Briana Jacoba is a rogue scientist focused on what is right & healthy –but misunderstood– in the modern male mind.

She understands, validates, and reflects the best in men back to them, because it is our birthright as humans to be loved, and connection is the antidote to a culture of isolation and alienation.

Bree’s take:

Connection is one of those chicken-and-egg things:
it’s hard to develop any connections
without already having some connection.

And delightful connecting is a special skill… a learnable, valuable, transferable skill that can help your home life, your work life, and support you in developing your passions.

Alas, connection skills remain chronically underdeveloped in men who don’t get much practice in the first place — a viscious cycle that keeps their gifted minds and rational hearts in exile.

Three main principles of Rational Hearts:

1. Connection requires being delighted in while you’re being understood.

2. Once you get the hang of it, connecting is a transferable skill.

3. Connecting with only one person is a dead end, stress-inducing trap.


♥ First key principle of Rational Hearts ♥

Connection requires two key parameters:
you’re being delighted in
while
you’re being understood.

1. Being delighted in

When someone you respect takes deep delight in the way you are, you don’t have to work so hard. Don’t have to keep defenses up. Your brain works better. Fresh perspectives arise naturally. Better ideas occur to you unbidden.

When someone truly ‘gets’ you (and can laughingly justify your peeves as known side-effects of intelligence, fully trusting you’re handling them), you can relax.

No Diagnostic Manual.
No status differential.
No looking for problems, offering solutions/advice.

You… just get to BE.

2. Being understood when speaking freely

Sure. Words can be hard to find. Partly because unless you manufacture sentences in advance, you’ll be left groping for words as you go.

(Did I say ‘groping’? I meant fumbling! I’m fumbling for words!!)

It can be stressful to feel like you just stuck your foot in your mouth. Precarious. Awkward. Vulnerable.

You need to be free to ad-lib. To just ‘spit it out.’
Free to sound-board the good stuff and KNOW that the rest won’t get you ghosted, finger-wagged, or talked down to. Bleck!

You don’t want a passive audience, though.
You want someone who can keep up.
Who also has many levels of senses of humor.

Oh—and isn’t squeamish. Just honest. That way, you remain the judge of your appropriateness. Seen with enough compassion, even the most “wrong” ideas are probably perfectly appropriate responses to some difficult situations. Valid hypotheses that might have approximated reality well enough for a time.

You should be able to be yourself, be understood, and be delighted in by AT LEAST one person.

One person you enjoy connecting with.

♥ ♥ Second key principle of Rational Hearts ♥ ♥

Connection,
once you get the hang of it,
is a transferable skill.

Being EITHER understood OR delighted in can ‘take the edge off,’ for sure. But to really hit the spot takes both at once.

Hit that sweet spot predictably, and regularly? Now we’re talking! That’s when you grow your own capacity to understand and delight in yourself. And eventually others. No more impossible choices.

Greater capacity = greater confidence.

Once you taste real connection in a controlled environment… you can get the hang of how you, personally, like to navigate in and out of it on your own terms.

More confidence = more bandwidth.

Once you get the hang of connecting regularly, your connectivity “goes mobile.” You gain the emotional and mental bandwidth you’ve been missing. You can take rational risks with your heart because, no matter what the outcome, you still feel great about yourself.

More bandwidth = more connectivity.

You become like a portable hot-spot. You even bring high connectivity wherever you go –even to scenes where you’re not understood 🙄 and/or not delighted in. Not initially 😉

Conncetion = a transferable skill.

Deep, playful, satisfying connection can become your new normal.

Wherever you go.

♥ ♥ ♥ One last key principle ♥ ♥ ♥

Connection with ONE person is key
– but don’t give your key away.
Keep yourself in charge of your own heart.

I’m not saying your mother/girlfriend/boss is evil. Or that whoever bought the stamps and holiday cards, or organized that party, was being controlling. No.

I’m just saying girlfriends resent being admins.

“But all I need is just one person to love!” Sounds modest, but damns the very relationship it enshrines.

Anxiety, resentment, and feeling emotionally blackmailed/manipulated by your “household social rep” are all results of delegating your social life.

Other signs of social isolation include:

  • Wondering “what just happened?!” after an interaction.
  • Feeling beholden/under threat ‘over nothing.’
  • Attraction being replaced by complaints/stress/appeasing.
  • Headaches/numbness/avoidance instead of real peacable predictability.
  • Loss of control/self-respect; unwanted habits.

How to stop that sex-killer and build self-esteem:
Build your own life. Regular, stable, and above all redundant connections contribute to a sense of centeredness without self-centeredness.

The challenge:
It’s hard to build something from nothing, especially with a backlog of deferred maintenance on the docket. Plus, if a girlfriend coaches you, she often also nags, which is a sex-killer.

Temporary support:
One contact. One predictable person. One connection with the sole purpose of helping you get comfortable fostering your own, direct connections.

One good person whose job is to help you become the hub of a perfectly manageable personal village of your own.

That was a lot of reading!!!

I hope even a quick skim intrigues you to consider building a social support system that’d make someone like me redundant — and your main squeeze less survival-level-vital and more flattered-to-matter. Truly free to love you as you are.

display first page of free e-book for smart guys who cringe at small talk

Permission to connect… via your inbox?

Find out for yourself whether real-time experiences of connection with your own truth can help you re-calibrate yourself to yourself. Please read my e-book, Smarts Make It Hard to Connect from the Heart!

It’s free. Wonder why? Click here to find out.

(If you’re still on the fence, you might be suffering from one of the most painful blind spots that plagues smart guys, specifically.)