How to increase your feelings of belonging in a third place
🎧 Pop in your earbuds for this 5-minute mini-podcast about how to increase your feelings of belonging in third place. If you’ve been wishing for a third place cafe, a third place coffeeshop, a third place pub, or a third place anyplace! — this is the one thing you need to make sure you always make a priority when you get there.
XO, Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships
Transcript
Over the last month in Platonic Action Lab, we've been a talking a lot about third places and what it means to find a place, or create a place, or be a consistent part of a place that’s neither your work nor your home, but it's a place where you feel cozy, comfortable, and connected.
One piece of this that I want to share with all of you today has to do with the realization that a third place isn't always something that lands in your lap so when you walk through the door, boom — it's a perfect sitcom setting ✨… instantly welcoming and you feel automatically at home, and it's exactly what you wanted it to be, and it requires no modification or effort on your part.
That's actually NOT how the expectation should be around third places.
One crucial element that has a significant impact on whether or not a place will FEEL like a third place to you, or even transform from, say, a generic coffee shop into a community gathering hub has a lot to do with… how YOU show up when you walk through the door.
Urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term third places and in his book The Great Good Place, he talks about this using the analogy of of baseball. In his example, he says if you're somebody who likes baseball, there's a range of ways that you can engage with your love a baseball:
You could watch at home alone by yourself on TV.
You could watch at home on TV with another person.
You could go to a baseball stadium and watch the game by yourself.
You can watch the game at a baseball stadium with another person.
You can join a baseball team and be stuck up and cold towards the other players
Or you can join a baseball team and actually be a really great team player who builds connections with the other players.
In his baseball analogy, he’s demonstrating you the range of experience you’ll have based on two things he urges us to remember:
Increasing the directness of your involvement: How passive, active, and close to the action are you?
Increasing the social involvement: Are you doing the activity by yourself, or are you involving yourself with the other people that are also doing that activity?
If you want a coffee shop or pub or library or makerspace to feel like a third place TO YOU…. It’s not just about what that places offers you, and what the vibe is when you come in. It’s also about what YOU offer to that place and the people in it.
You help create the vibe.
You help decide if that place fully reaches third place status.
To give a coffee shop example, if you want this coffee shop to be your third place:
You go and have your beverage alone.
You go with someone you know; have your beverage and you only talk to them.
You go and have a beverage and talk to other people there.
You go and have a beverage and talk to the regulars there and get to know the staff.
You attend an event there that you just observe.
You attend an event there that makes you interact with other people.
You volunteer to support an event there, or volunteer to spread the word about it.
You offer to host an event there.
You offer to host a recurring event there.
If having a third place is important to you, and maybe you've been doing research about places in your community that could potentially turn into a third place for you…
It could be a park.
Or it could be a business establishment, like you want a third place cafe.
Or it could be a community establishment like a library or community center.
Think about: Not just what you hoped to receive from that place but how your direct involvement and your social involvement with the people there (the strangers you might meet, not just the people you take there and then exclusively talk to them) think about how YOU are showing up in that space and how your contribution of conversation, warmth, playfulness, invitation, self-expression, and simply the gift that you are are actually the things that will put SOUL into that place and help it feel like a third place not just for you, but for the other people who come there too.
(Side note: I’ve found this to be true at the half-dozen or so Third Places that I’ve belonged to over the last twenty years. I’ve been working on a long-form piece of writing since late 2023 that I’ll be sharing soon that digs more into that story. But in the meantime, I hope this is helpful.)
That’s your note for this week! I’d love to hear how this resonated with you. And I hope you have a wonderful week full of friendship and community.
XO,
Kat Vellos
Author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships