Transcript
This is my favorite question and something I feel most passionately about. In fact, the entire impetus for my business is the answer to this question. I found myself as an entrepreneur that I had sacrificed my own health, my own sanity, my fitness, my workouts, my friendships, my social life. Just basically having fun. I forgot about a lot of things. Just getting into that tunnel and working really hard.
And especially in the early years of entrepreneurship when you’re also a parent there’s so much to get done that you often have to drop everything that feels extra and sometimes what feels extra is, you know, and taking a shower or a long relaxing bath, especially when your kids are younger and especially when the business is younger. And I myself went through that and basically burnt my candle at both ends until I had adrenal exhaustion and racing heartbeats. I really trashed my health and pre-kids and pre grinding away at a new business. I hadn´t had so much more time for friendship and joy and just fun, like fun for the sake of fun. So I think it’s so critical to a business to succeed, to make sure that you are filling your cup, that you are giving yourself joy for the sake of joy, fun for the sake of fun, that you are making sure that your life is still like enjoyable, that you have time to relax, time to lay in a bath for an extra hour with Epsom salts and candles and scent and a good book. And that you also have that social fun.
What we did in the club to address this was basically to create adventures. And the club adventures are literally that they are things that might be on our bucket list that as busy women entrepreneurs, we’re never going to get around to planning because I looked at my bucket list and it had basically stopped when I started having kids in my new business. I hadn’t really checked anything off in years. And so with our adventures we try to pick crazy fun things like we’re all going zip lining or we’re going to a Korean scrub spawn getting naked and scrubbed or we are going to learn pole dancing. Like things that, that deliberately have absolutely nothing to do with our businesses and shake us out of that hustle that we get stuck in and just giving our brains a break and our soul a break. I think that that’s usually the first thing to go is that busy mompreneurs drop this social life, they’ve dropped that fun. They don’t make time for girls weekends or slumber parties or just the stuff that gets left by the wayside because there’s so much to take care of with kids and, and spouses and partners and the business.
When you’re looking around trying to find your community that feels like a fit. I would first of all suggest trying out a few, scatter yourself about, go to a bunch of parties. I don’t know how it is everywhere else, but in the Bay area there are billions of meetups, especially for women entrepreneurs. If you’d go on meetup.com it’s almost overwhelming. I typed in women entrepreneurs one day and I just felt like, Whoa, why do I even try? There was literally about a thousand meetings in one week just in the San Francisco Bay area dedicated to women entrepreneurs. So I’m assuming it’s similar around the world.
I would jump into a bunch and really look for those that feel aligned in their vision, and their mission and their values. For example, my community, the club is based on, we call it community centered enterprise, which means I want members to join because they are specifically looking for community, that they are wanting to collaborate and lift up and support each other. I don’t want people to join to network, which is more of a selfish sounding aspect to me. And that’s why I don’t use that word in my marketing just because I see that when people think network, they think I want to build my network and they’re coming at it from a gimme gimme gimme. They’re shouting their little elevator pitch. They’re not listening, they’re not asking. They are just looking to grab and grow, grab and grow. So at some, some groups are like that. So if you are feeling that you want to just add as many contacts to your CRM as you can, then go to a group like that because everybody will be on the same page at least. And you’ll be swapping business cards and giving elevator pitches and growing your mailing list. If you’re looking for something that’s more about connection and friendships, then you want to look for that in their messaging and maybe their website. But really you can tell by just going to the events.
I also want to touch on going to the events because I was surprised when I launched my community with how much fear and anxiety people had about going to the party. And our parties are designed to be as relaxing and welcoming and as low key as possible. They really have nothing to do with business. We want people just to relax and connect as humans first. And we trust that organically. You’ll one day figure out what your new friend does. But I saw that people were messaging me privately many, many, many times. Hey, I didn’t make it tonight because I got really psyched up and I was gonna try, but I lost all my courage and I chickened out and I saw that people were really like struggling with getting the courage to go to a party. And that was foreign to me because I am extremely social and didn’t even think about that aspect originally. So what I’ve learned is if you’re nervous about going to these parties and you’re trying to get out there and pick your new community, think of the fact that you don’t have to put yourself on display and be like marketing yourself when you go to a party. You just have to smile and ask questions and be willing to listen because everybody is going to feel comfortable if you just ask them about themselves.
