear about this in our conversation: when we say we will follow up, we have to mean it. She described coming home from networking events, tired after hours of conversation, and still sitting down to send personal emails. She would follow with cards that arrived the next week. It was work, and that was precisely the point. Relationships require participation.
The principle is not limited to professional networking. Remembering an old friend, acknowledging a mentor, checking on a neighbour or thanking someone who quietly shows up all express the same idea. Care becomes real when it moves from thought to action.
Janice also spoke about being curious, doing what you say you will do, adding value and showing appreciation. These are not grand gestures. They are ordinary habits that make people feel they matter. The courage lies in practising them when there is no immediate reward.
Reaching Out Without an Agenda
One of the risks of treating relationships as opportunities is that every message starts to sound like a transaction. A familiar name appears in our inbox, and we brace for the pitch. Janice Porter shared a funny example of offering to be of service to a new LinkedIn connection, only to be told that the person was not looking for services. Janice had intended an invitation to connect, not a sales approach. The misunderstanding revealed how accustomed we have become to expecting an agenda.
There is a useful lesson in that awkward exchange. The purpose of reaching out should be clear in our own minds before we send the message. Are we genuinely curious about the person? Do we want to thank them? Are we checking in because they crossed our mind? If so, we can say that plainly. We do not need to dress a human gesture in the language of business development.
And we cannot control the reply. The other person may be delighted, distracted or uninterested. A meaningful gesture is still meaningful even when it does not produce the outcome we imagined. Connection is an invitation, not an obligation.
Lessons for Living Life Audaciously
We often associate audacity with big declarations, difficult decisions and bold public moves. But sometimes audacity looks much quieter. It is the willingness to interrupt a long silence. It is sending the note without waiting for the perfect words. It is calling someone when the voice in your head says you have probably left it too late.
There may be a person you have been thinking about for weeks. Perhaps you owe them a thank-you. Perhaps you miss them. Perhaps you simply wonder how they are doing. You do not have to explain the entire gap in communication before you are allowed to reconnect. A sincere hello is a beginning, not a courtroom defence.
The next time someone comes to mind, notice the impulse before you talk yourself out of it. You may never know what your message means on the other end. You also may never know what would have happened if you had stayed silent. That uncertainty is exactly why reaching out first can be an audacious act.
Hear the full conversation on The Audacious Living Podcast.
“He doesn’t know what that is, and and think about how many things I don’t understand about him and his culture. ⁓ And it just showed me as an eighteen year old it’s not, you know, ⁓ there’s just so much we don’t know and ⁓ and really just solidified this idea of we’re in a bubble. And so ⁓ I became obsessed with trying to leave my bubble so that I could ⁓ could learn because I just realized in that moment I had never even conceptualized of a person not understanding this paradigm of knock knock who’s there.”
That moment did not make him an expert on another culture. It made him more aware of how much he had yet to learn. There is an important difference. Curiosity begins not with having the right answer, but with realizing that our familiar answer may not travel very far.
When Common Sense Is Only Local Knowledge
Wesley began to reconsider moments when he had judged other people for not knowing things that seemed elementary to him. Growing up near the Mexican border, he once found it ridiculous when a visitor suggested joining a ski team in a desert community. He also remembered laughing at someone who mispronounced “tortilla.”
From inside his own experience, these mistakes seemed obvious. But the same logic worked against him abroad. In South Korea, he offered to walk his Korean tutor home after an evening lesson, intending to be considerate. She interpreted the offer differently, and the exchange became uncomfortable. In India, a fellow student warned him that raising his hand to ask a question could be perceived as disrespectful in that classroom.
Neither experience establishes a universal rule about an entire country. Both show how quickly a well-intentioned action can acquire a different meaning in a different setting. Good intentions do not automatically guarantee shared understanding.
The lesson is not to become afraid of speaking or acting. It is to replace the reflex to judge with a willingness to ask what context we might be missing. That small shift creates room for humility, and sometimes for a needed apology.
The Stories We Tell About People We Have Never Met
After living and studying abroad, Wesley returned to work in Silicon Valley. He considered himself worldly, yet eventually noticed that his daily surroundings represented a narrow slice of the United States. He wondered how much he really understood about people elsewhere in his own country.
When remote work made travel possible, he spent about eighteen months moving through rural American communities. He wanted to test the picture of deep division that he had absorbed from a distance. Rather than asking only which political side someone supported, he invited people to describe what a fair healthcare or immigration system might look like.
He found that conversations could reveal shared concerns beneath different labels. That does not mean genuine disagreements disappear, or that a few personal encounters can settle national political questions. It means that a label often tells us less about a person than we imagine.
In Alabama, a restaurant owner heard that Wesley worked in California and immediately assumed he held particular political views. The irony was hard to miss: Wesley had travelled to challenge his own assumptions and found himself on the receiving end of someone else’s.
The same habit can turn inward. We may decide a community would never welcome us, that a profession is not for people like us, or that a conversation is certain to go badly. Sometimes there are real reasons for caution. Other times, we are treating a prediction as though it were evidence.
Curiosity Is a Way of Testing What We Think We Know
What makes Wesley’s experiences useful is not the distance he travelled. It is the approach he brought with him. He entered unfamiliar places, asked ordinary questions, listened to answers, and allowed his expectations to change.
There is a distinction between seeking experiences that confirm our view and seeking experiences that might correct it. The first can feel reassuring. The second requires accepting that we may have been wrong, perhaps for years.
Curiosity is not the same as assuming everyone will be kind or every unfamiliar situation will be safe. Sound judgment still matters. But where the risk is manageable, a conversation or experience can provide better evidence than a stereotype, a headline or an inherited belief.
And there is no requirement to sell everything and move across the world. Wesley suggests that a different community, cultural event or place of worship might be within an hour of home. He also described a personal rule: try something new every week. The scale can be small; the willingness to learn is what matters.
Lessons for Living Life Audaciously
Living audaciously is often imagined as a dramatic leap: leaving a job, crossing an ocean, beginning something nobody expects. Those decisions can be bold. But so can the quieter act of admitting, “I might not understand this as well as I think.”
The next time someone behaves in a way that seems inexplicable, consider what they may know that you do not. When you dismiss a place or opportunity, ask whether your conclusion comes from direct experience or from a story you have accepted. When a familiar belief is challenged, resist the urge to defend it before you have heard the other person out.
Audacity, in this sense, is not certainty. It is the willingness to let new evidence change you. A wider world does not always require a longer journey. Sometimes it begins with the courage to question the wall you have been calling the horizon.
