The inner skill
of getting closer

Who should read it

Good with people, and knows it

After fifteen years of success at work, happiness at home, and with a handful of close friends, you're good with people. However with the right approach, your close relationships could become even more rewarding.

Not many people can say that: A study of friendship among American men found that only 27% reported six or more close friends, down from 55% in 1990.¹

You are the one everyone is glad to see, yet the last to be told why the project really slipped. Someone who loves you once said: you ask good questions but you tend to interrupt the answers. You've read Dale Carnegie. You have all the outer skills. Now you want the inner skill of getting closer.

Your situation

Nothing is wrong. That's the problem !

There is no fault here, only a glass ceiling. Some inhibition that holds us back from the deeper relationships we deserve. Connecting with others is a technique, and this can be learned; the work is done within you, in private, so that it can reveal itself afterwards in public.

You've mapped-out your life's course, as an upward progression with no finish line. Your surest measure of progress is how much richer each day becomes.

Why This Book

Forty-eight threads, one a week, for a year

Each week addresses a single thread of connection. It seeks to provide enlightenment and enhance your competency. The approach spans five axes of self-develpment:

• Engagementto overcome inertia
• Empathyto ease awkwardness
• Respectto avoid familiarity
• Affinityto bypass isolation
• Trustto conquer self-sabotage

The book is written as a life story, in episodes rather than rules. It draws upon carefully curated sources, woven together by the author's editorial.

Dale Carnegie's method, which Sinclair Lewis described as smiling and bobbing to get things out of people² covers the outer skills. Instead, The 48 Threads works on the inner ones.

What is not on offer:

• A cure. Nothing is broken
• A scientific method
• A wider circle. Deepening existing friendships takes time
• Quick wins. The gains are slow and steady
• Easy scripts for working a room
• Psychological fixes from the author

Why This Author

Synthesis with Soul

James has spent years following the leading authors and thinkers on these topics. Each thread sets out the landscape, points to the views that matter most, and ties them together in the succinct style he first learned reading PPE at Oxford.

The books structure comes from the behaviour-change methodology he applied to a successful smoking cessation programme³ , and from the mastery of change he obtained at a leading transformation consultancy⁴ in London. It's pace comes from a fortnightly bulletin he wrote on the back story behind the news.

He has worked, lived and studied in five countries, and spent the last twenty years in Lausanne, Switzerland.

One way to stay close