We Are Made of Relationships

We live in a time when information is no longer a rare resource. It’s hard to imagine a single question that can’t be answered by the swipe of a screen or the prompt of a chatbot. But when answers come fast, what gets left behind is the capacity to ask better questions—to sit with nuance, to hold complexity, and to relate across difference. As AI rapidly outpaces us in retrieving, summarizing, and even generating information, we are reminded that the space in which we are most human is not in what we know, but in how we relate.

The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer found that nearly two-thirds of respondents believe societal divisions are worsening, and a 2025 update signals that seven in ten people now believe leaders actively mislead them. “Grievance” has become a governing mindset, which is no surprise. When trust breaks, when institutions fail to hold us, what’s left is the human capacity to relate, to stay with one another, and to begin repairing. In this sense, relational intelligence has become an urgent and fragile thing at the same time.

So this piece is offering a reminder, a soft turning toward what many of us feel within ourselves. An invitation to relate with the words on the screen as you read them; to notice what stirs, what resonates, and what you might carry with you.

This is where relational intelligence lives. Not as a tidy skillset or a corporate buzzword, but as a way of being.

Relational intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and navigate relationships, with oneself, others, and systems, with awareness, empathy, and adaptability. It goes beyond emotional intelligence by focusing not just on internal states, but on how we show up in connection: how we listen, build trust, manage conflict, and co-create meaning across difference.

It’s a way of seeing, of sensing, of navigating. It is messy, intuitive, and embodied. It’s what children often know before they are taught otherwise—that connection precedes identity. That we are born through others, shaped by others, and continue because of others.

Relational intelligence is less about having the right answer and more about cultivating the conditions where trust, clarity, and care can emerge. In a conversation between psychotherapist Esther Perel and Trevor Noah, Perel described relational intelligence as the courage to be changed through connection, to enter relationships not for control but for co-creation. It’s a way of being that has become all the more urgent in the face of today’s polarizing forces and crumbling trust.

Ultimately, it’s the foundation for a truth we intuitively know but often lose sight of in the busyness of everything: the quality of our lives is shaped by the quality of our relationships.

It’s a truth we can feel in the small, everyday moments: the ease of being around someone who listens deeply without giving advice or resolution, and the relief in knowing you’re not alone in feeling the heaviness of the world. And yet, beneath these seemingly personal experiences lies something far more expansive.

Many Indigenous and Buddhist traditions remind us that we are not isolated selves, but continuations of others. Who we are is shaped through relationships, across time, across cultures, across generations. One of the clearest articulations of this can be found in the African philosophy of ubuntu, often translated as “I am because we are,” though this barely captures its depth. As South African anti-apartheid activist and Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu once explained, “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours. We belong in a bundle of life.” Ubuntu is not just a moral ideal, but a recognition of the ontological fact that no person is a person alone.

Storyteller, scholar, and global nomad Wakanyi Hoffman, whose work explores how African Indigenous wisdom can shape ethical frameworks for emerging technologies, speaks of ubuntu as “an invisible force that sustains life.” In her words:

“Ubuntu is not a relic of the past. It is a living system that shows us how to relate, how to lead, and how to care. It teaches us that healing is communal, not individual—that we are not only connected, but responsible for one another.”

Instead of asking “What do you do?”, we can shift to “Who are you in relation to others?” In hiring, in leadership, in everyday collaboration, this subtle shift reframes success from individual performance to presence. It values relational fluency, not just what someone knows, but how they hold space, how they navigate difference, how they build trust, and contribute to collective well-being.

For many in the African diaspora and bicultural communities, relational intelligence is not theoretical, but inherited—the ability to bridge languages, customs, and expectations. In the capacity to translate emotion across cultural codes. To be fluent in multiple worlds, not out of convenience but necessity, amid being often under-recognized by dominant systems, if at all.

These capacities, translation, attunement, and collective sensemaking, are deeply needed in our organizations, communities, and movements.

As scholar Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) reminds us in the Five Manifestations for a Beautiful World, “For this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.”

This shift away from extraction and toward reciprocity asks us to reimagine how value is created and exchanged. Extraction sees people as resources to be optimized, their work, attention, or knowledge used for mere output. The logic that dominates most of our current reality: transactions over trust, metrics over meaning.

Reciprocity, by contrast, is centered on mutual recognition, care, and an ongoing relationship. It’s not just about what is given, but how it’s given, and what remains in return. In this, relational intelligence becomes a form of resilience, asking us to notice what cannot be measured in bullet points or behavioral tests: how someone listens, how they recover from rupture, how they show care.

So we close with a few questions—offered not as conclusions, but as openings:

• How are your relationships shaping you and your life right now?

• When do you notice yourself pulling away or protecting? What might shift if you chose to stay in connection instead?

• How are you reclaiming or embodying ancestral and cultural practices that teach you how to relate, repair, and return?

• What does leadership rooted in relationship—through care, presence, and attunement—look like to you?

• And how might your teams, your tools, your gatherings begin to embody this kind of relational intelligence more fully?

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