“I'm so grateful for this experience. I now feel more empowered that I can go anywhere and make friends and connections using the tools and ideas I learned here. I feel much less alone and am so so grateful.”
— Lindsey, PAL Alumni, Winter Cohort 2024
If you want either (or both!) of these…
HYPERLOCAL FRIENDS
You want friends who are super close — i.e. walking, biking, scooting, rolling, strolling, or a tiny short drive away.
You want to easily spend time with friends who live in your neighborhood, and you want to feel a stronger sense of belonging where you live.
You’d also love to have a third place — someplace other than home or work, where you feel cozy, comfortable, and able to access easy, spontaneous, informal socializing and feelings of connection.
HYPERSPECIFIC FRIENDS
You want friends who share your interests but you haven’t been able to find them yet (or you haven’t tried!)
For example, maybe you want people to discuss mystery novels with… or you wanna host crafternoons… or you wanna share pineapple pizzas in the backyard while discussing your favorite self-development books…or [insert your own delightfully specific wishes here.]
If you need help defining your connection goal, that’s fine too. Come with an open mind and we’ll workshop your blurry ideas to bring clarity — and friends who are a match — into your life.
…then Platonic Action Lab is for you.
Our next course session (the DIY edition!) starts on Saturday January 4th, 2025
New in town?
It takes the average adult two years to feel at home after they move to a new city:
✅ Setting up new habits
✅ Creating friendships
✅ Building a sense of community
✅ Feeling a sense of belonging in your third place(s)
What if you could achieve all of that in 12 weeks?
Platonic Action Lab can help you reach that goal 18 months ahead of schedule. Keep reading to find out how…
Making those friendship wishes come true
The lessons in PAL are the same ones I’ve used to create a life full of fulfilling friendships and community. I want this for you too!
Here’s what PAL students have been doing in 2024:
💗 Deepening Existing Friendships
“Deepening my connection with 5 people in my network, and creating opportunities to develop new friendships or new communities.”
🏡 Housing & Films
“Making at least one local friend who shares my passion for tenant rights — and indie film!”
💃🏽 More Than a Mom
“Connecting with other moms who don’t just want to talk about being moms!”
🕯️ Gathering 101
“Connecting with like-minded local people and start hosting gatherings.”
🚶🏻♂️➡️ Walking Friends
“Forming a neighborhood walking group with the people in my building or on my block.”
🎨 Craving Crafternoons
“Inviting neighbors to come craft with me. Eventually I’ll work up to having gluten-free, nut-free potlucks along with the crafting hangouts.”
🏋🏾 Fitness Friends
“Attending CrossFit regularly and meeting folks who have similar fitness goals.”
🚴🏾♀️ Bikeable Third Places
“Learning how many third spaces are within a bikeable distance (4 miles) of where I live, and spending time there.”
🐮 Small Town in the Big City
“Creating a small-town vibe in a large apartment building.”
📈 From Acquaintances to Friends
“I want to initiate vulnerability in conversations with my acquaintances so we can become closer friends.”
🥬 The Slow Food Movement
“Forming a community with people who care about sustainability and the slow food movement.”
🧘🏽♀️ Yoga/Dance Friends Happy Hour
“Getting to know the other people who come to my yoga/dance class, and who usually all scatter as soon as class lets out.”
A small snippet of what people are saying (scroll down for more :)
Platonic Action Lab (PAL) was created by me, Kat Vellos, author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships.
PAL will give you more clarity and confidence to make your friend-making journey more successful and joyful. But don’t just take my word for it. Check out what alumni have been saying…
“I have no regrets in joining PAL. Not only was support during defined PAL time valued, I feel I now have new skills, approaches, and energy that I can carry forward past our time in PAL, capitalizing on the momentum built here.”
— JJ, Platonic Action Lab, Spring 2024 alumni
What PAL is…
Platonic Action Lab is a course for adults 18+ of all genders who want to get hyperlocal and/or hyperspecific to achieve their friendship goals.
If you want help taking action to make friends in your local area, or finding people (online or IRL) who are a match for your specific friendship wishes, then this is the program for you.
You’ll:
✨ Get crystal clear about who you want to invite into your life, and create an action plan that you’ll start implementing right away.
✨ Connect with your local community more consciously, so you feel a deeper sense of place, have more friends nearby, and stop feeling like Where’s Waldo in a sea of strangers.
✨ Build your confidence for cultivating connection, while getting high on the expanded sense of possibility that comes when you see the fruits of your actions.
What to expect
Our next session of PAL is the new, ultra-flexible DIY edition. Starts Saturday January 4th, 2025.
I’ll teach you the PAL framework for turning your wishes into actions and outcomes. This program isn’t a bunch of hand-wavey theory, it’s about action — and if you commit to taking action, you’ll start making progress right away.
The core curriculum is based on my expertise in the topic of friendship and community-building. I’ll share real-life examples about people just like you who are getting more intentional to create friendship and community in their lives.
In each lesson, you’ll learn, get inspired, and complete an action step as your homework assignment.
Q: “How do I access the course lessons?”
A: Week by week, you’ll get more comfortable with the connection-building skills you’re learning. You’ll make incremental progress by tackling your big goal one step at a time. Starting on Saturday January 4th—and continuing each Saturday for 12 weeks—I’ll send you one module via email.
I’m doing it this way because most adults are hella busy during the week with work and life, so I want you to snuggle up to your weekly lesson during a moment of downtime.
Think of this as you and me sitting down to a cozy coffee each week and me coaching you through the next breakthrough in your friendship-n-community journey.
Grab a bagel and coffee, then crack open the lesson in your inbox on Saturday morning. I’ll teach you a specific technique or exemplary story about how to achieve your goal of making hyperlocal and/or hyperspecific friends.
At the end of each lesson, you’ll set a small goal for an action you want to take over the upcoming week. And you will complete that self-designed homework, because you want to get results, dontcha?! 😉
Q: “Why is the DIY course set up this way?”
A: In the past, a lot of people wanted to take PAL but couldn’t commit to the biweekly live workshops on zoom, or their timezone didn’t fit for our live sessions. So I’m packaging the most powerful parts of the PAL experience and putting them into a format that fits for your life, no matter what time zone you’re in. If you have extra questions, read the FAQs below.
“The biggest lesson I learned in Platonic Action Lab is that being quiet, waiting for the perfect opportunity to arrive in front of me, and not taking chances are not the right way to make friends. I need to put myself out there and be willing to take risks in order to meet other people.” — Kim, Platonic Action Lab alumni
Your cheat sheet to connection
Thirsy for knowledge and examples? The Platonic Action Lab curriculum will guide you through crafting your bold intentions and creating your action experiments. It’s an inspiration treasure trove.
Your PAL lessons are filled with loads of scripts, templates, ideas you can borrow, and illustrative stories about the best ways to succeed at the audaciously delicious goal of having friends who live near you and/or who feel like a cosmic fit for your vibe, personality, passions, and quirky interests.
“I definitely cribbed language and ideas from our class materials and the PAL handbook. Really useful tools.” — Brittany*, PAL alumni
Bonus: Enrollment includes a free copy of the Connection Jet Pack which will give you tons of conversation starters to use with new and old friends, and activity ideas you can riff on or use as-is.
🛋️ Investment ☕️
If you spent six months complaining to your therapist about how you wish you had better friendships and more community, it would cost you $1200-$2400. But why complain when you can take action? For the cost of two therapy sessions, you get three months of high-octane guidance to help you fix it.
In Platonic Action Lab, you’ll actually solve the problem, and you’ll walk away with skills and tools you can use forever.
Investment: $1200-$2400
One payment of $399
Do it for you
How good would it feel to finally have the meaningful, easy-to-access local friendships you wish for — and friendships that feel like the right fit for you?
Commit to yourself and the life you want to live.
The lessons in PAL are the same ones I’ve used to create a life full of fulfilling friendships and community. I want this for you too!
Enroll today in Platonic Action Lab. When it’s over, you’ll have the skills to recreate new friendships, and deepen existing ones, any time you want to—for the rest of your life.
Here’s what Platonic Action Lab can do for you
Founder & Facilitator
Kat Vellos is a trusted expert on the power of cultivating meaningful connections, building friendships and community, and creating healthy work environments.
She’s the author of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships which was called “marvelous” by BookLife, a subsidiary of Publishers Weekly. Kirkus Reviews gave the book glowing reviews that were echoed by legions of readers. Since its release in January 2020, it’s been helping adults around the world heal from disconnection and loneliness.
A veteran facilitator, Kat has twenty years of experience creating communities where people find belonging and authentic connection. Kat also founded Better than Small Talk and Bay Area Black Designers which was profiled by Forbes.
Kat frequently speaks at companies, conferences, and in the media. Some of her press highlights include The New York Times, Forbes, NPR, Communication Arts, The Good Life Project, Design Observer’s The Design of Business | The Business of Design, The Wall Street Journal, and Hurry Slowly. She’s spoken at TEDx Talks, San Francisco Design Week, The Atlantic’s Pursuit of Happiness conference, Rosenfeld’s DesignOps Summit, and many more.
FAQs
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It’s deep but easy. Twelve weeks. If you can read and take action, you can crush this course.
Every Saturday morning, I’ll send you an email with that week’s lesson.
I’m doing it this way because I want you to complete the course so trickling each lesson to you slowly one week at a time is a more manageable way for busy adults to learn, and you have time between each lesson to take action on what you learn.
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Starting on Saturday January 4th—and continuing each Saturday for 12 weeks—I’ll send you one module via email.
I’m doing it this way because most adults are hella busy during the week with work and life, so I want you to snuggle up to your weekly lesson during a moment of downtime.
Think of this as you and me sitting down to a cozy coffee each week and me coaching you through the next breakthrough in your friendship-n-community journey.
Grab a bagel and coffee, then crack open the lesson in your inbox on Saturday morning. I’ll teach you a specific technique or exemplary story about how to achieve your goal of making hyperlocal and/or hyperspecific friends.
At the end of each lesson, you’ll set a small goal for an action you want to take over the upcoming week. And you will complete that self-designed homework, because you want to get results, dontcha?! 😉
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$399. If you need it split up into smaller payments, just let me know.
Hot tip: If you apply what you learn to cultivate your network of professional colleagues, you can probably get the tuition covered by your employer’s Tuition Reimbursement Program or personal development funds.
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Nope, Platonic Action Lab is not a matchmaking program and it's not “get better at friendship” class.
Platonic Action Lab is a program that will help you take bold action to accomplish one or both of these goals:
• Making new friends in your immediate local community
• Finding people who want to share the same kinds of friendship experiences that you want to share (either online or offline). This might draw upon the network of people you already know by deepening existing friendships, or it might mean meeting new people. We’ll discuss what feels right for you.This program is a bold experiment, designed to get meaningful results. It’s powered by a deep well of optimism, imagination, and determination. Like all experiments, a specific result is not guaranteed. But this one carries the possibility of sublime success — especially if you take the homework assignments seriously and proceed to take bodaciously bold action with what you learn.
Check out the testimonials on this page to see the range of results and outcomes that our past cohorts have achieved.
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It’s true, some folks are not a fit for this program. And I am not Coca-Cola trying to sell cokes to everyone on the planet, meaning that … this program is not for everyone.
For example:
• This program is not for folks who wanna sit on the couch taking zero action, then want to later bemoan the fact that nothing happened. If you’re not gonna do the homework assignments and actually get out there and meet people and deepen your connections, don’t sign up. PAL is designed for a student to learn, be inspired, and take action on what they learn by tackling weekly assignments based on each week's lesson.
• This program is not for folks who'll only make one or two half-hearted attempts and then give up because their wishes didn't come true instantly. (You don't need to be a personal trainer to know that two or three sit-ups won't deliver 6-pack abs.)
• It's not for folks who are too busy to take any action at all. If you're that busy, check out the Overcoming Busyness chapter in my book or sign up for Unbusy Camp instead.
• It's not for folks who don’t want to do an independent, self-study course.
• It's not for folks who are super pessimistic. It's perfectly ok to be nervous, feel anxious, have doubts, or feel unsure — we all feel that way sometimes, even me! But extreme pessimism and entrenched cynicism are border walls that keep a mind closed… and they're not a fit for a class like this.
• It's not for folks who can't articulate what they want… your goals can be simple or complex, but you need to know what they are. Specifying your goals is the first step in getting you closer to achieving them.
If you read all of that and you're thinking, “Ok, makes sense, I can get down with that”, go ahead and add your name to the waitlist above. I’m excited to have you.
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Reason #1, Hyperlocal: I created Platonic Action Lab to help you initiate easily-accessible, local, face-to-face acquaintanceships and friendships. The program helps you develop the strength, skills, and follow-through to go out and connect with people right where you are, with people who are walking, skating, biking, rolling, scooting, and strolling distance away.
Reason #2, Hyperspecific: I created the Platonic Action Lab to help you realize that no matter what specific characteristics or activities you want to share with your friends, there's a good chance there are other people who want that too. Since the hyperspecific goal is based on a more limited set of “search criteria," we need to use a broader search area (ie not just your neighborhood), but there's a good chance we can find the people you’re looking for. They might not live on your block, but we can find them and connect you with them, wherever they are.
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You have until 48 hours before the course starts to cancel, and you’ll get a full, fast, and friendly refund.
Once the first class is complete and you’ve started receiving the course materials, no refunds can be given because it’s impossible to reverse the electronic transfer of digital information.
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If you have any concerns or questions , you can send Kat a friendly note here.
Say yes to the adventure
In Platonic Action Lab, you'll be asked to try things you've maybe never done before. But when it's over, you might be able to tell a story you've never been able to tell before… a story about how the world cracked open...
A story about how you uncovered a sense of possibility and deep inner strength that you didn't know was there…
A story about how wonderful new people came into your life, and with them, an entirely new perspective about the availability of friendship and community around you.
Let’s write that story together.
Refund Policy
If you cancel before the course begins and before you’ve received any course materials, you get a full, friendly, and fast refund. Scout’s honor.
Once the course starts and you’ve received the curriculum materials though, no refunds are possible, because it’s impossible to reverse the electronic transfer of digital information (makes sense, right?) See the full terms and conditions
Start your new year by bringing more friendship and connection into your life. Let’s do this.