By Lisa Calhoun — founder & GP of Valor Ventures, Kauffman Fellow, AI investor since 2017
“I read it in a weekend and started calling people I'd let drift.” — Early reader
“It reframed loneliness as a skills gap. That alone changed how I show up.” — Early reader
A new book by Lisa Calhoun
Connection
Belonging in a World of Disconnection
You were built to belong. Modern life mislaid the skill — and it's repairable.
Connection is a skill you can build, in five stages, from the ground up. This book is the training plan.
30 questions · about 3 minutes · free personal report
50%
greater likelihood of survival for people with strong social ties
Holt-Lunstad meta-analysis, 148 studies, 300,000+ people
15
cigarettes a day — the mortality impact of social disconnection
U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory, 2023
Step 1
Discover Your Connection Strengths
Everyone carries all five connection senses at different volumes. The free Inventory shows you your current profile — and where your fastest gain is hiding.
Self
Animal
Plant
Divinity
Community
30 questions · about 3 minutes
Step 2
Reserve Your Copy
Be first in line. No cost, no commitment — we’ll tell you the moment it’s ready.
What you get, right now
Take the Inventory or reserve a copy, and these are yours today:
The ROOTS Cheat Sheet
A one-page field guide to the five stages at the heart of the book: Root, Open, Orient, Tune In, Sync.
Your full Strengths report
Every Inventory finishes with a personal report — your five connection strengths, ranked, with your fastest gain.
Notes from Lisa
A short, occasional email series — practices and stories on building a connected life. Unsubscribe anytime.
The method
ROOTS
Connection grows the way anything living grows — in five stages, each rooted in the one before it. That's the ROOTS Method.
- RRootCome back into connection with yourself. The taproot the rest grows from.
- OOpenBecome present, available, receptive to what's happening now.
- OOrientSet your intention toward connection — choose where your attention goes.
- TTune InListen for what answers back — what's offered, mirrored, revealed.
- SSyncThe living current: harmony, mutuality, awe, felt interconnectedness.
10 Things This Book Will Teach You
- 01Tell which of the voices in your head is actually yours — and turn its volume back up.
- 02Read your body's tighten-or-settle signal before any big decision.
- 03Find your five connection strengths — and your fastest gain.
- 04Turn loneliness from a life sentence into a skills gap.
- 05Practice the ROOTS process: Root, Open, Orient, Tune In, Sync.
- 06Connect with animals, plants, and places — not just people — and why your body counts it all as medicine.
- 07Ask for what you want and survive hearing no.
- 08Find the tribe that's already waiting for you.
- 09Make peace with the largest connection of all.
- 10Build a connected life the way you'd build any skill: small reps, honest feedback, compounding returns.
Early praise
“A rare book that treats belonging as something you practice, not something you're born with.”
“The five-strengths frame gave language to something I'd felt my whole life but never named.”
“I gave copies of the manuscript to my whole team. The ROOTS process is that useful.”
Let me tell you more
You were created to connect deeply — with yourself, with other people, and with the animals, plants, and places around you. Modern life systematically unplugged you from that birthright. Not on purpose. It happened anyway.
Connection argues that the loneliness so many of us feel isn't a character flaw or a permanent condition — it's a skills gap. And skills respond to practice. The evidence is blunt: people with strong social ties have a 50% greater likelihood of survival, and disconnection carries a mortality impact on the order of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
The book maps five connection senses — Self, Animal, Plant, Divinity, and Community — and a five-stage process, ROOTS, for growing any of them. You'll learn to tell which voice in your head is actually yours, read your body before your mind catches up, find the tribe already waiting for you, and treat your quietest strength as your fastest gain.
Connecting within is connecting without.
AI conversation is fast food: it fills, it doesn't nourish.
You don't get corn by wishing at the tassel. Root first.
Your lowest score is your biggest opportunity.
This book is for you if…
- You're dissatisfied with how your otherwise successful life feels.
- You're highly sensitive, but you've never known what to do with it.
- You feel like you're missing something you can't quite name.
- You're lonely, and the dating apps and meetup groups aren't meeting the need.
- Your intuition says there's a deeper level — you just haven't found anyone to go there with.
- You want a closer relationship with some divine essence you're almost afraid to name.
About Lisa Calhoun
Lisa Calhoun is the founder and general partner of Valor Ventures and a Kauffman Fellow. A venture capitalist who has invested in AI since 2017, she knows exactly what the technology can do — and what it can't. Connection is her instruction manual for the one thing AI is quietly erasing: our capacity to belong.
Founder & GP
Valor Ventures
Kauffman
Fellow
2017
investing in AI since
5 senses
one process — ROOTS
Start where it’s easiest.
Take three minutes to find your connection strengths — or reserve your copy and be first in line.