Archives for August 2020

Some memberships and communities fail despite the huge amounts of labour that go into them. And some succeed even when everything is done “wrong”.

That’s because no amount of clever tactics will make up for a lack in the experience the group has.

The most powerful kind of experience the group can have is a shared experience.

Shared experiences give the group empathy to each other, a common language for connecting and a feeling of ‘being in it together’. It turns the others in the group from ‘the others’ to people like me.

Some communities are lucky enough to be built around an existing shared experience (e.g. having a child, buying a home, growing your own veggies in your backyard). These are the groups that often grow in spite of everything else because every single person in that group has experienced that thing.

For the rest of us, with communities that bring together a wide range of people, it’s up to us to create a shared experience for our community.

What makes a great shared experience? Here are some that I’ve seen work:

• Live events hosted for the community (e.g. a summer camp for adults like Camp GLP)
• Teaming up to complete a challenging event together (e.g. Half-Marathon or Obstacle Course Race)
• Learning together from leaders of the community (e.g. a membership site like Fizzle or school like Akimbo)
• Rallying together to help a member of the community achieve something (e.g. fundraising for a cause or lifting someone up the same level)

What do these have in common? Members of the community are being challenged by something new. Something potentially unknown. Facing and overcoming new experiences is what brings us together.

How will you unite your tribe with a shared experience?

The idea behind self-care is that if you take the time do something for yourself that you’ll feel better.

On the surface it’s a great idea. Adopting some self-care might allow you to stop working for an hour and go for a walk outside helping you to feel refreshed and reinvigorated and giving your subsconcious some space to work on problems in the background.

But the problem with always seeing self-care as taking time for a bath or to treat-yo-self or learning to meditate is that taking time for yourself isn’t always what you actually need.

For example: Perhaps you’re feeling depressed, so you cancel everything social to spend more time by yourself.

But what if spending time with some of your friends is the thing that would help normalise what you’re feeling and help you feel better?

Or another example: A project you’re working on starts getting really hard. It’s stressing you out and impacting other areas of your life, so in the interest of self-care, you drop it.

But perhaps what that project really needed at that time is for you to continue to show up, even in a small way, every day and that the satisfaction of seeing that project through would have been a boost to your confidence and self-esteem.

That’s why self-awareness is so important.

Self-awareness allows us to correctly identify what we’re feeling in the moment. The we can pick the ‘self-care’ activity that will truly help us.

Taking time out to re-energize is a good place to start, but sometimes self-care involves leaning in, reaching out to or helping others and seeing things through.