Building communities can sometimes be a challenging thing. You don’t always see eye to eye with others. There’s always the opportunity to have conversations and work it out, but misunderstandings and misconceptions can sometimes cloud better judgment.
In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David recalls a specific community experience he had and how he felt about it.
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Highlights:
00:17 – David’s community-building experience
01:04 – Working with a community collaborator
01:33 – Looking for venues
02:08 – “We’re not going to teach anyone anything”
04:15 – The sacredness of teaching and instruction
05:47 – Making yourself small to avoid the difference you can make
07:13 – Being triggered is an opportunity
07:32 – Just daring enough to believe that you can change the world
Transcript:
Building communities is something that I've been doing in the last eight years or so. And it wasn't exactly me… I grew up in the church and in the church, communities are part of the equation.
And it's one of those environments where there are some people who are hired to do what they do or are compensated or incentivized in some way. But most people there are volunteering in some capacity. Some churches are super busy and big and have paid positions.
You'll find that small or medium sized community churches rely and depend on giving as well as volunteers.
So, community, I guess you could say, has always been a part of my DNA. But my community collaborator was initially the catalyst for most events I was a part of.
That encouraged me, and my collaborator was interested in building communities almost on an experimental basis, just to see how people would participate and react and join and be a part of it. Building something that they would love and inviting them to be a part of it.
So, I remember one time we went down looking for venues where we could bring our community gatherings. It was an important part of the whole process.
One time we were going down to a specific venue in downtown Calgary and having a look over. And we were also talking to the owner about being part of our community.
She was interested in being a part of it and leading one of our regular ongoing events and that was great. And at one point she said something that made me wonder… I didn’t know exactly how to take it.
What she said was, “We're not going to teach anyone anything.” I think her perspective was sort of that there are few people that either venue owners or previous business owners or people like me that have online coaching and info product businesses that were known or movers and shakers or influencers or that have some clout in a community.
So, “We need to like remain humble and not teach anyone anything.” I thought it was a strange comment.
The reason I had trouble identifying with it is because the whole thing about community… I'm sure you've seen it before; you've had that experience of going to a rinky-dink operation that wasn't anything special.
Like a gathering of random people and where random things happen. Maybe there's a bit of food and maybe there's a bit of a program, but it’s effectively amateur hour.
But we always strove to be a above amateur hour because that's everything we weren’t about. We wanted to avoid that. We wanted to create quality events that ran on time and had a specific agenda and schedule to them. I think even “intention” is a better word than “agenda.”
So that's why I was like, “That's a strange and interesting comment.” Maybe it had something to do with the way she specifically understood what we were trying to do. I don't know.
It's also possible that she checked out some of my content and what I was up to in my coaching and info-product businesses and kind of went like,
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