Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 13th April 2025

I wanted to do a bit more musing this week on friendships and connections. I was thinking again about the role of paid support in people’s lives in facilitating and supporting friendships connections and relationships. I wrote quite a lot about this back in March 2024 and I’m really clear that, if I have some paid support, one of their central roles is to support my friendships and connections – on my terms of course.

I’m not sure my viewpoint is widely held, or at least it falls under the, ’would be nice to do but a bit difficult sometimes’ category (note my reference to safeguarding in the March 2024 blog). I’m not sure we make it a priority, and certainly not an essential requirement in our time and task focus of direct support roles. It certainly was part of the job description when I recruited personal assistants, but you might want to check your job descriptions to see if it’s there. The cynic in me says it might not be.

Part of the job description I used when recruiting personal assistants:

So, you can get it in people’s job descriptions, but then it also feels like a huge cultural shift is needed – what does supporting my friendships and relationships look like? It doesn’t fit neatly onto a checklist.  I’ve employed a couple of personal assistants who were spectacularly good at this. As I tried to unpick it, I realised that lots of their talent was about the ability to seize opportunities, or maybe just noticing there were opportunities to be seized.

Little opportunities like making sure, as a paid worker, you’re not the one having a conversation with a checkout person in the supermarket or the corner shop.

Noticing when someone smiles or makes eye contact at the bus stop and facilitating a conversation.

Being a go-between when The Girl sees a young girl on roller-skates playing outside her home and says hello in her slightly clumsy way.

It’s about not looking and feeling like a bodyguard (there’s a huge rant I could go on here about lanyards but I won’t) and maybe not caring much about what people think of you (as it’s not about you).

There’s also something critical about being there as support and yet allowing enough space for the energy of human contact to work its magic.

The girl really seems to connect with older women. She had a great relationship with my mum and only ever knew living with granny. She also had a strong relationship with her birth maternal grandma who helped raise her when she was very young. In supermarkets, she’ll often go up to an older woman get very close and say ‘hello’ loudly! Then she will usually say ‘grandma’ with a smile. My response when she was living at home and we were in the supermarket together was always to say to the woman in question, ‘Hi this is Lucy. I think she’s maybe saying hello because you remind her of her grandma who she loved very much.’ This was without exception met with a big smile and sometimes even more of a chat. The Girl then gets a selfie with the woman and the rest of the supermarket trip is a much better experience for her (and I think for the woman). 

Chatting to her current team, we’ve talked about how to make more of these conversations, striking up a proper conversation, maybe even inviting the older woman to take 10 minutes and have a cup with us. We’ve also talked about the girl taking her genuine talent for playing the piano, alongside her wicked sense of humour, to residential or nursing homes. I’m genuinely not sure how she’d react to older people on mass, or indeed, how they react to her, but nothing ventured, eh?

None of this is very neat, is it? I suspect some of you might be feeling quite uncomfortable reading this as it’s definitely not very British! I was chatting to somebody at the bus stop the other night in South London (I know I should know better, against the rules) we had a lovely chat for six or seven minutes. I then got on my bus, and she carried on waiting for hers. Left me with a smile on my face - I hope it did her as well.

So, I guess my ask of you this week is, if you’re directly supporting people look for those opportunities to facilitate/nurture/grow/support connections and relationships - no opportunity too small. If you’re a commissioner or manager, maybe have a think about how important you believe nurturing relationships is, and what you can do to make it a priority.

PS. Have you heard about 'Getting Curious About Creating Gloriously Ordinary Lives' training course? It's a 5-session course where you'll learn how to create Gloriously Ordinary Lives, reflect on current support practices, understand your role, and develop a clear action plan for making a difference. The course is for everyone and starts in June.

PPS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode 10 is here. I chat with Sam Clark, Chief Executive of ⁠Learning Disability England⁠. We talk about the importance of people opening their own front doors as we share the new campaign - I Open My Own Front Door, Do You? - by Gloriously Ordinary Lives in partnership with Learning Disability England.