Party of One

Russell was 65, and had been a widower for six years. Aside from the usual health concerns that come with getting older, Russell had realised something else.

He was lonely.

(Loneliness wasn't why Russell had come to see me. But health rarely stays neatly inside the reason written on the appointment form.)

He had never been much of a "party person" (his words), and as he got older, there seemed to be fewer places to make connections. Perhaps more than that, he genuinely enjoyed his own company.

He loved to read, he loved long walks with his dog, he loved going for a mid-afternoon pastry, or visiting his relatives abroad.

He wasn't sitting at home desperately wishing someone would invite him out. He liked his life.

But as he got older, a thought had started to bother him: what if he got sick? He and his wife had never had children. Who would look after him? Who would he call if he needed something? Surely he should have a few friends he could call upon from time to time.

So Russell decided he ought to make some. But it never happened.

Because the mistake he'd made was assuming that his desire for connection meant he somehow needed to become more sociable.

So I asked him: What does enough connection look like for you?

Not for me.

Not for his neighbours.

Not for the people who tell us that retirement should involve an exhausting calendar of lunches, clubs, hobbies and people popping round for coffee.

For him. For Russell.

And his answer was surprisingly modest. He wanted someone he could telephone occasionally. Someone who might notice if he disappeared for a few days. Someone to have a cup of coffee with now and then. But, perhaps most importantly, it was the reassurance that if something did happen, there were people in his life who would notice.

He didn't need twenty new friends. He just needed a handful of meaningful connections.

And so we approached it in exactly the same way I approach almost everything else: instead of concentrating on the problem, we concentrated on the outcome – and we started with what was already there.

The relatives he visited abroad. A neighbour he occasionally spoke to. Someone he regularly bumped into while walking the dog. The familiar faces at the café where he bought his mid-afternoon pastry.

Rather than finding entirely new people, it was about allowing some of those existing relationships to go one step further. The conversation that became a coffee. A coffee that became another coffee. And he started saying yes occasionally when previously he might have gone home.

And sometimes he still went home.

Because that was the other side of it. There was nothing wrong with the man who liked walking his dog by himself.

A few months later, Russell hadn't transformed into a social butterfly – but his world had shifted. There were more conversations, more familiar faces, the occasional coffee, and people who knew where he was going when he went away, and who asked how the trip had been when he came back. Nothing dramatic at all.

But when we spoke about it, he no longer described himself as lonely. He said that being alone had gone back to feeling like a choice. There were people around the edges of that solitude and he really liked that.

I think we sometimes become so preoccupied with fixing ourselves that we forget to ask whether the thing we're trying to fix is even actually a problem.

You don't need to be more outgoing, more productive, more confident, more disciplined, more anything. Rather, you need to understand what you're actually trying to achieve - and to find a way of getting there without needing to become someone else in the process.

Russell didn't need a new personality. He just needed a slightly bigger life.

So, ask yourself, what are you trying to change about yourself that doesn't actually need changing?