Insights and Activities from May’s Joyful Connection Masterclass
The May Joyful Connection Masterclass opened with a question before anything had been formally introduced. Rachel Rozen, host and founding member of Connection Crew by Covve, asked participants to name something they were celebrating or looking forward to. It was a deliberate first move in a session designed to remind people that a professional gathering does not have to begin with credentials.
In most professional spaces, the default is the visible story: the job title, the company, the polished version of who we are. People learn a great deal about each other through those surfaces. But facts do not produce closeness. The distance between knowing someone's resume and actually knowing them can feel enormous, and most events are not designed to close it.
This session was designed to close it.
Connection does not deepen at the level of accomplishment. It deepens when we share the feelings, the hard seasons, and the invisible chapters that shaped us but never made it onto a profile. Here is a closer look at how the three activities shaped that experience.
Building a Mental Core with Ronan Casserly
Using structured self-reflection to acknowledge what has been survived and what keeps a person moving forward
Ronan Casserly opened by naming something many people in professional spaces rarely say out loud. Following a late-stage ADHD diagnosis, he had spent years trying to understand why certain things felt harder for him than they seemed to for others. His answer was not a single solution. It was a collection of small, manageable things assembled over time.
The activity he brought, which he calls My Mental Health Six Pack, is built around one daily practice: naming your Olympic dream. Inspired by USA sprinter Gabby Thomas, who wrote the same sentence every morning in preparation for the Paris Games, Ronan asks himself the same question each day: “What is the long-term goal I am working toward?” The answer becomes a mental anchor.
Three questions follow that anchor. What is something big you have already overcome? What is a small win from the last 48 hours? And why are you going after this dream? Together, they do not ask participants to perform confidence. They ask participants to find evidence of it in their own history.
During the live demonstration with Ashley Kirsner, the structure of the activity became visible in motion. Each question built on the one before it. The Olympic dream grounded the conversation in direction. The big win offered proof of capacity. The small win brought that capacity into the present moment. The why gave it meaning.
The design is not about motivation. It is about reconnection. The mental core is what allows a person to snap back on hard days. And that core is built by consistently acknowledging both what has been survived and what is still being built.
How to Practice It:
- Name your Olympic dream in one sentence and return to it daily, even when progress is not visible. Consistency is part of the practice.
- When working through the questions with a partner, listen for what the answers reveal about their values, not just their achievements. The why matters more than the what.
- Let the small wins count. The habit of noticing them is not a distraction from the larger goal. It is the foundation of it.
Practicing Openness Through Internal States with Ashley Kirsner
Sharing feelings, opinions, and thoughts to close the distance between knowing facts and actually knowing someone
Ashley Kirsner, founder of Skip the Small Talk, opened her segment by naming a familiar experience. You can spend an hour with someone and walk away knowing a great deal about them, what they do, where they live, what they are working on, and still feel like you have not really met them. The problem is not the conversation. The problem is the layer at which the conversation stayed.
Research in social and clinical psychology shows that sharing internal states, which means feelings, opinions, and genuine thoughts rather than facts, increases interpersonal closeness. And the effect moves in both directions. It does not just help the person sharing feel closer to others. It also makes others feel closer to them.
The activity used a single question from the Skip the Small Talk card deck: in what ways are you different from the person you were ten years ago, and in what ways are you the same? The question was simple enough that almost anyone could answer it. But the instruction was to find as many opportunities as possible to share internal states along the way.
Ashley modeled what that looks like by answering the question herself. She spoke about feeling unstable in her mid-twenties, about one piece of critical feedback being enough to derail her entire week. She spoke about how that had shifted, about feeling more grounded now, less swayed by either praise or criticism. The content was personal. The tone was considered, not confessional. That calibration was the point.
When the room returned from breakout conversations, participants noted how much they had grown and how many people seemed to have walked a similar path. The sense of recognition was exactly the outcome the activity was designed to produce.
How to Practice It:
- Answer the question yourself before posing it to someone else. The specificity of your own answer gives permission to others to be equally specific.
- When you notice a feeling arising as you talk, name it rather than skipping past it. That small act of transparency is what shifts a conversation from informational to connective.
- Use this question with someone you think you already know well. The answers will very likely surprise you.
Surfacing the Invisible Chapter with Dr. Julia Wiener
Making room for the parts of a person's story that shaped them but never made it onto a resume
Dr. Julia Wiener, founder of JW Strategies and an organizational psychologist, opened the final activity by drawing a distinction that most professional settings quietly enforce but rarely name. The visible chapter is everything on a resume: the title, the company, the credentials, the clean and polished version of a person's story. The invisible chapter is everything else. The seasons, the losses, the quiet pivots, the things that formed a person's values and sense of purpose without ever appearing in a bio.
Connection deepens, she argued, when we make room for more than the visible story. When we hear even a small piece of what is behind someone's title, we begin to understand them more fully. That fuller understanding changes the quality of every conversation that follows.
Dr. Wiener modeled the invisible chapter by sharing her own. She went through an inconsolable loss while completing her PhD. Her family and professors encouraged her to stay in the program, and she did. She wrote papers and conducted research while grieving. From that season, she learned grit, perseverance, emotional regulation, and how to focus her mind during impossibly hard stretches. None of that appears on her resume. All of it shapes how she leads.
The activity asked participants to identify one invisible chapter of their own and share it with a partner. Person A shared. Person B listened and reflected back what they heard, without offering advice or analysis. Just understanding. To give the exercise some lightness alongside its weight, participants were also invited to give their chapter an unofficial job title. The chat filled with entries: Chief Recovery Officer, Chief Neurodivergent Understanding Officer, Chief Listening Officer, and many others.
The unofficial titles were not just a playful detail. They were the mechanism by which the activity landed. Naming the chapter gave participants a way to claim it, to say: this happened, it shaped me, and it is mine.
How to Practice It:
- Before asking someone else to share an invisible chapter, name one of your own. The willingness to go first signals safety and sets the tone for the conversation.
- When you are the listener, resist the impulse to advise, fix, or compare. Simply reflect back what you heard. That act of being received is what the activity is designed to produce.
- Give your own invisible chapter an unofficial title. The act of naming it changes how you carry it.
Thank You
Thank you to Ronan Casserly, Ashley Kirsner, and Dr. Julia Wiener for bringing such openness and unique perspectivesto this session. And thank you to every participant who showed up ready to share more than their credentials.
A professional connection does not have to stay at the surface. When we name what we have overcome, share how we actually feel, and offer the chapters that shaped us but never appeared in a bio, we give each other something no resume could provide: the experience of being fully seen.
We look forward to continuing this work with the Joyful Connection Masterclass community, one conversation at a time.
