Of course, plenty of people disagree. They think that it’s blending that’s B.S. – your personal and professional lives should rarely mix, if ever. When The Wall Street Journal published a blog item on this issue, it generated considerable feedback, with more than 200 people weighing in on the topic.

“My personal life is on a need-to-know basis,” wrote one person, “and the people I work with don’t need to know.” From another: “My company actually grades you at review time on your ‘ability to keep personal life out of the workplace.’”

Earlier this year, The Harvard Business Review posted a blog item saying that business e-mails should never contain such personal niceties like, “see you at the Red Sox game next weekend.” The author’s reasoning: “Just as there is separation between church and state, so too do those barriers exist in business and our personal lives.”

It’s pretty clear to me that when we deepen the relationships in the different spheres of our life, blending becomes inevitable, and, ultimately, we lead a more satisfying life. But I recognize that there are times when this is more difficult than others. When work is incredibly stressful, we feel we need a refuge that takes our mind off it. Or when we’re boxed into a job that’s not quite the right fit that we’d like to work our way out of.

I plan to write about how to reconcile these tensions (can we?) in my upcoming book, and I’m eager to include stories from all of you.

So tell me: Is your personal life on a “need to know” basis at work and why? Has it always been that way? Or if you’ve had success in blending your home and work lives, let me know how you were able to accomplish that.

Good news folks: You’ve got an “empathy hormone,” and you can control it with the sheer power of your thoughts. Science has proven it.

The hormone oxytocin plays a key role in influencing our ability to establish trust, act with generosity, and perceive others’ feelings. Research has shown that oxytocin reduces anxiety during public speaking tests – not surprising, given that it lowers blood pressure and stress hormone levels. During childbirth and breastfeeding, mothers produce more of it – nature’s way of making sure that they bond with their babies.

But what’s really exciting about oxytocin is that you can train your body to release it. There are several ways to do this, which I outline below, but one of the easiest is to flood your head with images and thoughts of someone you love.

Take my client, Paul. Every week, he dreaded his team meeting – conflict, drama, and resistance to critical feedback from his colleagues pretty much guaranteed an anxious experience. Then he decided to try priming himself before a meeting with an “oxytocin booster.” He took a few deep breaths and got lost in thoughts about his girlfriend, and the mental snapshots of the time they spent together on a recent New Mexico trip.

He felt the results immediately – instead of dreading contact with his colleagues, he found himself starting an open conversation about their current work challenges, with genuine curiosity. He was shocked: one coworker let down his guard to reveal the real problems behind his project; another listened openly to Paul’s ideas. Paul could trace the shift in the meeting to the tone he had started it with—the warmth, care, and empathy combining to transform the atmosphere.

Here are five ways that scientists have shown that you, too, can get the empathy juice flowing to improve all your upcoming interactions:

1. Daydream about your significant other. Before you approach a stressful social situation, make like Paul and think about your most supportive relationships and connect to the feelings of positivity associated with them.
2. Hug someone you care about. Make contact with someone who makes you feel really good, and set your mind to transfer good feeling to someone with whom you are developing a relationship. That contact has been clinically shown to increase oxytocin levels, and the oxytocin will give you confidence and a brighter outlook.
3. Spend a few minutes with a beloved pet. Making contact with pets has also been shown to generate oxytocin. Use this to improve your ability to relate with generosity and to create more mutually fruitful relationships.
4. Listen to your favorite music. Stimuli for all the senses—even smells—can boost oxytocin levels to prepare you to interact with more elegance.
5. Get down, make love. If the researchers say to do it, and you have the flexibility (and the partner) to schedule it around important meetings, who’s to argue?

Try one of these out before your next meeting, or any interaction that tends to be stressful. This is great stuff to prep you for meeting new people, too. Do it before a networking event and maybe you’ll even be able to skip that cocktail that provides your usual social lubricant. Go try it!

Have you tried and had good results with any of these?

Let's Do Lunch: I'm gearing up to try out the two competing lunch-matching sites, Let's Lunch and Go Grab Lunch.

Candor Generator: If you were a car, what kind make and model would you be? This is one of many questions that friends and colleagues will answer if you sign up for the 360 Reach. It emails a survey to your friends and then aggregates the data so that you can gather critical and anonymous feedback on what others perceive as your strengths, weaknesses, and overall brand.

Have you ever done a personal 360? How did you feel going into it, and what were the results?

Chatter is Salesforce.com’s competing walled-Facebook-for-business product. I’m pals with the Yammer folks, so undeniably biased – although it seems incontrovertible that Yammer is more feature-rich. In-con-tro-ver-tible.

Anyway, between Yammer, Skype, and Webex, I’m starting to feel like our satellite employees are a lot less far away. This stuff works.

This week’s hits:

MORE POWER FOR SOCIAL NETWORKS: Social media has transformed marketing. Now let’s think about its impact on product innovation, sez HBR. (Hat tip to RMA VP Sales Will Petruski for this link.)

VISUALIZE SUCCESS: Lucidchart.com, an inexpensive collaborative mindmapping tool, is my favorite new toy. I recently used it to map out a new editorial strategy for RMA (coming soonish…), and our Customer Experience Director Kristen Bassick, who turned me on to it, has used it to map out our corporate onboarding workflow.

PRODUCT LAUNCH IN A BOX: Looking for a turn-key solution to market and launch your own membership website online? Check out Kajabi. I heard good things about it from Get Storied’s Michael Margolis.

SUPER-EASY APP FOR PHOTOSHARING: Thank to Zapd, I recently got treated to an entire web site of pics of some of my zany weekend antics – seems to be an awesomely quick way to share your event photos, on a dedicated URL. But it’s Iphone only. (Slap in my face: I switched to Android recently. Je regret.)

DROP OUT AND WIN: Peter Thiel looks to burst the higher education bubble in this Techcrunch article. Fascinating, inevitable, and exciting for anyone who has looked at the price tag of a university education and resolved into a dew. (Note to Tech Crunch: Great piece, but next time, make it an interview!)

That's all for this week. Go make friends!

Every Friday, Relationship Masters Academy's Program Director Sara Grace digests recent must-see news, research, and technology for social capitalists and collaborative leaders. Send articles and apps you'd like to see featured to sgrace at relationship masters academy dot com for consideration.

Yes, I'm coming off the high of my first NY Tech Meetup last night. NY's startup scene is on fire, and at the monthly tech meetup, you get to see 10-15 entrepreneurial teams pitch their products/sites. I'm including a couple of the sites I saw last night here in today's Relationship Roundup. (Huzzah!)

CORKBOARD.ME: I love this: a virtual corkboard of infinite space, along with an infinite stack of post-it notes! I didn't retire my own real-life corkboard until I moved from LA-NY and left most of my worldly belongings behind. You can use this as a to-do list, a collaborative tool, or for your own project planning. Other uses I could imagine: planning event seating charts, organizing scenes for a screenplay or concepts for a presentation... Useful and fun.

IMUP4: Location-based app to help you filter friends' invitations (eg "meet for drinks tonight?") from their social feeds. One of several I've heard of lately that use social media to try to game out your plans for the future.

SKILLSHARE: A revolution in learning!! From their About: "A community marketplace to learn anything from anyone. Our mission is to flip the traditional notion of education on its head and democratize learning. We are challenging the assumption that learning only occurs within the four walls of a classroom. Instead, we'll tap into existing communities and networks, which are the world's largest universities." Right now it's just in NY, but you could take the lead in launching your own city. I'm considering both taking and teaching a class.

Question: What's your favorite new app or tool that's helping you get your work done?

As you'll see in the article, your relationships affect everything from surgery recovery time (you heal more slowly if you're fighting with your spouse!) to simply whether you have a good or bad day.

Here are some intriguing highlights:

1.    Relationships matter. Relationships protect us during hard times, which improves our cardiovascular functioning and decreases stress levels.  People that have very few social ties have nearly twice the risk of dying from heart disease and are twice as likely to catch colds (even though they are exposed to fewer germs due to being less social).

2.    Support matters. Being in a tumultuous relationship can extend the time it takes for you to recover from surgery or a major injury.

3.    Proximity matters. A friend who lives three blocks from you has dramatically more of an affect on your well-being than one who lives just three miles away.

4.    Mutual friends matter. Your whole social network affects your entire well-being, which means that mutual friendships matter a lot.  If you invest in these relationships you'll see a high return.  Improving their well-being will improve your well-being. As I wrote in WGYB, lifelines have a DISPROPORTIONATE effect on your quality of life.

5.    Time matters. If we achieve at least 6 hours of social time a day it increases well-being and decreases stress and worry.  That 6 hours is definitely attainable because it includes time at work, talking on the phone, emailing, talking to friends in person, and social media.  Even having 3 hours of social time decreases the chance of having a bad day by 10 percent.

6.    Work friends matter. Thiry percent of people have a best friend at work.  Those that do are seven times as likely to be engaged in their jobs and produce higher quality work.  Those that don’t have a best friend at work have a one in 12 chance of being engaged – yikes.

Can you think of a time your network affected your health?

While I was in LA I had the pleasure of going to one of Keith's dinner parties and was reminded - the man knows how to host a great dinner! We played the question game. Mine: describe my most embarrassing moment. I blurted out the first thing that came to mind: Showing up to a birthday party at age 8 or so, in my fancy party dress, and finding out the party wasn't until next weekend.

Now, the important stuff, links:

• First, a shout out for Lisa Earl McLeod's FREE SUMMER WEBINAR SERIES, Grow Your Business (without giving up your life). Lisa is the author of the awesome book on conflict resolution, Triangle of Truth, and I highly recommend you register for one or all of the three calls in the series.
• RMAer Michael Fox shared this Bloomberg BusinessWeek article on the importance of connecting with colleagues the forums - check it out!
• If you thought you didn't have anything to learn from Chuck Norris, you'd be wrong!

UPDATE: I neglected to mention that you can still slide on into Pilot II and avoid the Sept price increase - but get on it quickly so that you can catch up with people who started  June 14!

What a great model for getting stuff accomplished! I love the idea of a month of "development sprints" to move a specific project forward. Why not?

A couple links:

Rethinking Glass Ceilings: A thoughtful post from Shivonne Byrne of Microsoft on how corporate America can better incorporate people who explore nontraditional career paths - in particular, women.

Lessons from San Francisco's homeless: "It's a new way of hating. It's about being straight with people. The dictionary defines hate as hostility, but that's heavy. My idea is to be straight about negative feelings that we all have, which is what hate is, and then you can have a real conversation. Don't be threatening or angry or snotty - just straight."

Send me more! sgrace at ferrazzigreenlight.com!

Now, onto this week's links...

• 10 Tips for Making Great Email introductions: This is great stuff. Chris, can we use it in RMA? Hat tip to Meghna for the link.
• Pirate Management: No really, it's a good thing! Fun Psych Today post about The Invisible Hook, a new book about "what today's managers can learn from the scurvy dogs of yore." Thanks to Sara Santos for the link.
• The Social Capital Scramble: Economics once again hastens a societal shift already underway: Welcome to the Relationship Economy. Thanks Tanja for the link.

Notice: Every single link today was sent to me by someone else. Let's use this as a model, people, so that I can hit Friday happy hours with greater regularity. (Is that my new vision statement?)

The FG NY office's snowy window.

Greetings from snowy NYC. Keith's in town! He's here for an engagement at the NY Stock Exchange, and to spend time with the online Relationship Masters Academy crew. So many of you have signed up information on joining the charter class - thank you! Very inspiring and exciting for us. We'll be communicating with you about it soon.

This week in links:

• Don't deal with a job transition alone! From The NY Times, a wonderfully honest story about the importance of turning to trusting advisors when you've got big decisions to make. The author writes, "Everyone who’s laid off should find someone they trust and sit down and talk. You can’t think things through by yourself, especially when you have a family. You have too much going on mentally. You need someone who cares enough to listen, but is not in the thick of it the way you are."
• For Email Marketers: A creative, relationship-centric approach to getting people to rethink unsubscribing.
• Touch me! I've got to hit one more from the Times (when in Rome...): Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, according to one of the studies in this article on the power of touch.
• Technology works! I'm always amazed by technophobes who worry about technology isolating us. So I enjoyed relationship-savvy salesman-entrepreneur Andy Ellwood's story, on his personal blog, about using an iPhone app to bridge a language barrier.
• From the Lighter Side: An over-privileged business school student gets taken down.