The Ryan Meetup group has nearly 2,000 members whose common bond is simple: their first name! David sits down with founders Ryan Rose, Ryan Cousins, and Ryan Le to hear the amazing origin story of these three partners spreading the Ryan gospel. The Ryans reveal how they were able to take a Meetup of just three members—themselves—and turn their first big event into a viral blowout with hundreds of attendees including journalists from the New York Times, NPR, and The New Yorker. Plus, the Ryans discuss how they’ve actually helped people legally change their name to Ryan, and their future plans to break the world record for the largest gathering of people with the same first name.

Show Notes

In this episode, we are talking to Ryan Rose, Ryan Le and Ryan Cousins. Yes, there is something similar about all three of them. They’re all Ryan’s. They are the Founders of The Ryan Meetup group, where one commonality of the first name can drive connections for thousands of people. Happy reading.

—

We are talking to the Ryan Movement with nearly 2,000 Ryans in their group. Hello, Ryan Rose, Ryan Le, and Ryan Cousins. This is not a joke, readers. This is a community whose origin is going to shock you. We’re so excited to have the three Ryans here. At your first event, Ryan Rose started it. You only had two people show up. At your next meetup event, you had over 100 Ryans. You’ve built the Ryan Movement. It’s a great story. Let’s get started. Tell us the story.

It wasn’t supposed to be anything super big, but it did grow very fast. I wanted to make friends in the city. I moved here years ago. I’ve started a few other groups and nothing blew off, but I decided to try something new. I went into Photoshop and printed out ten flyers or so and hung it up in my neighborhood. I guess these two guys saw and came out to the first one.

That was it. Ryan Cousins, you saw the flyer. What happened?

I was walking out of my apartment one day and saw this group huddled around this telephone post. They asked me and they were like, “Is your name Ryan?” I didn’t even know these people, but I was like, “Yes, can I help you?” They’re like, “You should look at this.” I know I walked up to the telephone post, which is 5 feet from my front door, and it says in bold type, “Is your name Ryan?” with a huge QR code on it. It says, “No Bryan’s allowed.” I’m instantly a little bit scared maybe that someone is following me but also extremely intrigued.

I scanned it. I was the twentieth Ryan to join the group but the first one to RSVP to the event. I had to meet the person who had created this idea. I was all in from the start. I messaged Ryan Rose the second I saw it, and I was like, “Let’s get this thing moving.” It was only the two of us for a while until the day of, and I’ll let Ryan take it from there.

Ryan Le, take it away.

Somebody tweeted out a picture of the poster that day. A friend of mine sent me the tweet. It was a tweet that sent a picture of the poster that said, “I wish I could go.” I was like, “That’s hilarious. What is this?” This is the day of the event.

Was your friend a Ryan who said, “I wish I could go?”

She was not. She had sent this to me. I scanned a QR code that day. I was like, “This is hilarious. What is this?” I assumed right from the start since it was a big tweet with a lot of interactions and stuff, this is already a big established thing. I scanned the QR code, joined the group, RSVP’d to the event, and then saw that there were probably six people RSVP to the event. That didn’t deter me at all. I was like, “This is 40 minutes from my apartment. It’s today. I don’t have any plans tonight. I’m going.” I met these two.

It was only the three of you that showed up at that first event. Is that right? Now let’s backtrack a little. Ryan Rose, what were you thinking? How did you come up with this idea of doing a giant QR code and putting it around the neighborhood? You’re a very creative person. How did you come up with this?

For the flyer, it’s very uncreative.

It’s very old school.

It’s ominous. That’s what got a lot of people’s attention. I tried to make the word Ryan super big and all the other words small. People look from afar. They see the word Ryan and they could walk closer. I feel like QR codes are in these days, so I added that on.

Were you in the shower and suddenly you had a vision of a QR code with the big word Ryan? How’d you come up with this idea?

I had this bigger idea years ago. There’s this Ryan Reddit group. I posted there and tried to see if they were interested. I didn’t act on it for a whole year, and I’m like, “Maybe I’ll start small in New York.” I wanted ideally this huge gathering of the Ryans where all the Ryans come together in a convention style. I wanted to start small so I figured I could meet some local ones in the city.

You had met Ryans previously. How many Ryans before this group did you know?

I went to school with a few. I meet them here and there, but honestly, not that many. I don’t have that many close Ryans in my life.

Ryan Cousins, Ryan Le, do either of you have a best friend who’s a Ryan?

No. One of the first things I did when I saw the flyer was go through my contacts. I typed Ryan into my phone. I was like, “Who can I tell about this?” It’s such an exclusive club with such straightforward requirements. I searched for Ryan on my phone. Five popped up, and I messaged one of them. I tried to get them to come up from Philly, but that’s it. My Ryan network is pretty small. We had humble beginnings in that sense.

How about you, Ryan Le?

In high school, I had these two friends that were named Ryan. We used to always joke around in high school about how calling ourselves the circle of Ryan. That was back in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We’re a bit ways away from me being able to invite them out to New York.

You did have a connection. You had a little group of Ryans in South Dakota. That’s amazing.

A little bit.

There is something special about this name, clearly. The three of you showed up. Let’s continue the story. Ryan Rose, do you want to continue? What happened after your first event and how did it grow?

The first event, we were this small little dive bar. I was sitting in the back corner by myself. I remember Ryan Le was the first one there, and he’s like, “Ryan?” I was like, “Yes.” Honestly, we talked about our names. Ryan Cousins came, and he is like, “Ryan?” We’re like, “Yes.” We sat around this table and discussed our names. We tried to decide on a name to call this little group. I’m like, “Only you guys showed up. Let’s all be the growers of this thing and see where it goes.”

Where did it go? Fast forward, what happened next?

We’ve split up our duties of hanging up flyers and posting. Ryan Le has taken over Manhattan and Cousins has been helping with Brooklyn. I went on this little road trip and put some flyers up around the country. I drove down to Texas. I stopped at all these different spots and tried to spread the word across the South and the Northeast.

Spreading the Ryan Gospel.

There are Ryans everywhere. During South too, I’m like, “People come from all over, so this is the perfect place to spread the word.” What grew it is Ryan Le posted a flyer in Manhattan. Someone posted it. I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard of that. I think I saw your comment.

I did, yes.

He posted on there. He posted somewhere in Manhattan and someone posted on there and it grew from there, another viral Reddit post. We got a lot of Ryans coming in from there. It grew to 1,000 after that.

It was the number one trending term, I think, on Reddit for a short period of time. It was super trending on Reddit, I had seen. On Twitter, it also got a ton of hits. What happened, Ryan Cousins? Were you shocked when you started seeing what was happening?

It felt like I had some stake in Dogecoin. It felt like that and it was taking off. We had been texting. It felt that we were all in our group texts since the day we had met. Watching it blow up was exactly how you’d imagine it. We were through the roof and texting every minute, “We got another one.” It was very exciting and not expected.

Ryan Le, how about you? What was your reaction?

I remember I was at a trivia night in the East Village that night, and I have notifications on Instagram. I remember my phone was blowing up all night like, “Ryan followed you,” on the @RyanMeetup on Instagram. We went from 200 followers at the start of the day to 800.

Was it all because of what? What was driving the virality?

It was that Reddit post. I had put up posters a couple of days before and went viral on Reddit. All of a sudden, people found the Instagram, Meetup group, and flooded it.

It’s a great example. You guys have paid nothing except for the cost of printing some paper, which cost nothing pretty much. You created this incredible community, which is so cool. Tell us about the first big event that you had. What happened at that event? How many people showed up? What’d you all do? After the first event, which was the three of you, tell us about the next event, Ryan Rose.

It was very different from the first event. At the first meetup, we’re deciding where we should have the second one. We found two places that had Ryan in the name. There was Ryan’s Daughter on the Upper East Side and Ryan Maguire’s. We went with Ryan Maguire’s because it was a little bit bigger. Ryan Maguire seemed to fit the bill. We contact them and they were super excited about it. Ryan Maguire himself showed up. It was named after their son. That was exciting. We had all these press come out, which we didn’t anticipate. The New York Times came. They even contact us or anything, so we were shaken by that. Some guy from NPR came and someone from The New Yorker. It was a big one.

New York Times, NPR, and The New Yorker, you can’t get bigger than those three, not in the New York area. Was it a Ryan journalist that came from any of the three?

It was perfect. The guy from NPR was named Ryan, and The New Yorker guy had a friend named Ryan.

Tell us about the first event. How many people showed up? What happened?

About 120 people RSVP’d. We got around that many people are coming in and out and not everyone signed in. The space ended up being a little bit small for how many people there were. It was perfect because everyone was congested in this back area. It was easier to talk to everybody and speak to everybody. We had a sign in the background, which was perfect for all the photo ops because you could see the sign in the back.

Finally, what was your reaction to the first event was 120 people?

It was crazy. One thing that we didn’t mention was that when we originally started planning this whole thing to have it at Ryan Maguire’s, we didn’t even contact the bar. We were like, “Let’s have it here. Maybe twenty people will show up.” It kept exploding. “We should call them so that they know.” When we told them about it, they were like, “We’ll get some extra staff for you guys that night. Don’t worry.” They had a guy that called in named Ryan. They called him in for the event. I was shocked. Ryan Cousins and I were at the front helping ID check all the Ryans to make sure we didn’t have any Bryans breach the event. It was crazy. It was a great time. I was happy with how it went.

I know there’s a very strong feeling. No Bryans allowed.

That’s very explicit on anything you see from us. Also, the Kyles have started to become somewhat of a threat to us because they’ve been trying to organize a record-breaking meetup.

For people who don’t know this, let me share this with people because I read about this. There’s something called the Gathering of the Kyles. Apparently, in Kyle, Texas, they’re going to be looking to break the record for the larger single-name gathering. They’re going to be gathering in Lake Kyle Park and they’re going to look to break the current record. The current record was set in 2017 when over 2,300 Ivans gathered in Bosnia, of all places. That might as well hit head on this now. Ryan Cousins, could you ever attempt to break the Ivan/soon-to-be Kyle record?

That is our ultimate goal. The three of us have decided that’s where we want this to end up. That’s why we’re heading West to host a Ryan meetup in LA. We have a lot of interested Ryans on the West Coast. We’re trying to mobilize all of these Ryans to get them ready for the ultimate meetup, which will break the record. We’re confident of that.

Are there more Kyles or Ryans in the world? Do you know? I’d be interested to see that.

There are more Ryans. I looked it up actually.

You have more potential there. Ryan Rose, talk to us. What have you got?

In the US alone, there are over 600,000 Ryans. For Kyles, there are only 190,000.

Just in the US alone, there are over 600,000 Ryans.

You’re over 3X of the volume.

I’d also like to add that we have a Ryan who used to work for the Guinness Book of World Records who’s giving us some inside tips on accomplishing the mission.

You’ve got your little Ryan that has some inside intel. Let’s get back to Ryan Cousins.

I was going to say this brings us back to the event. We have Young Ryans, too, and I think the name Kyle is falling off a little bit. We had a one-year-old Ryan show up at the Ryan Meetup.

 Was he by himself?

That would’ve been preferred.

You allow non-Ryans at the event if it was taking care of five-year-olds or less.

They had to make it clear that they weren’t a Ryan. That was a highlight to see the little Ryan. They’re carrying him on their chest or whatever. It’s great to see that the young Ryans are getting involved too.

Ryan Le is holding up a picture now of little Ryan in a baby pouch that looks very Ryany. That’s all I would say.

There was a Ryan chant at one point that got too loud.

We have to hear the Ryan chant. What does the Ryan chant look like? You can’t do it all at the same time, so who wants to do it? Ryan Le? Who’s going to do the Ryan chant?

It’s very simple.

Ryan Cousins, do it.

Ryan, Ryan, Ryan. It is very creative, just like the flyer.

You all got together. Everyone had an awesome time. You’ve had another event since that event. Is that right?

Yes. We had an event not so long ago.

Let’s hear about it. How did that go?

We’ve been trying to switch it up. We held the event at this theater bar area. We called it Ryan Rendezvous. We had Ryan Gosling movies playing in the background. We set up a red carpet and a Ryan backdrop. We had a few other features like a name-changing station. We made a trophy for Ryan who traveled the furthest to the Ryan Meetup award.

Who traveled the furthest? I’m sure it was Ryan, but how far?

It was Texas Ryan. He was from Austin. There was another Texas Ryan again. The Texas Ryans show up. He traveled over 1,700 miles.

Just to be around his kin folk. Let’s ask. A broad picture here, as people who read this who are interested in marketing, virality, driving people to show up, and trying to build community, let’s each of you share one learning that you would take in terms of building community. Ryan Le, take it away.

If there’s anything I’ve learned so far with the Ryan Meetup from Ryan Rose, it’s plain and simple. Keep it simple. All we did was put up posters that said Ryan on them and we got 100 people to show up to our events. Keep it as simple is all you got to do.

Keeping it simple is all you have to do.

Ryan Cousins, what have you got? One learning.

Keeping it simple is important, but bringing fresh ideas to the table to keep it interesting. At the first meetup, we were ambushed by this huge pack of Ryans that we didn’t have anything planned other than let’s hang out and talk about Ryan topics. This time, we had the actual paperwork for people to legally change their name to Ryan. This one Ryan brought his girlfriend and she filled out all the paperwork.

Someone actually changed their name to Ryan at a Ryan meetup?

Yes.

It’s 600,001 now people that could show up. This is insane. Was the person hesitant to do so? How did this happen?

We had advertised ahead of time that we were going to have this stand manned by Ryan attorneys, which was a Ryan in a suit. I don’t think he’s actually passed the bar or anything, but we did have all the legal paperwork set out. The second she got there, she was there for that. She had made a beeline.

What was her original name?

Dina.

She was not a Dina person. She always saw herself as a Ryan. Now she could live her Ryan dreams.

Exactly. We have to meet her at the courthouse and finalize it, but she signed the papers, so she’s well on her way to officially joining the Ryan Meetup.

Were you so happy you got someone to do it?

We were through the roof. I did not personally expect anyone to actually change their name. That’s how you win. That’s how you can grow and compete with the Johns and the Mikes of the world.

I wanted to add as well there was a second Ryan. We also got a lot of questions like, “What if your middle name is Ryan? What if your last name is Ryan?” We basically told them you have to go by Ryan and please provide references that you go by Ryan. There was a Ryan that showed up. He said something about the middle name. I checked his ID and saw Christopher Ryan, whatever his last name was. I made a joke about the whole reference thing. The man pulled out two references on the spot. I was jokingly saying that after that conversation. He pulled them out and then he was at the name change station later that day also signing the paperwork as well.

Ryan Rose, what’s one big learning that you had or any reaction as a person who changed their name as well?

It’s like what Ryan Le said, keeping it simple. Also, I feel like I’m very old school with my ways of advertising. I love flyers. I love the idea of someone being outside and seeing something out and about. I wanted this to be an in-person event, but also, to grow online too. It is the idea of starting it somewhere outside, not online, and then maybe bringing it to a media format.

I heard another thing happened, which you haven’t even mentioned yet, which is that Ryan Seacrest mentioned it on his show as well. Talk about that.

I was sleeping. My mom called me and was like, “Wake up,” and then she put the phone to the TV. She’s like, “Ryan Seacrest is talking about it.” Someone on his team sent him the flyer. I think he was scared by it. It was on Ryan and Kelly. Kelly’s like, “This is how people get abducted,” and Ryan’s like, “I don’t know about that.”

This is what Ryan Cousins first thought when he got scared when he saw his name Ryan on there.

Honestly, I get it. The poster does look like a wanted sign or something, so it makes sense. He looked up the group and he is like, “I guess it is real. I wish them luck,” but it would be better if he actually came out.

He’s not in the show anymore.

He is not.

He’s got some free time. Get him.

He has no excuse not to come.

Come on, be a good Ryan. Who’s your favorite Ryan, Ryan Cousins?

It’s got to be Ryan Reynolds. I know that’s an easy answer, but this is a perfect match for him too creatively. This is the kind of thing that he would get behind. I’m in advertising and creative, so I’ve always admired the work that his agency does. If you’re reading, Ryan Reynolds, we’d love to have you.

Ryan Le, how about you?

I’ve got to go with Ryan Reynolds myself as well. Everything that Cousins outlined is right up his alley, I feel like. We’d love to get in contact with him.

Ryan Rose?

All the Ryans are equal in my book. I love them all.

It’s like if someone says, “Who’s your favorite child,” when you’re a parent. You can’t pick your favorite child. It’s asking Ryan to pick the favorite Ryan. Very nice answer. I have a question to ask you. David’s a very popular name. There are probably more than 600,000 Davids. There are probably over 1 million Davids in the country. I don’t think I should start a David Meetup group. The reason for it is because it’s such a common name. It’s not as much of a form of identity as Ryan, which feels like a much more special name. I’m thinking that perhaps I start a David Siegel meetup group because on LinkedIn, believe it or not, there are six David Siegels. When I graduated from college, there are four David Siegels in my graduating class.

There are a lot of famous David Siegels out there. The person who owns the largest house in the United States, the Versailles House, his name is David Siegel. The previous CEO of United Airlines is David Siegel. There’s a lot of David Siegels out there. I may start the David Siegel Meetup group. Of all those reading who have a unique name, who has ever thought about wanting to meet more people with your name, you could also start a meetup group out of your name as well and potentially get thousands of people. Ryan Cousins, what are your thoughts?

It’s funny you say that. We had two Ryans with the same first, middle, and last names show up to the meetup, which is pretty crazy. Ryan Patrick O’Connor.

I’m guessing they have some Irish heritage with that Ryan Patrick O’Connor name.

Yes, definitely.

They could create a Ryan Patrick O’Connor group, but I have a feeling that wouldn’t be quite as big as some of the others. What have we not talked about? Are any other crazy things that have happened through this process that would be interesting to share?

After the New York Times thing, I got an email from someone named Ryan. He said back in 2013, he and a group of Ryans in San Francisco started the same exact Ryan movement. No Bryans allowed and all.

They actually said no Bryans allowed also?

Yes. They would have these Ryan gatherings as well. They kept in contact over the years. I saw they have this huge long email chain, so I kept it to see everything they talked about since 2013, but one of them messaged each other and was like, “Was this you?” They’re all like, “Is this you?” They were like, “There’s a new movement of Ryans coming out.” We got into a group chat with them, and they want to be invested in trying to break the world record one day. They said that was their ultimate dream.

This is going to happen. You’re bicoastal here. You got Texas in the middle of the country. This is going to happen. Much like there’s a Kyle, Texas, and a Lake Kyle Park, is there a Ryan place somewhere?

Ryan, Oklahoma.

That’s the only Ryan City right now?

No, there are a couple within the states. There’s a whole list that somebody had sent us, but I know Ryan, Oklahoma is the one that comes to my head first.

There are multiple Ryans that you potentially could choose. You don’t have to gather there. It might be harder than gathering in a big city New York or LA.

There is also Ryan Field. It’s Northwestern University’s football field. That could be a potential gathering place.

You could fill up every one of the 60,000 seats with Ryans. Nolan Ryan can come out and pitch. He’s not known as a Ryan, but you have Ryan Sandberg. He’s a famous baseball player from the Chicago Cubs. He could play. Also, Ryan Howard.

Maybe even Ryan from The Office, the fictional Ryan. As long as he comes in character, that should count. If Ryanair could fly all of us Ryans to the field, that would be ideal as well.

This is the dream. The dream is to break the record, but why is it breaking the record? Why is this whole thing? Ultimately, at the end of the day, it’s not about meeting other people named Ryan. What’s it ultimately about?

Everyone’s adding to this collaborative effort to grow the Ryan community. Many Ryans have great ideas. I got The Office Ryan idea from someone. Another one said they wanted to make business cards because that’s what they do for a living. It’s more about seeing what we can accomplish as this massive group that is only connected by our first names.

The beautiful thing is that when you’re connected by your first name. You find that you’re also connected by so many other potential ways as well. The beautiful thing about community is that the best communities are where people are very different from each other and it’s not all the same type of person because who needs that? That’s not the way that life should be. At the same time, you have some commonalities and you clearly have something common here. Each of the three of you, any last parting words? Ryan Le, why don’t you go first?

Any Ryan that’s reading out there, I invite them to join the Ryan Meetup.

Ryan Cousins?

Thank you for having us on. It’s a little awkward that your first name isn’t Ryan, but for business, it’s probably good for us anyway.

It’s not too late for me to change it, so that’s good news.

That’s true. We do have that option now. To any soon-to-be parents, hopefully, you consider Ryan as a name for your son or daughter. I’ll leave you with that.

Thank you. Ryan Rose.

Ryan Seacrest, Ryan Gosling, and Ryan Reynolds, if you’re reading, join our movement. Ryanair, fly us to places. Anybody else who’s not named Ryan, except Ryan, you should start your own little name group. It’s very special.

It’s absolutely amazing what these three individuals have done. You’re causing so much happiness and connection for hundreds and soon-to-be thousands and thousands of people that all share a common bond. I want to give you all the kudos and credit in the world. I cannot wait to see where Ryanair and the Ryans take you in the future. Have an awesome rest of the day.

Thank you so much. It was fun.

—

Thanks for reading this episode with the Ryan Meetup group founders. It’s such a beautiful story that can teach all of us that virality, growth, and energy come from authenticity. You try to fake, it doesn’t work. If you do the Ryan way, great things happen and, hopefully, they will end up breaking the record and Meetup will be a big part of that. If you enjoyed this episode, then please subscribe, leave a review, and remember, let’s keep connected because life’s better together.

—

I have something important to share. Check out my new book, Decide & Conquer, to get to know my story at Meetup. The hardest thing about community leadership is making tough decisions when the stakes are high. I’ll tell you, they were never higher than when Meetup was owned and sold by WeWork. In my new book, Decide & Conquer, I’ll walk you through a counterintuitive framework for decision-making and the epic journey of Meetup’s surprising survival. Good leaders deliberate, and great leaders decide. Order my book by visiting DecideAndConquerbook.com or anywhere books are sold. I think you’ll like it.

Important Links

• The Ryan Meetup
• @RyanMeetup – Instagram
• DecideAndConquerbook.com

The post Episode 65: How To Turn Any Idea Into A Real Movement appeared first on Meetup Blog.

Before he was a co-founder of General Assembly and founder of Common co-living spaces, Brad Hargreaves was a Meetup organizer hosting tech events in New York. In this conversation with David Siegel, a legendary entrepreneur talks about how he’s made community building an essential part of his business strategy. Learn how the right community can help you make a major change in your life, whether it’s a long-distance move or a career change.

Show Notes

In this episode, we have Brad Hargreaves, the Founder of General Assembly and the Founder and Chairman of Common. If you are looking for advice on career transitions or information on building community, this is the episode for you to learn not only the common answers but the uncommon ones. Happy reading.

—

Brad Hargreaves, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Everyone should understand Brad knows a lot about keeping people connected. He is the Founder and Chairman of Common, which is all about connecting individuals in their living spaces. He’s the Founder of General Assembly, which is all about building community, building connections and helping people around their career transformations. I find it amazing, first of all, that you are willing to punish yourself by not just being a founder once but being a founder multiple times. Are you founding for punishment?

I don’t know what else to do. It’s the only thing I know so I keep doing it. There would probably be easier ways to live my life but I love it. I have fun and hopefully, do some good for people in the process.

After General Assembly, which is in 20 cities and 35,000 graduates, we’re going to talk a lot about that and Common up to 10,000 beds, are you working on the potential next idea?

I brought on a great CEO to run Common day-to-day. I’ve been building it for a couple of years. An incredible woman named Karlene Holloman has spent decades building and managing hospitality operating companies. I am out of day-to-day at Common and I’m taking some time off for the first time in my working career, which has been nice.

What does a day in the life of an incredibly successful entrepreneur who doesn’t have to work ever again if he doesn’t want to look like? Are you getting off the couch?

My kids mandate that I get off the couch. I’ve got two young kids. I take them to school every morning and pick them up every day. I’ve been doing a lot of writing. I started a newsletter called Thesis Driven, which is focused on innovation in the built environment. I’m going deep into new real estate trends and topics that are emerging by profiling people that are building new things, aligned with those trends. I’ve had a lot of time to write which has been nice and catch up with a bunch of people. It’s been nice to take some time off.

Is there a meaningful feedback mechanism for your writing? Meaning a lot of times, you could write and people read it and that’s wonderful but it’s even better when you write and then you get feedback back. For me, I need that incentive to keep going on and writing more, to hear whether it is helping me play or not.

I do it on Substack and something Substack does. Certainly, Twitter does very well where I promote a lot and push the articles out. It enables people to comment and say, “This is spot on. This was helpful,” or, “You’re an idiot. You didn’t think about X, Y and Z.” I get both of those. Going back to this idea of community that we’re talking about, it’s a very different type of community than one I’ve ever fostered before. You see the same people engaging with what I’m putting out on Twitter. For instance, there are these little sub-communities and groups of people who advocate for housing policy reform that I support.

There are groups of real estate developers. You don’t think about real estate developers having a community but there’s a tight community of real estate developers on Twitter. It’s been fascinating to see the growth of these little sub-communities doing very specific things. Meetup was and is great at fostering that and then you see online channels like Twitter taking that nation worldwide. Through those, I do end up with a lot of feedback. Sometimes, more than I want on my plate.

Let’s talk about the first major community that you helped to build when you started General Assembly. We’ll start talking about that, Common and all the other things that you’re doing. General Assembly, why did you start it initially? How did that company evolve? We’ll then get to what role community played and what learnings people are going to have as well. Why’d you start General Assembly?

To start, I was one of a couple of cofounders of it. It was four of us in the early days and each one of us had our vision of what it would be. This was coming out of the global financial crisis. We didn’t start it as a company. We started it more as a collective of people in this emerging tech community scene in New York. On one hand, there were a lot of interesting companies getting started. My Cofounder, Matt Brimer knew a lot of them. We went to events and got to meet a lot of these emerging tech companies. Meetup was one at that time. This is 2009 going into 2010 when we formally started General Assembly.

You look at these companies and they had a huge need for talent. They needed engineers, digital marketers, designers and product managers. These weren’t disciplines that were coming out of universities. On the flip side, remember, this is not a time of 3.5% unemployment. It’s much higher. You had a lot of people coming out of school. My peers at that time you could say overeducated and underemployed. People had got degrees and expected to go into whether it was law or finance. Suddenly, those opportunities and paths weren’t as clear as they used to be. They said, “I have to pick up new skills.” It was an educational envelope. We had all these different parts.

We started with this 16,000 square foot. We called it an urban campus at 902 Broadway. This was back when you could rent office space. We rented that at $29 a foot for a 10-year lease. Now, that space would probably go for $80 to $85. Everyone laments the decline of offices and office rents are dropping. I would love to go back and you can do a lot of interesting and creative things when rents are $27 a foot.

We had a little bit of co-working space for interesting startups. We had a big event space where we’d host meetups and events like hackathons. We also had a classroom and the classroom is where the education would happen. Even though it was a very small part of our square footage, it was maybe 400 square feet out of the 16,000 total that we had, that became the core of the business.

High ROI for 400 square feet right there.

Initially, it was these small evening classes. We have workshops and eventually, we started teaching people fundamentals of web development, user research, digital marketing and data science. This was before the very early end of the learn-to-code movement when that became hot. As we continue to grow and built more campuses and spaces, a larger part of our business became an enterprise as well. Helping organizations digitize and helping them take the talent that they had and make sure it was up to speed and fluent in digital technologies.

People had to up-level. The New York Times was separate from New York Times team and the Digital New York Times team. They wanted nothing to do with each other until there isn’t that much of a print in one team anymore. It’s one integrated but publishers, in particular, resisted for a period until some of them don’t exist anymore.

You look from starting in maybe 2012, 2013 until 2018, 2019, many consumer-facing organizations went through a digital transformation. Everyone was talking about that.

General Assembly was very much at the forefront of that. Let’s talk about community as it related to General Assembly and connections. What role did it play? How did that community space help you? I’m assuming you weren’t directly monetizing it. It was more that you used it for lead gen. Tell me about the role that community played in helping to grow the enormous company that it continues to be.

The nature of the community touched everything we did at General Assembly. It’s an important part that we looked at it as this extended user journey, particularly in the early days. If someone comes to an event, maybe they’re working a job at a law firm, about to graduate college or moved to the city for whatever reason and they’re looking to explore what’s going on in the broader tech world. They would come to an event and learn a little bit. They’d take a class in the evening or go to a weekend workshop. They’d sign up for a course. We could help them get a job at a startup or one of our talent partners.

We looked at that in that exposure to people at various stages of progressing through that ecosystem. It is important. We would create specific things to take people from one stage to the next. Those stages almost always had some aspect of like, “Get to know other people in existing communities and see what other people are doing.” We would run regular programs like Introduction to the startup ecosystem where we’d talk about, “Here are the major VCs and interesting tech companies. Here are five Meetup groups you should check out.” People would come.

Did they come for the pizza or for other reasons too?

Who knows?

Was there always pizza at these events or not?

There’s a lot of pizza. I don’t know how many slices of pizza have been served in the history of General Assembly events. It’s probably in the hundreds of thousands. They would come for the thing to do on a Tuesday night. They go to this workshop and learn a little bit about tech. We started finding specific channels to take people from specific industries into what we were doing tech. We would run a lot of events for lawyers.

You’re telling me that some lawyers don’t love being lawyers and want to go to another job? Every lawyer I know loves their job.

Often going in-house at a startup is very common.

It is very different from being a white shoe law firm into a tech GC. It’s a very different role.

I’m guessing Meetups lawyers are dressed more like you and me and not wearing suits and ties every day. I could be wrong but they’re real benefits to that, probably not going in the office 3 or 5 days a week.

Community centrals to everything. I have to ask, it’s a little aside but I’m interested in the topic of career transformations for people. Many of our audience are in the process of career transformation. Many people at Meetup join Meetup groups because of the networking career transformation element. What holds people back? What advice would you give to people having seen, as an organization, tens of thousands of people go through career transformations? What advice can you give our audience abound what’s holding people back and what actions they could take?

There are a few different ways I could answer that. The most fundamental is it requires, in many cases, taking a step back to go through a career transformation in every way.

The most fundamental career transformation requires stepping back to go through a career transfer.

Financially and also in level. You were a director and then an individual contributor, whatever that is.

There is an ego component to that. I don’t want to dismiss that but there’s also a meaningful financial component of that as well. For some people, that financial piece is viable and in some cases, it’s not. You’ve seen a lot of different models come out. You look at what people like Austen Allred are doing with the income share agreements model. That’s after my time. Income share agreements weren’t prevalent.

Not everyone knows what those are. Why don’t you explain what an income share agreement is for people in 1 or 2 sentences?

An income share agreement is a way that a student can finance their education, not through an upfront payment or debt but rather by saying, “I’m going to pay a share of my income.” It could be above a certain threshold or after a certain period back to whoever is financing that education.

Companies could even be looking at individuals as individual stocks and hoping that that individual is a potentially high-paying stock return. Please continue.

You’ve seen innovation in this space to help address this challenge. Even though a lot of these programs are an order of magnitude less expensive than traditional undergraduate or graduate education, that’s still a meaningful cost. Not everyone can afford to take that on. What I do tell young people when they come to me at any stage of life is to try to keep their personal burn rate as low as possible. Sometimes that’s not possible but it does increase the number of options you have available, like asset, light and existence. As long as you can keep that, the better.

Number one is to be willing to potentially take a step back. Mindset, ego, accession. What are a couple more?

Being willing. That willingness from an ego standpoint and a financial standpoint is incredibly important. That unlocks so many other things that you could look at as separate but I almost look at them as subsidiaries to that like willingness, egoless and intellectual curiosity. Often, it is pretty closely mapped. Your willingness to admit and say, “I don’t understand this. This is going to be hard. I want to put the time and effort into it.” I look at that as a subsidiary of the ego piece and willingness to take that step back. A lot of it goes back to that. Rather than listing a laundry list of things, I’d rather say, “Have that willingness and keep your burn rate as low as possible and you’re going to be in a good position to go through a career transformation.”

Let’s talk about you. Sometimes, I start with the person but this time, I decided to start with General Assembly and then Common. You grew up in rural Arkansas, went to an Ivy League school and went around the world to science competitions. You have done a lot of interesting things. It was community, connections and education, which are at the forefront of a lot of the areas that you’ve devoted your life. Was that a big deal for you? When did it become a big deal? How did your past influence that? Share a little on that.

I’ve always been seeking out connections and trying to build my community. I grew up in a very isolated rural area. Not a lot of other human beings around. I live in Chelsea, Manhattan. A lot of what I’ve built from General Assembly to Common has been focused on building not communities standalone but using this idea of togetherness, bringing people together around common motivation and cause. I’m using that as an accelerant in a way to do what we’re doing better.

Did you feel like growing up, you had community because it was this small environment?

When I had opportunities to seek out the community by entering whatever academic competition I found on the internet, I would do that. It was what it was. I don’t think I knew anything different. My best friend is someone I met when we were twelve on online games. Life has funny ways of working out.

Gaming drives community as well. When I used to play, back on Nintendo Day, when I was a teenager, it was not as community-oriented as it certainly is now. For many people, it’s incredibly valuable. Let’s talk about Common because it’s a super interesting company. What is Common? Why is Common so needed by frankly so many people post-college, people in their 20s and 30s? Not only that age but 40s, 50s and potentially 60s as well. Why is Commons so valuable and important?

Let’s go back to General Assembly. We were building these in 902 Broadways in the heart of Manhattan. We replicated that model in a lot of other cities. When you have a lot of people and you see a lot of people, mostly young people moving to these big expensive cities, the struggle to find housing, specifically affordable housing, is at the forefront. We saw that all these students, not only our students, our instructors and employees were moving in and saying, “I’m not even going to try to find an apartment. We’re going to find a room on Craigslist.” This informal roommate world was massive and nobody in the development and finance world was paying attention to it. Twenty-five million Americans share a home or apartment with someone they’re not related to.

If you look back in history prior to World War II, it was common for when people moved to cities, they would live in what we would call residential hotels. Some of them were nice. The Plaza Hotel used to mostly be long-term residents. You still occasionally see these women’s hotels and things like that. Often, when they’re new to the city straight out of college, the Y on the Upper East Side, 92nd Street Y has a lot of single-room housing. I said, “Let’s take this concept and adapt it to the 21st century.” I work directly with the real estate world. I partner with developers and investors to create housing built with roommates in mind.

Typically, 3 to 5-bedroom apartments are open into shared kitchen living amenity areas that are priced at a substantial 30% discount to a studio apartment in the same neighborhood and quality. It also comes with utilities, Wi-Fi, shared cleaning or shared kitchen, bathroom supplies and all that. That was the idea back in 2015. We’ve made it in some ways a thing. In other ways, we’re still scratching the surface. Ten thousand units is a great number but it’s small in comparison to the need.

In the addressable audience, it’s a minuscule percentage but that tells you how enormous the potential can be. Community is very much at the center of General Assembly and Common. Talk about how Common builds community. What are some of the best practices that Common does? Also, what are even best practices that anyone who is not in a Common apartment could potentially think about doing?

For us at Common, it starts with having some shared set of understanding of what it means to live together in a shared space. You have to have some basic understanding there. First, make sure that what you don’t want to do is say, “We’re going to have all these fun events,” but you don’t have some common shared set of understanding of the owner.

Get the basics done. You can’t leave your dirty laundry in the kitchen sink.

There’s some basic set of things there that have to be established. We have to be good property managers. That’s what we are. At the end of the day, we’re a designer and property manager of these spaces. Beyond that, it is about creating those forums and venues for people to meet within buildings. It might be something where it’s very traditional like getting together, getting to know the people in your building and welcoming new people coming in. We also do a lot of things at a city or neighborhood level. In comparison to a lot of more traditional residential communities, we try to get people out into the community and go to local sporting events, bars and restaurants. It is a big part of what we do to foster and support that.

Do you have a community manager in each building that focuses on this or is it a part of someone’s responsibility?

We have a central community management group that organizes events and things for all of the cities we’re in. We often have local property managers that help out there and adapt those events to the local communities.

If someone is not in a common building, which most of our audience is not, are there any things that they should think about doing to help to build community within their apartments? What could John and Jane in San Diego be doing to build a greater community among the people with whom they live?

Often, we’ve found that the best communities start with shared interests. A lot of our matching, particularly on a city level, is about, “You live in Common and you’re interested in running. Why don’t you join this running club?” I would start by thinking about, “Are there some shared interests that go beyond like, ‘We live in this building?’” Often, I’ve found, certainly outside of Common buildings, one of those shared interests is, “Let’s advocate for something that we’d love to see happen in the building. We need this elevator fixed. We’d love to see something installed in the garden in the back.” That’s often a way that neighbors can get together, get to know each other and build those relationships.

The best communities come through a shared start with shared interests.

Property managers love when all the neighbors get together too to ask for a million-dollar investment in X, Y and Z.

That is often what I encourage people to do. Think about some shared cause, whether it’s an interest that they all have or something they’d like to see done to get together. Talk about that and try to make it happen.

A garden is a great example though because it’s physically located potentially near the building and it could be something that people could do together or work on together and be a meaningful source of joy. It doesn’t have to be unless it’s in New York City or some expensive place with an outrageous cost. What types of common goals that you see people wanting to join forces together on the garden as an example? Any other ones?

You often see these groups gather around sporting events and things that like. It’s silly sometimes for each person to be isolated in their living room watching the World Series or Super Bowl. Get a lot of people together in the building.

That’s easy and then bring pizza again.

It doesn’t have to be simple and complicated. Invite your neighbors over and say, “Here’s something we’re doing. I’m hosting a Super Bowl party. I’m having an event to watch X, Y and Z. I’ve got a plan on the TV. I’ll have some chips and pizza.” People will come by.

Brad, I love that you’re calling that out because one of the things I did want to hit on is how to organize events in a cost-effective and time-effective way. People are intimidated justifiably. A lot of people want to go to a party but not everyone wants to host a party. Hosting events, whether they’re Meetup organizers or generally want to have something in their home or wherever. The principle that you said is an important one, which is to figure out how to keep it simple. Any other advice you would give specifically around events aside from keeping them simple or in close proximity probably to where someone lives? Any other bits of advice you would give to people around that?

A lot of it depends on what stage you are in the development of your event. For someone who’s getting started and thinking through the first steps, I would say don’t overthink it. Open your door, be accommodating and welcome people in. Most people are incredibly friendly and warm. I try to encourage a lot of people to start very simply. Invite their kids’ friends from school and people from work to start the first steps of that physical community.

With two young kids, do you still host any events ever or too hard?

Absolutely. We host bigger and more events than we’ve ever hosted. We host events in our house for political candidates we support nonprofits. We had a nonprofit fundraiser.

Let’s share it. What’s the nonprofit? We like hearing about nonprofits.

At the Table support kids in foster care with educational resources, specifically tutoring. It’s a great cause. It was years ago. He’s helping out hundreds of students with tutoring and support. We hosted a fundraiser at my house.

I hope someday, I’ll get an invite but maybe next time.

We’d love to have you. Something super simple. We had a Passover Seder. We kept it lowkey but we invited other parents and families from our kids’ class. If they didn’t have anywhere else to go, they could come to our house.

You were a Meetup organizer at one point in time, which is why you’re such an event and community expert. According to what you said, you’re possible into over 200 different Meetup events. What was the group that you had organized? Let’s start with that.

When I was in college prior to starting General Assembly, I was a game developer. I started a game developer’s Meetup group here in New York for other game developers because there was nowhere for people who were building games to get together and talk about building games.

What happened? What was your biggest event? Did you have 10 or 20 people ever come to an event or even more than that?

We got well into the hundreds. We would do them in a gallery bar on the Lower East Side every month. We’d have six developers come and demo their games. In the gallery bar, they had a big screen. People could throw up their games and be like, “Here’s a game I’m building.”

It’s so much fun. Did people play games with each other at the event or after the event or was it more educational to learn about?

They started doing that later. When General Assembly took off, I handed the group over to someone else and they started more playtesting.

You’ve also been to hundreds, which is more than I’ve been to as a CEO Meetup. I’ve been to many. I don’t know if hundreds are the number. I’m going to a Zumba Meetup event and see how that goes. Tell me about some of the events that you’ve been to besides the gaming one that you were an organizer of.

Back in 2008, 2009 and 2010, around that time, we were starting General Assembly. Every week, I would go on to Meetup. It was the place to go to find what tech events are happening. Where can we go talk about what we’re doing and meet new startups, interesting founders and engineers? From those years, I was probably going to a couple a week.

You did it for recruiting reasons or help to recruit people.

Recruiting reasons and salesforce, more evangelizing General Assembly. We’re getting the brand out there.

Any advice or suggestions you would give to our audience around Meetup specifically before we go into rapid-fire questions? You went to many but what should they do to find the right one? Any advice you’d like to give?

I would encourage people to go to events and then talk to people about what are the other good events they go to. If you go to an event, you’re probably going to meet a lot of other people who also go to other events and may have been doing it for longer. I’ve found that that is the best way to discover new events and what’s going on in a city. You go to three events and at each event, you ask three people what else are they going to. You’ll probably find the right venues and forums for what you want if it exists. If it doesn’t, you should start it.

Brad, it’s good advice because a lot of people don’t realize it. Let’s say they go to tech Meetup events. They’re like, “Meetup is a tech platform you can go to.” No, there are hiking and book clubs. People go to book clubs and they realize, “I could go to these other types.” There’s such a big plethora. People don’t necessarily realize the gamut of different types. Even within gaming, there are thousands of different gaming groups to find. Thank you. Great advice. Here we go, rapid-fire questions with rapid-fire answers. The first time you saw yourself as a leader, Brad?

Running my game development studio in college in 2006. I didn’t know what I was doing but I saw myself as a leader or something.

If you could access a time machine, go anywhere in the world anytime, where are you going and when?

I’m super happy with the present. I love where we are. We’re in a great time. People over-glorify the past. The future will bring wonderful things but I’m happy with where we are right here.

We’ve had over 60 episodes so far and no one has ever said right here, right now.

We got to live in the present.

What’s something on your bucket list that you could share?

I want to do a Cannonball Run.

Is that running with bulls? Is running with Cannons? I’m sure it’s something good.

It is an illegal race of how quickly can you drive without stopping from New York to Los Angeles. They set the first new record of Cannonball in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.

What’s the record?

It’s something like 28 hours to drive from New York to LA. People strategize what routes to take. When to do X and Y. They pair up so someone is always driving and someone is sleeping.

What’s keeping you from doing it? When is the next one?

I don’t know. We have to have another global pandemic or someone that drives everyone off the streets. People do believe that the 2020 record may never be broken because there was no traffic in March 2020. Some very not risk-averse people decided to jump on that. The first thing they thought of when the COVID pandemic was happening is like, “Now is the time to set the new Cannonball record.”

That is a creative person, someone I would love to have at an event one day because that person thinks differently. Last question. You’ve done so much and helped hundreds of thousands of people through the courses, Common and the events that you’ve had. It’s amazing. How do you most want to be remembered?

As someone who brings people together and around great experiences is core to my identity and who I am. Someone who looks back and says, “I went to a lot of great experiences. I did a lot of fun things. I met a lot of great people and hopefully, Brad was at the center of bringing that together.”

It’s not just about the experience. It’s about those people that you meet in those experiences and hopefully how you could continue to maintain relationships with them over time. Brad, it is a pleasure. I’m so glad that we were connected and had the opportunity to discuss this. There are many ways in which hopefully meet up and Common can work together in the future. I wanted to thank you so much for being part of the show.

Thank you so much for having me on. This was great.

—

Thanks for reading the episode with Brad Hargreaves. If you think that was a common episode, it was not but on the bump, lots of great conversation on career transitions and the importance of being willing to take a step back in your career to take 2, 3 and 4 steps forward. Also, his feedback around community building. Keep it simple. Don’t overthink it. Open your door for an event advocating for community change as part of a community. All those are wonderful lessons for every one of us to consider. If you enjoy this episode, subscribe and leave a review. Remember, let’s keep connected because life is better together.

Important Links

• General Assembly
• Common
• Thesis Driven
• At the Table

The post Episode 64: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Community Building appeared first on Meetup Blog.

Aldwyn Altuney’s path took her from a rebellious teen who ran away from home to a world-class journalist working with major news organizations on multiple continents. Her latest effort is Good News Day, a campaign to change the tone of the contemporary news cycle that always skews toward fear, panic, and negativity. Aldwyn sits down with David to discuss the influence of negative news on our daily state of mind, and how to make space for focusing on the light amid so much darkness. Their conversation also includes the ongoing presence of censorship and the value of creating alternative media. 

Show Notes

In this episode, we are talking to Aldwyn Altuney, a true expert in journalism and positivity. She’s someone whose energy is contagious.

—

Aldwyn, you are an inspiration.

Thank you so much. It’s so great to be here. I’m honored.

You have been through so much. You’ve seen a lot. You’re doing so much to turn all the challenges and negativity that exist in the world into good and positive. I want to start with how Aldwyn became Aldwyn first and what shaped your life. You had challenges in your teenage years, and now you have a very specific life focus. Talk about the teenage years and how you turned into yourself.

Thank you. I was born in Sydney in Australia. I was a first-generation Australian. I have Greek, Turkish, and Ukrainian heritage. Interestingly, the Greeks, the Turks, and the Russians were all at war with each other at one point. Being born with that heritage makes me so grateful to be here on the planet because there are so many variables that could have shifted in my heritage that would not have led to me being here or even being born in Australia.

Scientifically, we have fourteen generations of DNA in us. In my heritage, I have people that were killed for stepping up and running for their life for speaking up. What do I do now? I help people step up and speak up. However, it wasn’t always like that. Growing up in Sydney, I was bullied as a kid. Even though I was born in Australia and I look Aussie, my name was different. The food I took to school was different. Kids picked on me from a young age.

At age six, my parents after migrating to Australia in 1970 went back to Turkey. There was a big sheep that I befriended at my grandma’s place. I was being so friendly with the sheep every day. I was so happy to see the sheep. One day, we took the sheep out for a walk, and then I saw the sheep get slaughtered in front of me. I saw it have its throat cut in front of me.

What I didn’t realize is that was a Greek Orthodox tradition. When a family comes from a long way away, they sacrifice a sheep and give the meat to the poor village people. However, for me, that was a traumatic experience. Even if that was explained to me as a six-year-old that’s what was happening, I would have wanted to run away and live happily ever after with that sheep. My innocence died at six years of age.

My dad always watched the news every single night. He would watch at least two hours of negative news. He would go from one channel to the next. I joke and say CNN stands for Constant Negative News. It’s like that in Australia too. Ninety-nine percent of news is negative. I remember one night being so upset by what I saw on the news in Sydney. I went to Dad as a child and said, “Why is the world like this? Why are people so cruel? Why is this happening?” I was in tears. He hugged me and said, “Darling, that’s how the world is.” I remember thinking from that moment on, “If that’s how the world is, I don’t want to be here.” I became self-destructive and rebellious. I did not want to be here at all on the planet.

I also internalized my anger because one thing Dad said is, “Anger is danger.” I internalized it, and I would find different ways to let that anger out. I would do poetry and listen to angry music. I focused on my studies a lot as a way to distract myself from what was happening in the world and became the dux of my primary school, interestingly. Dad introduced me to table tennis at the age of eight. I used to start beating the hell out of the ball as I had this killer four-hand smash.

Anger is danger.

Next thing, I went on and represented Australia for six years as a table tennis player and traveled around the world as a table tennis player. However, during that period too, I would do the opposite of everything my dad said to do. I was running away from home at thirteen. I started to get into drugs, drinking, and smoking a lot. I was a very self-destructive and angry teenager. Even though that was all happening and I was doing well at table tennis, no matter how much I did, I felt it wasn’t enough.

I felt this inner urge. I don’t want to live in a world that is so cruel because my filter of the world from watching so much news is that it was a nasty world. My filter was I was seeing everywhere how people were being cruel to animals and each other. I thought, “I don’t want to live in a world like this.” It came to a point where I got kicked out of home at fifteen because my dad had very strict rules. He had that very strong European ethic. I wasn’t allowed to stay at anyone else’s house. I wasn’t allowed to pierce my ears. I pushed the boundaries everywhere.

I’m sure you pushed the boundaries because of those rules. If you had grown up in an environment without those rules, you would have been a very different person.

At fifteen, I went to this Halloween party and came home at 5:00 AM. While I didn’t sleep at my friend’s place, that was enough for my dad after two years of running away from home and rebelling. He said, “While you’re living in my house, you live by my rules.” That morning, I came home, and he said, “You’re not my daughter anymore.” He started throwing my things out of the house at fifteen. I moved into this crazy household in Sydney with this guy who’s a musician. He was a drummer in about five bands.

How did you find this house?

That was where we had the party.

You went back to the party to live.

I went back to the party house and moved in. I started to pay rent and do two part-time jobs as a fifteen-year-old. I moved in with this drummer. His mom was an alcoholic. His sister was dealing drugs. It was a crazy household. Six months into that environment, I saw my boyfriend sleep with my best friend in front of me. I remember The Pretenders’ Don’t Get Me Wrong song was playing on the turntable back then. This is back in 1990. I remember bawling my eyes out. I called my mom in tears and said, “I can’t handle this anymore.” She said, “Come back home.”

I changed my environment. I changed my school in year twelve, worked my butt off, and got a Media degree. From there, I started to see the media as a fantastic way to help speak up about things in the world that upset me or angered me in some way. That was where my whole media journey started. I ended up editing the university newspaper for a year and a half.

One of the first stories I wrote was an anti-duck shooting story. I couldn’t understand how people could kill ducks for fun. I looked into it and how the ducks wouldn’t die immediately. They do this for fun still to this day in Victoria and parts of Australia. I couldn’t comprehend it. I wrote a story about that. I remember the headline was, “Go and get ducked.” It was in-your-face uni press. We said what we thought. I did one about recycling, farming chickens, and female circumcisions.

I would see these documentaries back then. This is well before Facebook and social media. I would see documentaries and things in the news that upset me or angered me and write stories about them. That then led to a twenty-plus year career working as a journalist on TV, radio, and print around Australia freelance to magazines overseas. It has been a wild journey since then. I’ve done a lot of personal development work while I’ve invested at least $500,000 in my business and personal development since 2005. That has been critical as well to bring me to where I am.

As a journalist, your approach is incredibly interesting in terms of your focus on the good, not the focus on the bad or the way in which you grew up, which was this negative type of environment. Why does the bad sell? Why are people so interested in watching negative and bad news and things that upset people? Why aren’t people more interested in watching good stories? Tell us. Psychologically, what’s going on there?

We are conditioned to live in fear because certain powers that be in the world want us to live in fear so they can control us. When people are in fear and when we divide and rule the people, then we have control over the people. I believe psychologically we have been conditioned this way. If you look at what’s happening on Netflix, a lot of TV shows, and Hollywood, we are conditioned to live in drama.

What happens is that people in their lives if they don’t have drama, they create drama because that’s how they feel that life needs to be. Psychologically, we have the hindbrain that is in fight or flight. We are conditioned as human beings to look out for danger. We are on alert always for danger because we want to stay safe as human beings. However, when we get how amazingly powerful we are as super conscious beings and when we get our amazing power as individuals, then we no longer need to be controlled by fear and worry about the negative news because as much as there is negative news out there, there is always positive news. It’s the yin-yang of life.

There’s always light where there’s darkness. It’s about what we choose to focus on. I’m doing a book at the moment called Good News Sells because we have been conditioned that bad news sells. If it bleeds, it leads. I believe that there are a whole lot of other agendas going on behind the scenes. If you look at the Out of Shadows documentary, which came out during COVID, it had 10 million views in about a month, and then it was shut down on a whole lot of channels online.

There has been a lot of censorship of information, particularly since COVID. I always say, “If there’s nothing to hide, why the censorship?” This Out of Shadows documentary was done by two Hollywood stunt guys that talked about the programming that happens through the media from when we are children, when we’re in school, when we are taught to do as we are told, and when we condition from childhood to believe that drama is a part of life through the dramas that we watch on Netflix, all the different channels online, and the drama that we see in Hollywood movies.

People think that life needs to be one big drama, and it doesn’t. I’m not saying that the crappy things aren’t happening in life. There’s always some crappy stuff happening in life. Life is always going to throw curve balls but if we focus on that, then we’re going to have a skewed view of life as I did as a child, “That’s how life is.” It’s not how life is. That’s one view of life.

I’m so grateful for all the alternative media channels that have come about in the last few years with social media. We have amazing shows like this where people can speak their minds freely without censorship. This is what people are now standing for. It’s freedom of information. I respect whatever your point of view is on any topic but please, question everything.

Having worked as a journalist, there were times we were told to go and get angles on stories that weren’t there. There were times that news was blasted across all the media and syndicated particularly News Limited and News Corp. Some of these massive organizations that we see blasted news right across the board.

That’s what we saw with COVID. Suddenly, COVID came about, and it was on every single news channel. Immediately, when I saw COVID come about, I thought, “Here we go. There’s more fear-mongering.” In one of the first press releases I put out for one of my clients who was a doctor at the time, we said, “Fear of COVID is making people sick.” Indeed, that’s what was happening. We did a very simple press release and gave simple tips on how you can boost your immune system.

This is an important message because so many people have become so despondent through COVID. We have had four times the suicide rates worldwide since COVID. Normally, the stats are about a million people a year worldwide take their lives. We have had four times that since COVID. We have had a much bigger mental health issue than we have had a physical health issue.

This is where even more so now, it’s important to notice what are we focusing on. How does that make us feel? When you focus on the negative news, you are going to feel like crap. When you focus on what you can be grateful for regardless of whatever negatives are happening out there, “How is this happening for me, not to me?” the more we can practice that gratitude, which is why I started the Global Good News Challenge. It’s a practice of gratitude continually. Sharing that gratitude with the world is so incredibly powerful. You can see I’m slightly passionate.

I love it. It’s awesome. Talk about the Global Good News Challenge. You referenced it now. I would love for people to hear more about it because you have to be intentional. If you’re not intentional and you turn on the news or go through your feed on Facebook and Instagram, you’re going to end up seeing more negative than positive but if you’re intentional about it, then good things can happen. Talk about the Good News Challenge, please.

In June 2020, I thought, “The world needs more good news. I’m going to start a Global Good News Challenge. We’re going to do this every single month.” It’s a very simple free social media live video challenge. We started as a Facebook Live challenge initially. People can do it on their profiles or in a group that I started called Loving Life. It is a simple live video. It goes for as many days as whatever number of months it is. We’re in April 2023. It’s a four-day challenge. For May, it will be a five-day challenge.

It’s a simple live video where people share their names, what they do, three things they’re grateful for, and a piece of good news. The good news could be that I’ve been interviewed on this amazing show with you. That’s my good news. I’m going to do my day two of four Global Good News Challenge, and that’s what I’ll share. I’ll be sharing about this great show.

We will share #GlobalGoodNewsChallenge with thousands of people. It’s free for people to do. They can do it on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, or wherever they want to do it. They can use StreamYard and go out to multiple platforms as I do often. By doing that, they’re practicing gratitude in a very simple way. April is a four-day challenge, and May is a five-day challenge for the fifth month.

It’s important that you do 5 days in a row or 4 days in a row. December will be twelve days in a row. If you miss a day, go back to day one and start again. It’s the discipline of every day of that challenge. People can go more than that. They could do a Global Good News Challenge every single day if they like. However, we know that a lot of people don’t stick with things that long.

Behavioral change happens when there’s repetition. If you’re going to change your mindset and your actions, you can’t do them once or twice. It has to keep repeating. One of the things you referenced, which was so important, is that gratitude is the antidote to negativity. I‘m not saying that’s the most obvious thing but a lot of people do know that. Gratitude is so important to decreasing negativity. Why are there so many challenges that people have in having gratitude and expressing gratitude when they know that it’s so valuable to them? What keeps them from doing it?

People, whether they’re conscious or not conscious of it, have most likely been living in drama most of their lives. They feel that’s how life has to be. They often create drama over little things where there doesn’t need to be drama. It could be that someone said one thing that they didn’t like, “That person is so-and-so.” They get all worked up over something someone says, whereas if you build this resilience, which is getting into a gratitude practice. It’s building resilience.

You understand the science behind how powerful gratitude is. You look at what Dr. Hawkins’ scale of consciousness shows. Dr. Hawkins was an amazing man in America who did a study on this. He found that 99.9% of every human being is energy, frequency, and vibration. When we feel different emotions, we’re vibrating at different frequencies. When we get into gratitude, it’s a higher vibration than love. Love is at 528 Hertz. When we get into gratitude and joy, we’re vibrating at 540 hertz, which is an expanded state of being.

When we’re in expanded consciousness, we attract opportunities to ourselves. Things naturally flow for us. We are contracted. When we’re in sadness, anger, grief, and shame. Grief and shame are the two lowest vibrations. We’re going to go up and down this scale as human beings. This will happen as we feel different emotions. However, the trick is the quicker we can move up the scale and get to these higher vibrations of joy and gratitude. Above that is peace at 600 hertz. Enlightenment is the very highest vibration we will feel as human beings.

There’s a whole diagram that explains this. I’ve got a group called Conscious Community Global on Facebook. The diagram is showing that. It also links to our energy centers, which are also chakras as some people call them. They are also scientifically proven. Our energy centers are all linked to these emotions that we feel. The sooner we get conscious of it, the sooner we can shift it.

Most people are like The Walking Dead out there. They’re not conscious of how they’re doing life. They’re doing the same old thing. We have about 60,000 thoughts a day. About 90% of them are the same as we had yesterday, and about 80% are negative. That’s for the standard person. The sooner we get conscious, the sooner we can shift it. It is making those small changes bit by bit.

By doing a Global Good News Challenge, people will start to feel the power of gratitude. There are times I haven’t felt like doing a Global Good News Challenge. However, I’ve said to myself, “This is what I’ve committed to.” I get on camera, whether it’s holding a phone up. You don’t have to do it on StreamYard and do a fancy thing like this. You could hold your phone up. The minute I do it, I feel amazing.

People know that something could feel amazing and something could be so good for you, yet it takes so much discipline to do it, whether it’s shutting your phone off or whatever the things are. People know they’re good for you but they have so many challenges. What advice could you give to someone when they know what they should be doing but they lack the discipline? It takes a lot of discipline, going one after another. Many people, including myself, will be challenged with that.

The biggest thing is to get how amazing you are because often people can be their biggest enemies. People put themselves down all the time. Notice your language. Do you ever say to yourself, “I’m such an idiot. I did this?” Notice the conversations going on in your head. It’s quite a practice to come to self-love. That’s quite a journey in itself. I did a whole retreat one weekend all about self-love. The sooner we can come to self-love, the sooner we will start respecting ourselves and treating ourselves better. We often treat others so well and put others before ourselves. It’s great to contribute to others. However, you can’t help others with an empty cup. You need to fill your cup first.

The sooner we can come to self-love, the sooner we will start respecting ourselves and treating ourselves better.

People sometimes think, “That’s being selfish.”

That’s not selfish at all. It’s so important that we have self-love and self-worth. That’s not in an arrogant way. You don’t have to be arrogant and egotistical about it. It’s saying to yourself, “I am amazing. You are awesome and a gift to the world.” When I brush my teeth since this self-love retreat, look in the mirror and say, “I am beautiful. I am stunning. I am kind.” It’s whatever comes out. I look myself in the eyes and build this self-love practice every single day.

It’s like going to the gym. You don’t go once, and suddenly, you’re fit. It’s important, particularly if you’ve got any perfectionist streaks about you as I have. I’ve had some perfectionist streaks. Notice if you’re being a perfectionist about this as well in any way and acknowledge yourself. When you get to the end of the day, say, “I acknowledge myself. I did this,” rather than getting to the end of the day and going, “I’ve still got this and that to do,” particularly if you’re in business. We can be very hard on ourselves. Build that self-love.

Another great tip I’ll give is to do what you love. Every single day, do as much as you can of what you love because the more joy you have in your life, the more love and gratitude you’re going to feel. It feeds off that. The more you can expand your consciousness consistently, you will build that muscle to be a lot stronger in that space.

Do as much as you can of what you love because the more joy you have in your life, the more love and gratitude you’re going to feel.

There’s no quick fix. There’s no magic pill you take where suddenly, you are happy and you stay happy. There are going to be times we’re going to go up and down but the trick is how quickly we can pull ourselves up through these low moments in life and the challenges that we all face. We always get thrown curve balls at different times. That will happen. You can flip that and say, “How is this happening for me?”

I got swept out to sea in Coffs Harbor in New South Wales. I was swept out a kilometer. There was no one out there. There were no boats or surfers. I was swept out to sea, and I faced my potential mortality. There are sharks in this ocean. No one was around. I had friends back at shore, which was way back. I got taken out by a very big rip and a sweep where a creek was meeting the ocean, and the tide was going out. Suddenly, I find myself in the middle of the ocean. I’m thinking to myself, “How is this happening for me?” I was panicking. In some ways, I was praying, crying, and thinking, “Is this the end?” However, I had to let those thoughts go and bring them back to, “How is this happening for me? What am I grateful for?”

We are given opportunities because we can handle them. Knowing that, it’s not a punishment. It’s not random. We want to be given those opportunities because it drives growth. It’s such an important mindset to have. It’s happening for you, not happening to you.

We are not given challenges too big that we cannot handle as well. It’s important to realize that. Often, big challenges are not given to small souls. If you faced a lot of challenges in your life, there’s a reason for that because every time you overcome one of those challenges, there’s always a breakthrough at the end of every breakdown. Hang in for the rollercoaster ride of life. If you’re challenged or if you are having any challenges whatsoever, then embrace those opportunities for growth because that’s how I view them.

That perspective is so important with everything in life because if you become the victim of your circumstances, you will never be able to become the victor and create your future if you’re constantly in victim mode. A lot of people are conditioned and live in victim mode without even being conscious of it. The minute you’re conscious of it, then you can let that go. Notice the conversations you’re having with yourself.

Are you loving what you’re doing? Do you love what you do? Is there something else you could do? Could you do something in your week where you do love that? For example, I love playing the ukulele. I went to Hawaii years ago. I learned a few ukulele songs. In the future, I’ll be making time for the ukulele because that’s what I love doing. I love doing yoga. I love going to the beach. I love all these things. Whatever it is, make the time for you to build your muscle of self-love.

What’s amazing is that so many people start doing that in their 40s and 50s but when they’re in their 20s, they oftentimes feel like, “I don’t have the right to be spending my time doing the things that I love. I wait until later. I need to build a career. I need to be finding the right partner in life,” or whatever those things happen to be. That’s so unfortunate. Only later in life do sometimes people start spending time doing those things that they’re passionate about. It shouldn’t take that long.

As we get older, life seems to go faster. The years seem to go faster. We realize that we are running out of time. The average person dies at 65. That’s about the average lifespan. Whereas at twenty, we feel invincible. We feel we’ve got lots of time to do things and live a life we love. I’ve noticed that the older I got, the more I valued life. A lot of my friends have died over time. I’ve had four friends who took their lives by the age of 45. This is why I started the Good News Day.

I’ve had depression myself because as my dad said, “Anger is danger.” I internalized anger, which led to depression for me. I’ve been in some dark places in the past. I get what depression is about. I get that sometimes it feels like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. However, trust me, there is. It’s worth going through that journey. When you go to these low and dark places, sometimes you need to rest. I know that in my life, I’ve had a pattern of this high-adrenaline lifestyle in the media, meeting deadlines, timeframes, or this go-go-go thing, and then I crash. When I crash, it’s my body saying, “Slow down. You need time to rest. Rejuvenate.” You start again on the journey.

Listening to the body is so important. People fight against their bodies and the stress that they have. There’s a reason why you have stress. Let’s figure out what’s going on. There’s a reason why your stomach is in pain or why you might have headaches. There’s something happening there that Tylenol or Advil is not going to give the answer to. You referenced August 8th, which is Good News Day. I love the concept of Good News Day. Share Good News Day with our audiences as well, please.

Good News Day started as a project on the eighth of the eighth. It’s a very symbolic date because eight in Chinese is a very auspicious number. It’s about prosperity and abundance. After my fourth friend’s suicide, I thought, “We need more good news.” I’ve had this thought for quite a while. I love the Gandhi quote, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” I thought, “I’m going to start a Good News Day. Every year on the eighth of the eighth, I want to encourage people to share some good news on that day, whether they do it in a post on their socials or they do a video.” It was a day to celebrate good news but every day is a day to celebrate good news. It’s making that day a day to make people more aware of it.

Imagine what would happen if everyone in this world celebrated Good News Day. Imagine the transformation that would happen among people. What would happen on August 9th, the day after that Good News Day? What would happen the day after that as well? We should all give ourselves the challenge. Ideally, every day could be Good News Day but if not, find a day in the year when you expose yourself to positivity, gratitude, and self-love. It’s so important.

It’s so simple and quick. People use the excuse, “I don’t have time.” Look at some of the good news challenges out there. People have done it in 1 minute to 3 minutes. The biggest challenge for people is overcoming their fears of getting on camera. You don’t have to have your makeup done, whether you’re male or female. You never know nowadays. You don’t have to be all done up. You get on camera and share from the heart.

Notice if you’ve got any fear around putting yourself out there because when we have fear of getting on camera or sharing our story, it’s often this worry about, “What are people going to think of me? What if I say the wrong thing?” The more we can focus on being of service with what we are delivering and coming from the heart, it doesn’t matter what other people think because hurt people hurt people. If there’s one bit of advice I would have given my younger self, it’s that hurt people hurt people because I used to take it to heart so much when people were nasty.

You grew up in a family where that unfortunately happened.

My dad was very strict. He did the best he could with what he knew. We have the most extraordinary relationship now. I’m happy to report my dad is 85. My mom is 79. They have been together for years. They live on Bribie Island. We see each other every week.

That’s solace to anyone who may have had challenges with their parents. Think about the challenge that you had of being kicked out of the home at fifteen years old and everything else. Now, you see each other every week. Did they change? Did you change?

I did the Landmark Forum in 2006. That was pivotal for me because I realized I hated my parents from the age of six when I saw that sheep get slaughtered. I didn’t realize I was hanging onto all this anger and hatred. When I did that program on Sunday of the Landmark Forum, I would block the memory of that sheep incident out of my mind. It came forward because, in Landmark, they say, “Something happens in life. We make it mean something.”

What happens is people end up perpetuating whatever they believe to be true. We keep creating those experiences in different ways. We keep attracting the same kinds of partners. We keep attracting whatever we believe to be true. On that Sunday, I called my parents for the first time and spoke about that sheep incident. I said, “I’ve hated you ever since that happened. I’m sorry.”

My dad said, “We are sorry that happened because we had no idea you would react like that. That was a normal thing in Turkey where they sacrificed sheep like that.” My brother was only two years older than me. He didn’t react at all to that incident. We shared for the first time. We communicated about that sheep incident. I held onto that drama all that time for 30 years. I was 36 at this stage.

That is a breakthrough.

For 30 years, I held onto that drama without even being conscious of it. This is doing the inner work and the programs. Landmark is one program. There are many different courses that I’ve done over time that have been helpful on this journey. However, that was when I got my parents back. Ever since that, we have been so close. We talk about all sorts of things. We don’t always agree on everything.

However, everything can be resolved with communication. How often do people not talk to family members because someone said something they didn’t like? If that’s you, life is so damn short. Please, make the time to let those in your life that you care about know you love them. No matter what has happened in the past, you can always start again.

Life is so damn short. Please make the time to let those you care about in your life know you love them.

What an important message for everyone to listen to here. Before we wrap up, I have to hear. You have three different Meetup groups, the Gold Coast Business Laughter Club, the Gold Coast TV & Film Production Meetup, and Mass Media Tribe Australia. What is Business Laughter?

I started Business Laughter with a friend called Tracey Korman who runs Two’s Company. She’s a very dear girlfriend of mine. We decided to start an event to help business owners loosen up a bit because a lot of business owners are very serious. We noticed there was a lot of depression among business owners. We started the Gold Coast Business Laughter Club as a Meetup group. We had comedians come along. We would have inspirational speakers.

We started these in-person events back in 2018. It was a way to lift the spirits of business owners and help them connect and network as well. Tracey and I have both had depression. I interviewed her for Media Queen TV about how to overcome abuse and depression. It’s something that was close to both of us as business owners. We have had depression. We have come through it. This was a way we could give back to the community and encourage people to come together, unite, and connect through laughter.

You have been a part of Meetup for a while. You’ve come to many different Meetup groups. You’re an organizer at different Meetup events. What is it about getting together in person? During COVID, that’s virtual but getting together in person specifically is a game–changer to such a great degree. Why is in-person gathering so powerful for people?

If you look at it scientifically and energetically, we all have a torus field, which is an energy field around us that you don’t get when you’re on a screen. You get a sense of it. People say, “You could be online dating for years but when you meet someone, you’ve either got the chemistry or you don’t have the chemistry.”

You can’t explain why sometimes you meet someone and connect. Sometimes you are not. It does have to do with some energy that people have around them, which is fascinating. You could only figure that out in person.

The Thrive documentary explained this torus field and this energy field that we have around each of us. You can watch the Thrive documentary, which is free on the Conscious Community Global Facebook group. They’re featured in there. The Thrive documentary is brilliant, done by an American couple. There are two of them that are brilliant. They talk about how powerful we are as individuals. When we get together in person, either the magic is there and you gel with some people, and then some people think, “I don’t connect with that person.” That’s okay. We’re not going to connect with everyone but there is a deeper level of connection that happens in person that you will never get online.

We’re all teachers and students at the same time.

I‘m going to wrap up with one last question. You’ve done so much. You continue to do so much to make the world a better place. If you have to think about one thing that you most want to be remembered by, what is that one thing for you?

For inspiring truth and good news in the world.

You are doing so much of that. You are being the change that you wish to see in the world as Gandhi would say. If Gandhi were here, I can’t imagine how incredibly proud of you he would be. It’s going to be exciting to see what you are and what you continue to evolve into over the next 10, 20, or 30 years. The perspective that you have and the gratitude that you have in this world are so remarkable. It’s an inspiration to me and so many of our audiences. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. It’s such an honor to be here. Thank you for helping me share my message. We’re all teachers and students at the same time. I encourage people to be open to whatever opportunities come their way, trust themselves, and get how amazing they are because they truly are remarkable. It’s your choice for this beautiful gift of life that you’ve been given. What are you going to do to follow your passion and your mission and to be the best version of yourself?

—

Thanks for reading this episode with the incredible Aldwyn Altuney. There are so many thoughtful comments. Hurt people can hurt people. There’s always a breakthrough after a breakdown. Big challenges aren’t given to small souls. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe and leave a review. Remember, let’s keep connected because life is better together.

Important Links 

• Aldwyn Altuney – LinkedIn
• Global Good News Challenge – Facebook
• Loving Life – Facebook
• Conscious Community Global – Facebook
• Good News Day – Facebook
• Gold Coast Business Laughter Club – Meetup
• Gold Coast TV & Film Production Meetup – Meetup
• Mass Media Tribe Australia – Meetup
• Two’s Company
• Media Queen TV – YouTube

The post Episode 63: Change Your Negative Thought Patterns appeared first on Meetup Blog.

Amnoni Myers has persevered through addiction, abuse, abandonment, homelessness, and the many difficulties of the foster care system to become an author and nationally recognized child welfare advocate. Her success story (recounted in the new memoir You Are The Prize) is not only a tale of resilience and self-discovery but a brilliant guide for anyone struggling to thrive after a difficult past. Amnoni and David sit down to discuss how to be proactive in your own healing, the truth about safe spaces and why they matter, interdependence as a core value, and so much more.

Show Notes

In this episode, we are talking to Amnoni Myers. If you enjoy being motivated, you are going to enjoy this episode. This is someone who went from homelessness to providing legislation around foster care to Congress, who has written an incredible book and who is an exceptional human being. Happy reading. Happy motivating.

—

Amnoni, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. It was good to see you.

I feel deeply privileged to chat with you. The reason is that when people have such a challenging childhood, it is amazing to me when people are able to become the shining lights that you are. Your community-building, bestselling book and day-to-day actions are quite remarkable. I’m eager for people to read your story because it is a special story that motivates me and will motivate others. Let’s talk about your early days, your childhood, the foster care system, your challenges and the steps you took to overcome them. Let’s go back and we will bring ourselves forward to Meetup, Shut Up & Write and all the other good stuff we are going to be talking about.

Thank you so much for having me on the show. I feel extremely privileged to be here. It is something that feels surreal. I’m thankful. As I look back, it is important to always think about where I began because it has given me an opportunity to finally see that the things that I have experienced, in a way, had a meaning.

I grew up in the foster care system. Before that, I was born with drugs in my system. I was born heavily addicted to drugs. I was left in the hospital. From there, my great-aunt heard about my siblings and me. She ended up taking us in. I lived with her for the first ten years of my life. I was introduced to my mom at the age of ten. I was living with her and my siblings for a few years. It was during that experience that I experienced abuse and emotional unsafety. I felt like I dealt with a lot of confidence issues, issues around rejection and abandonment.

That is a complicated time for every person, a twelve-year-old young lady trying to figure out things in life.

At the age of twelve is when I ended up going into the foster care system. It wasn’t that I got disconnected from my biological mother and family members but I was also separated from my siblings. For anybody out there that has siblings, that is hard. People who have been your protective factors and have been your best friends. One of the things that I shared when I was in Atlanta was that my siblings are where I first found and experienced love. To have that ripped away from me at the age of twelve and not even knowing why you are being taken away is hard.

Amnoni, were these older or younger siblings?

I was in the middle. I had an older sibling and a younger sibling. It was my little sister that got separated from my brother and I. When that happened, I ended up going into care. From there, I ended up getting separated from my brother because I ended up moving around. Those experiences, at such a young age, you don’t recognize how much that taps into your experience around safety, trust and stability.

When it was time for me to age out, which was at the age of eighteen, you were either leaving foster care, reunited or adopted. None of those things happened to me. I abruptly aged out of care. My social worker told me my foster mother was no longer being paid to have me there. When I went back home to pack up my belongings, my things were already packed. They were waiting for me on the porch in black trash bags.

That is also a level of dignity and inhumane that happens. That speaks to the amount of instability I had growing up throughout my time. When you go into foster care, you are expected to feel safe, be safe and heal but all of those things were re-triggered. Healing, for me, was more of a lifelong pattern and experience.

You were incredibly proactive in your healing. It is not a “lucky thing.” Everyone has some lucky things happen to them throughout life but you made it happen. Share with us a little bit. You are eighteen. What did you do? How did you take ownership? It feels like you took ownership of your healing. That is incredibly brave and hard to do. Few people are able to do it.

I was determined from a young age. I knew I did not want to experience the things my parents had experienced or the things they had gone through. I knew I wanted to be different and at least have a shot. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get there. During my senior year of high school, I got caught drawing graffiti on the wall. I was not on track to graduate and even go to college. It was during that experience that a new principal found out about me and said, “What do you like to do besides drawing graffiti on the wall?” It was at that moment that I was introduced to other options I had no idea about.

The power of that one person. That is beautiful. You went off to college. Talk about that.

I went off to college and was determined to graduate. I had roadblocks while I was in college. It was there that I ended up becoming homeless during my sophomore year. I had signed up for a mentorship program. Part of the holidays is that young people in foster care can’t stay on campus. I had nowhere to go. My school made an exception for me to be able to go with my resident director to her family’s house. It was during that experience that I got sent to a conference. I wouldn’t spend a Christmas alone.

I met another mentor who became a mentor who told me about an internship program for young people who were in the foster care system on Capitol Hill. She was like, “You should go and check it out. You would be a perfect candidate.” I was experiencing homelessness so I was like, “I need to figure out what I’m going to do next summer.” I ended up applying sheepishly and I was like, “I’m going to try it.” I got accepted.

It was the first time in my life that I realized that my story could have meaning. I never was in the position to share all of the things that happened and I experienced care in a way that could help change the policy lens. I wrote a policy report. The policy report was focused on how you train foster parents in trauma-informed care. That way, young people age out of care or when they leave their care, are not being dually traumatized or harmed. I got to present that report to both members of Congress in the White House Domestic Policy Council and one of the senators took it up for draft legislation.

You had been homeless a year prior.

It was like a full circle. The crazy part was I was upset and annoyed being at that conference because I was like, “I want to be with a family. I don’t want to be here.” Being there is what led me to that opportunity.

Man plans and God laughs. You don’t know what amazing things can happen but you made them happen. There’s something about your resilience that is truly remarkable. What is it? Is it your personality? Did you have to work hard at it or it comes naturally?

It is a mixture of all of those things. One of the things that I learned early was that I didn’t have to allow my path to dictate my future. I was raised by a great-aunt who spoke good life into me and shared with me the importance of being a leader and all of those different things. When you spend a lot of time in darkness, you are always inching to see the light. I spent so much time in darkness so I was determined to see what was on the other side of darkness. That is light.

I’m thankful that I have had people in my path, that has been placed in my path, strangers that have become family, and that have said, “I see something inside of you that I couldn’t always see.” I believe that we are all born and great. The problem is that a lot of us are not able to see our greatness. It takes people and the community to be able to do that for us.

It seems to me, in everything you shared, the power of mentors for you. You are also mentoring other people and you continue to be mentored by people and mentor other people. That is a theme that has woven through a lot of your experiences. Let’s talk about safe spaces because you referenced that while we were talking originally. Share with us your thoughts about the challenges of safe spaces. How do you create a safe space? Why are safe spaces important? It is something you are passionate about.

Safe space is the key for people to not only experience vulnerability and safety but it is in those spaces that they are able to transform. I find that the challenge with safe spaces is that sometimes people don’t always understand why they are necessary and why they are important. If they feel left out of that, they will feel no one else can experience that. That is not true. Everyone deserves to have a safe space. How do you create that safe space? It is by being able to come together to find that objective meaning as to why we are here, why we are supporting each other and why it is important.

The beauty that I have been able to experience has been that even in the spaces that haven’t always been safe or have felt safe, I have been able to create that safe space with other people and communities. Being able to recognize the importance that people deserve to be able to be seen even in safety and security is so important. I’m here for safe spaces, David.

If you were to give one message to our thousands of readers about what they can do to create a safe space, what one message would you possibly give them?

The one message I would give people who are thinking about creating safe spaces is to ask why they are creating that safe spaces. Your why is inclusive as to how you are going to approach that. When you find yourself not being able to do that, you will go back to, “Why I created this safe space? Why is this important?”

It is important to think about yourself. All of us need safety, someone to talk to and a shoulder to lean on. Even if the safe space is a space where there is silence, to know that other people are in that space with you to me speaks volumes because here in our society, it has been difficult to find and create safety. Safety is what transforms the work, world and hearts. It also transforms and transcends love. That would be my message to people for creating a safe space.

Safety is what transforms the work, world, and hearts. It also transforms and transcends love.

One thing you mentioned that I want to need to work on more is that it is okay to have or even prefer to have silence in a safe space. I will speak for myself. There are many executives and solution-oriented type people. Sometimes the best thing is not to provide the solution but to have silence and listen. That is oftentimes the thing that people need the most. I’m glad you hit on that.

I’m glad that, as a leader, you were able to even speak to that. That is something that you want to be more aware of. The reality of it is we all want to help and be supportive. What I’m realizing is that sometimes in silence is where you are able to find what you need the most. Knowing that you can look across the room and somebody else is also doing that same thing makes it easier to know that even though you are experiencing silence, you are not experiencing the suffering alone. You have somebody that is there in the community with you. We can feel the energy. That has been helpful to know.

It is harder to feel energy by Zoom but we can still feel Zoom energy. In-person energy is something critical and important. You mentioned safe spaces. Meetup has been that to some extent. Your story on Meetup was motivational to me. I want to share that with you in terms of helping, writing the book and creating a support system coming out. Let’s talk maybe a little bit about your experience with Meetup, whether you want to talk broadly or hit on the group, Shut Up & Write. However if you want to take it is great.

When I first met Meetup, I felt like I was first meeting myself because I was in the process of coming out. I had moved to Oakland. I came to San Francisco a couple of years prior to that. When I came to San Francisco, it was my first time experiencing the queer community in ways I had never experienced it.

Specifically, accepted and embraced or something different?

I was shocked because I was also coming from a religious community. The first thing that people said when I was coming to San Francisco was, “Don’t come back gay.” When I came to San Francisco, the problem is I already was. I did not make any steps to necessarily find community because I was nervous. I remember people kept saying, “Amnoni, you should check out Meetup. You might find some stuff to do.” I ended up looking up on Meetup. I saw that they had speed dating. It was something I had always wanted to do. I could not see myself in that space because I’m somebody that likes women. Usually, it was about the opposite sex.

When I saw that Dr. Frankie had a speed dating event on Meetup, I was like, “I’m going to try this out.” I was a little nervous but I went out like it was a date. I went out and got a shirt and a bow tie. I ended up going to this group. It was the first time I had felt seen in a long time in the way of me being able to be gay. That was my first introduction to Meetup and I was sold because I recognized that it wasn’t a space for people wanting to do and find activities. It was a safe space for people who were not traditionally included in events.

We always say, “Find your people on Meetup.” It is true because people think there is no one like them. Who else grew up in foster care? Who else had the challenges? Who else is also in the process of coming out? There are a lot of people that can share one story and there is a lot of comfort in that.

I agree with that. That is what I felt on the site, which made me come back for more. It turned into me going to queer game nights. I ended up moving to Sacramento. I got to go on a boat trip and that was cool. There were a lot of activities that I got to find. The other thing that I want to say about Meetup is crucial and important, especially being here in Tulsa sometimes all these events are happening all at the same time but you also don’t know.

With Meetup, you can at least see what’s happening not just months in advance but weeks into events. You can plan things. I even have done the speaking classes they have on Meetup. I still do that from time to time here because it is virtual. The beauty of Meetup is that things have been virtual. After losing my little sister to suicide, I found myself feeling isolated. I couldn’t get out of bed, David. I couldn’t do anything. It was hard. My supervisor thought that it would be important for me to find a grief group. I did go to a grief group. I couldn’t see myself and relate to what other people were experiencing.

With Meetup, you can at least see what’s happening not just months in advance but weeks into events.

Losing someone to suicide is a different grief you experience. I was thankful to be in the space of people who were grieving but I also found myself needing more. Another thing she said was, “You should find a support group. Think about what you want to do.” I was also in the midst of writing a book. I said, “I’m going to go back to Meetup.” I went on Meetup. I went to the search bar. I put writing in and Shut Up & Write came up. I was like, “This is wild.”

For people who don’t know, Shut Up & Write is one of our most successful writing groups on Meetup Pro. We have dozens of groups in different cities. It is an exceptional opportunity for people who are interested in having a support group to help to write. It sounds like that support group is more than writing for you.

It was because it was there that I was able to meet people. In meeting people, they were able to see me and I was able to see them. We were on our different journeys of writing. There were some people who were writing books. There were people who were writing for pleasure. There were people who were coming because they wanted to be surrounded by the community.

It was there that I met a best friend and a mother-like figure. We ended up writing our books. It was a beautiful experience. I remember knowing that I was going to set myself on a schedule because I would do it on Tuesdays and weekends. It was either Saturday or Sunday. I knew that in my schedule, that was something I was going to be doing on a weekly basis.

There were times that I was not able to get there but the times that I did it was powerful because it was also my first time writing a book. I had a solid community within the new degree press community. Outside of that, when you are writing a book, you are doing that alone. I wasn’t just writing a book. I was writing a memoir of my life. I have to process such deep and hard emotions. To be able to do that in a community of people felt solid, to be quite honest.

I want to get to You Are The Prize, which is your amazing book. Before that, I wanted to say something about you, which is something I find remarkable. You are an independent mind person. You think and do differently. It is great but you also seem to be comfortable asking for advice and listening to others. Your story weaves through, “This person told me to do this so I did it.” There are a lot of people out there that are independently minded that they don’t believe in listening to anyone. I don’t know if it is unique or not. Your ability to be incredibly independent but also get the advice of others seems like it has led you down some good paths.

I was blessed with the community. Knowing that the importance of community is how you thrive has been something that I have known and been able to experience. The importance of interdependence, knowing that we can lean on each other for support, is something that many of us are learning. Many of us have not been able to experience, witness or see.

People fear interdependence because there is a vulnerability that goes with it. Oftentimes, people are reluctant to do it because they don’t want to get hurt.

In some ways, in my experience, being able to understand pain at such a young age allowed me to navigate through it. Not adapt to it but to be able to adapt to the surroundings that I’m in and thrive in those ways. Pain has given me insight into the things I don’t want to experience. There are times where sometimes they say, “Don’t put your hand on a hot stove.” Sometimes we do it because we want to see for ourselves. I have been that person. I have learned that it is okay to learn and hear from other person’s wisdom because it may allow you to experience something on the other side. That is how I try to live my life.

The other observation I would say is you have a particularly strong sense of self. Through the challenges and successes, you know yourself. When you know yourself, it is a lot easier to navigate life. There are many people out there that could be in not just their twenties when people are trying to figure out who they are. In their 30s, 40s and 50s, they still don’t know who they are. It is hard to navigate a world like that. You Are The Prize, I love that name for the book. Talk about why did you choose that name? What does that name mean? What does that mean to you? How did you choose it?

I cannot believe I’m holding the actual book. It is interesting to go from a writing group to writing a manuscript and it is all on Google Docs. All of a sudden, you have the actual book in your hand.

I have a book that came out. I know the feeling. The first time I walked into a Barnes & Noble, I saw my book and I started crying.

Congratulations. That is exciting.

Talk about You Are The Prize.

It is a memoir. The title came from my little sister. She said to me one day, “Always remember that you are the prize.” When she said that to me, it was when I was going through my coming out experience I remember experiencing my first heartbreak. She was my hype man, cheerleader and confidence booster. I was like, “What better way to honor her life and her legacy than by naming the book after something that she has told me?”

I experienced the loss of her when I went into the foster care system. To have that piece of her to be like, “You are the prize,” I was thinking about my life journey. That was something I didn’t get to experience. I didn’t get to experience myself as the prize. When I thought back to my writing process, thinking back on my stories and the things that I’ve experienced, I said, “Life may have told me that I was born in shambles and have been born through all of these different adversities.”

What it has ignored to share with me is that I was also born whole. Everyone is born whole. That is a prize within itself. I had to recognize that even though I experienced difficult things, at the core of it, I am still the prize. That is something I wanted to share in my book with other young people because when you are being taken away and removed, you lose your self-worth and sense of self. There is a lot of confusion because you begin to blame yourself.

Everyone is born whole. That is a prize within itself.

The adults in your life are not explaining to you why it is you are in the position that you are in. They don’t take the time to say to you, “It is not your fault.” With that, you take on all of that blame and you begin to realize, “I’m a burden. I don’t know why I belong here.” It was me coming back to myself. I’m not saying that it is perfect but it is to say that I remind myself every day that I am the prize. This book holds me accountable because, when people see me, they say, “Amnoni, you are the prize.”

You have gotten some feedback about the book. What things have you been hearing from people? How meaningful is that?

It was difficult getting the book out. I was nervous. I had a lot of Imposter syndrome around it. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be good. I wasn’t sure if I had been too vulnerable. I was nervous about my family. That was what I was first nervous about. Getting feedback from my family has been amazing. For them to be able to acknowledge what I experienced, how far I have come and the strong lineage that I came from was super impactful. I’m hearing it from professors, teachers and people who have also lived through foster care come up to me and say, “Amnoni, your story is amazing. This has been beautifully written.”

I saw my hard cover for the first time. Dr. Nichols from the American Pediatrics Association moderated a panel that I was on. He bought my hardcover. It was the first time that I had ever seen the hardcover. Just like you, when you saw your book at Barnes & Noble, I felt this overwhelming feeling come up inside of me because it was like, “Not only is my book being released to people who need it and who want to see it thrive but to have someone like Dr. Nichols holding my book felt amazing.”

You know how many people are going to read and be impacted by it. When did the book come out?

The book came out in January 2022.

You Are The Prize is one action that people could take to learn more about the foster care system. I urge all of our readers to do that. Any other last suggestions you would give for our readers to assist or learn more about foster care? It is a black box for many people. Is there anything we can or should be doing?

May is National Foster Care Month. It is around education, advocacy and bringing to light the experiences, challenges and wins we have experienced with moving child welfare policy forward. In your local communities, it is important to do your homework and research to learn more. The thing about it is that many people say, “I can’t foster, adopt or do any of those things.” Those are the things I would urge you to think through and say, “If you can’t do it, that is okay but you can also learn about it.”

You can think about even some Meetup groups that incorporate young people that are in the foster care system, aging out or have been transitioned out because we are a population that gets looked over and that gets silenced. A lot of times, it is hard for us to find community within those communities. It is important to be aware and bring awareness.

I would love for people to check out my books. It is a good resource. It brings a good understanding for somebody who doesn’t know what the child welfare system is like for you to pass that on to another young person, an agency or an organization. My book is at four universities. I would like to get my book out into more spaces in the world because there is a lot of work that still needs to be done around this system and we can’t do it alone.

Everyone gains from those stories. It is not just people and fosters. All adults can gain from the messages in the book about community and safe spaces. I did tell our readers that they would be motivated. I have as reader number one. Here are rapid-fire questions with rapid-fire quick answers. Here we go. The first time you saw yourself as a leader.

It is when I was introducing First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House in front of not just staff but a generation of kids.

How nervous were you?

I was extremely nervous. I had to meet her before I went on. It helped ease off a lot of the nerves. She is super incredible. It is one of the best days of my life.

If you could access a time machine and go anywhere in the world at any point in time, where and when do you think you would go?

I would go to heaven to connect with my little sister and great-aunt to be able to see them, hear them again, get some perspective from them and be able to hug them. I can continue to hug the world.

Name one thing on your bucket list that you have not done and that you still would love to be able to do.

I want to go to Bali. I have not been able to do that yet.

Last question, how do you most want to be remembered?

I want to be remembered for my hugs and the way that I embrace people. I hear that I give good hugs. Part of that is because I have been able to receive good hugs. I want people to remember the impact that I have been able to make on their life. By doing so, it has been with the hugs and the words of encouragement and support I have given them.

If I get to head out to Tulsa, Oklahoma, will I get a big hug?

You will get a big hug.

Thank you for being who you are and for being the prize. Thank you for helping everyone and our readers to understand that every single person is a prize. There is this concept I read about once, which is if you save one person, you save the world. You represent that in terms of the number of people that you are helping and saving. I wanted to thank you for being such a loyal Meetup member. Most importantly, thank you for being such a loyal member of the human race. We appreciate you being on the show. Thank you.

Thank you so much, David, for having me. I appreciate you. Keep changing the world.

—

Thanks for reading this extremely special episode. You are the prize. Every reader is the prize. There are so many important messages throughout this episode that I hope that every person here is able to internalize for focus on the importance of interdependency, creating safe spaces, people understanding their greatness and people remembering where they came from. There are so many other key messages. If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and remember, let’s keep connected because life is better together.

Important Links

• Amnoni Myers
• Shut Up & Write
• You Are The Prize

The post Episode 62: How to Grow from Traumatic Experiences appeared first on Meetup Blog.

Kat Vellos is a certified connections coach and the author (plus illustrator!) of We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. She and David sit down to discuss why platonic relationships between adults are so important, why they’ve become difficult to maintain in the modern social landscape, and how to buck that trend through intentionality. Their conversation includes everything from the growing fear of awkwardness and online parasocial relationships to original ideas for replacing the old small talk and overlaying friend time with your other commitments.

Show Notes

In this episode, we are talking to Kat Vellos. She is an amazing speaker, facilitator, connections coach, and author of the award-winning, We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships. Amazing person. Many positive tangible actions that you could take to be a better friend and to grow your adult friendships.

—

Kat, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me here. I’m so excited to be here with you.

You’re an adult friendship expert, certified connection coach, author of We Should Get Together, and also a very successful Meetup organizer. Let’s start with you. User experience designers, Pandora and Slack, do not typically become sought-after adult friendship experts, but you did. How in the world did that happen?

By using the exact same skillset that I used as a user experience researcher and designer. Research, inquiry, and design thinking are the exact same things. You can use them for anything. Instead of saying, “I can only use these skills to make apps and websites more usable,” I was like, “What if I use the exact same skills to solve a problem I observe in the real world? That is, adult friendship is way too freaking hard, too many people struggle with it, and it doesn’t need to be that way.” I use those exact same skills to answer the question, “How might we make adult friendship easier?” rather than just, “How might we make it easier to play music or have fun at work collaborating?”

I’ve also been a facilitator for twenty years, so it is not new to me to be attuned to the needs of people who want community and connection, and ways to do that. Combining everything I knew as a facilitator with everything I knew as a user experience, researcher, and designer to say, “Let’s have a better experience of adult friendship. Let’s see how that goes.” That’s how. I spent about five years researching and writing the book. It’s not like I woke up one day and was like, “I know everything about friendship.” I’ve studied this for a long time and I tried to create something useful for people, which is the book so they can have an easier time with it too.

One of the things that I read was that when you first started, you were not writing the book, We Should Get Together. What were you writing originally? Are they stuff for yourself or others?

I was doing user research with people who were struggling with adult friendships and writing up just like I would for any other user research, like a case study. What am I learning? What are the pain points? What are the friction points? What’s working well for people? All of those things that we could learn. I was writing a lot of essays. At one point, I was like, “What am I going to do with these?” I had a blog.

At one point, I was sharing these community interviews I was doing, and then I was like, “It’s fun doing these portraits and these blogs,” but then I was like, “This is too long for a blog post. This is too long for a medium post.” It was getting longer. After about 10,000 words, a friend was like, “It sounds like you’re writing a book.” I was like, “Am I writing a book?” She’s like, “Yeah, maybe you have a book in you.” I was like, “I do.” It’s lovely because when you don’t know you’re writing a book, you never have to open a blank Google Doc and stare at the screen sweating like, “What am I going to say?” It’s like you’re already 25% done. Just finish.

Were you personally a good adult friend? Were you not great at building adult friendships? Talk about that a little bit.

I never had any trouble making friends before I moved to the Bay Area. I will not say that I necessarily had trouble making friends in terms of meeting people, having a nice conversation saying, “I’d love to stay in touch with you.” That’s not hard for me. I’m an introvert, but I’m not shy. I like people. I just need lots of recharge time after being with people. That’s my introverted part. The difficulty that I observed in my life was, especially once I got into my 30s, keeping people around was getting much harder. There was one year living here in the Bay where I went to more going away parties than birthday parties. People were moving all the time.

It’s so transient.

That made it hard. I got to start over. I got to make a new friend because my friends keep moving away and I’m trying to stay here. That was a big part of it. I also found that for a lot of the people I was interviewing, it’s not that they had trouble being friends. It was the keeping and feeling the sense of continuity, getting as close as you want, not just having small talk all the time. The quality, depth, and continuation of high-quality friendships were the trouble. It’s not meeting people. Meeting people is easy. Keeping and making strong friends is different.

Meeting people is easy. Keeping and making strong friends is different.

It’s similar to when you’re running a company. Getting new customers is not easy, but less difficult than keeping those customers engaged, going, returning, and referring people to go back to you. It’s a similar kind of thing. You don’t want to be this “leaky bucket of friendship.” You got this great bucket, lots of friends coming in, but it’s all leaky, and they keep moving and leaving. That’s never healthy. It sounds like there’d probably be very different strategies that people may need to take to keep in touch with remote friends who have moved out to different cities than ones in the same city.

I think they’re different levels of effort, attention, and intention. It’s something I talk about a lot in the book. What’s your intention? What are you going for here? Realizing that you might need different strategies for different situations.

I was just in Israel, which was great. I’ve been to Israel because I have 2 of my 3 there right now. I go to Israel every six months. There are people whom I will see more often in Israel because every time I come in, I have my list of 7 or 8 people I’m going to always reach out to. They could be 15 to 20 minutes away and I’ll see them every couple of years, but because I travel to a place, I’ll make the intention of always trying to get together with them. That’s unfortunate because I should make just as much of a level of effort for my close friends who are nearby as I do when I happen to be visiting the city. That’s a challenge for me.

That’s part of human nature. We tend to take things for granted when we feel like we’ll always have access to it. When something feels special, rare, and novel, we’re like, “Of course, I’m going to make that a priority.”

I love the term platonic longing. I have never heard of the term before. Longing is an interesting one because it implies this emotional anguish type of experience. Talk to us about platonic longing.

This was a term I coined in the book because it was the most succinct way to describe this exact experience that I was hearing from a lot of the people I was interviewing. It was this longing and craving for a certain type of relationship that was missing in their life, and it wasn’t romance. We talk about longing typically in the romantic sense, but what they were craving was platonic. It’s that friendship longing, that craving, that unmet need, that hunger for, “I want these deep close platonic relationships and I don’t know how to get them. I don’t know how to make them. It’s hard.”

It is important for us to have words to describe the experiences that we have as human beings. Without a name for it, it almost increases the suffering. It increases the pain of it when you don’t even have a name for it, which is similar to why it’s hard when people are dealing with a medical or physical illness, but have no name for it. There’s no diagnosis. It is so hard. It makes you feel like, “Am I the only one who feels like this? Naming it and saying, “This is platonic longing. This is what it is. You are not alone. This is what it feels like,” it is real. You deserve to have that need.

What you said is so important because one of the greatest sources of pain and sadness for people is the feeling that you’re not going to get out of it. The reason why you’re not going to get out of it is because you’re unique. It’s a unique situation that you’re facing. The world’s a big place. People aren’t as public about their challenges. They’re very public on social about the wonderful things going on in their life. They’re not as public about their challenges. Though, increasingly they’re more so.

Naming something allows you to talk about it very effectively with other people and have people say, “I feel the same way.” That’s incredibly important. Let’s talk about the four big challenges that you’ve written about around adult friendships. I’m asking for this because I think so many people will be able to identify it with multiple of those challenges.

For anyone who’s tuning in, make a note for yourself if you think this is something you might be dealing with. It’s real. It’s a thing. It’s not just you. The first one is what I call hypermobility in the book. This is a good example of this is how I described it. I went to more going away parties than birthday parties in a year because people keep moving.

People move at a faster rate. Whether it’s in and out of jobs, cities, apartments, neighborhoods states, and countries even. People always being on the go. Including this are people who talked about having long commutes. We had a lot of that before the pandemic, not so much during the pandemic, but now it’s back. If you have to commute two hours a day to somewhere, that’s the time you don’t have for friends. Hypermobility is the first one.

The second is busyness. Feeling generally not having enough time to connect with friends even though you want to, not having enough space in your calendar. The third challenge is relationships and family. That doesn’t mean that relationships and family are a bad thing, but it is a real commitment of time and attention. Often in our society, these relationships are rated at a higher priority than making time for your friends. When you’re committed to getting into your first grownup, real-life, serious, deep relationship, or you’re having a newborn, your ability to spend time with friends is going to shrink.

The fourth challenge is what I call difficulty establishing intimacy. This is what I’m talking about. It’s easy to meet people, but then how do you go from a stranger to a best friend? How do you get a crew of ride-or-die homies? How does that happen if you’re just talking about the weather and getting coffee every 72 days? Is that going to be enough momentum to establish the depth, trust, intimacy, vulnerability, reliability, and all of the things that go into having a committed friendship? Those are the four big challenges. I don’t know. Do you identify with any of those, David?

I identify with probably all of them, but the one in particular that resonates for me is, I tend to believe that “focus drives success.” Just because family is so important, I have three kids, it’s very easy to become overly binary and be 100% to 0% type of thing in terms of family versus friends. When you’re too extreme, generally in life and pretty much anything, almost always, it’s not a good thing. It doesn’t have to be 50/50 or 80/20, it could be 90/10, but it shouldn’t be zero. There was a period in my life where I was like, “I can’t deal with any friends right now. I’m overwhelmed. I got a 1, 3, and 7-year-old. I’m dying.” You still could find some time, so that one particularly resonated for me.

Sometimes when we think we don’t have time for friends, it’s because we are believing something we don’t need to believe. For example, there’s a thing that often happens in adulthood where we put the time in our calendar to see our friends in a box that’s separate from the rest of our life. That’s a behavior that we don’t have to believe that time with friends must happen in a box separate from the rest of our life.

What happens if that box is translucent, transparent, or laid over the top of something else that is already a part of your life? It’s like spending time with your kids. You have to get groceries. I have to get groceries. What if we went to the grocery store together? We can overlay the adult responsibilities and commitments that we have with our friendships. We don’t always have to compartmentalize everything and keep it separate, and then feel like we don’t have time for it.

I like that. I enjoy running a lot. A bunch of friends and I all run together. It’s very efficient to be able to run, exercise, and also maintain those friendships together at the exact same time. I remember I did this with shopping and kids. I had time for my young kids. At one point in time, I had to shop, so I would take my kids with me for shopping. You can take friends with you for shopping.

Finding ways to almost go through as many tasks as you can and see how you could do some of those with friends could make it an even more wonderful experience. It’s a beautiful idea. You had so many different things in the book. I’m going to go with the first one that hit me, and then you’ll hopefully add some more. Social media unshare, I like that concept because I had never heard of it before. Explain what it is, and then what should we be doing.

This is a concept also that I came up with and gave a name to in the book because one of the things I write about in the book is parasocial relationships and how social media can sometimes create parasocial relationships between friends. Simply by observing each other’s lives, we think we’re close, but we’re not interacting at all.

The social media unshare is a way to say, “How might we disrupt a social media behavior just a little bit so that it gets us a little bit closer to the friends that we want in our life?” One version of it is to say, if you took a beautiful photo during your day, or something funny happened, or something interesting happened. You would typically post it on social media.

Instead of posting on social media, pause and think, “Who might the 1, 2, or 3 people that I know appreciate this the most? Let me send it to them directly.” Let me send it to them either as a personal message, a text message, an email, a voice memo, or whatever it might be. You’re like, “This thing happened. I would love to share it with you. Check this out.”

See what happens if you have a one-to-one relationship or one-to-one communication around that, or with a small group. The thinking behind this is, if the thing that you’re sharing is good enough to share with many people or everybody who follows you, then why isn’t it good enough to share directly with the people who are the highest impact on receiving?

Before you go to the next one if you send a message of something like, “I’m just thinking of you.” When I get those from people, I’m like, “They were thinking of me, little old me? I feel so special. I haven’t spoken to them in six months. Thank you for thinking of me.” It’s so meaningful to get those. I like what you said. It’s all about intentionality. These things don’t take a lot of time.

It doesn’t. Another way to do this is if you see that a friend has shared something on social media, instead of writing a little comment underneath or dropping your emojis, thumbs up, heart, and moving on, follow up with them directly to ask a follow-up question, get a little bit behind the scenes, or to say, “I would love to hear about your trip to Turkey. Do you want to tell me about it? I have time this weekend all Saturday morning.” See if you can take it deeper than just a comment on social media. See if you can create a moment of connection for yourself and that friend with a conversation.

When I first launched my show, I interviewed someone. A person whom I barely ever talked to, a wonderful person I haven’t stayed in touch with, out of the blue called me up and said, “I tuned in to your show. I want you to know I loved it.” There might have been other people that maybe liked the post or whatever it is, but to call up and say, “It was so great for the following reasons, 1, 2, 3.” I felt so happy and it felt so special. That story reinvigorated our relationship.

We started talking, and now we talk more often. He made that first effort of reaching out, rather than just shooting a note to call me or hitting a like button. It had an impact on me. I try to do it more often, which is very easy since I did it zero before, so more often is like once in a lifetime. Those are two extremely practical actions that people can take, and so much of it involves that pause.

It’s the pausing, the thinking, and as you mentioned, making the other person feel special, seen, thought of, and noticed. Being like, “I thought of you. I want to connect with you about this specific thing.” Thank you. It’s beautiful.

The next one that I also liked and it’s related to is the phone dependency issue and how people can decrease their phone dependency. Riff on that a little bit vis-a-vis friendship, please.

This came up in the chapter about getting past awkwardness, which is so relatable for so many people. They’re like, “I don’t want to have an awkward conversation.”

Let’s do the awkward thing. I got a 15-year-old daughter. She and her friends, every time I hear them talking, they’re, “Awkward this, awkward that. This is awkward.” How has awkwardness become such a big thing in this world?

I don’t know.

Everyone’s so afraid of awkwardness. Why? What’s so bad about awkwardness?

There are a lot of different reasons, but I think part of it is that there’s a little bit of fear underneath this. I interviewed a therapist in this chapter about the awkwardness to talk about this. Part of it is a little bit of fear of, “What will happen if I don’t know what to say or do?” You will survive. You will figure out what to say or do.

Why is it such a bigger phenomenon today than it was years ago?

It’s because we spend so much of our life not improvising. We spend so much of our life having the opportunity to draft what we’re going to text before we text it. Write out what we’re going to say before we say it. We have fewer options to spontaneously improvise and discover that it will be okay if you need to spontaneously improvise in a phone call, in a conversation, in a social situation, whatever it might be.

The more that we rely on devices to mediate, create a barrier, create a buffer, create a zone of practice, even a zone of delay and procrastination, there is safety and comfort there. That’s part of the phone dependency. I believe that is also part of the awkwardness in this game as well, from the therapist I interviewed who said he hears this over and over with his clients. People are afraid of awkwardness.

We talk about the exposure hierarchy and we talk about ways to reduce your fear of awkwardness. In little baby steps, give yourself a chance to try the thing that seems like it’s going to be awkward. When you discover that you survived and it’s okay, you get a little bit stronger. Just like lifting weights. You start with a low weight, then you move up to a higher one. Eventually, you discover that you can do something you didn’t think you could do before.

The analogy I typically like with the weights is that the way in which your muscles increase is by tearing your muscles. Little muscle fibers are tearing, they’re in pain, and then they come back stronger every single time. It’s that practice that’s so important. First of all, super interesting. I never heard that theory before and I totally buy it around why awkwardness is such a more meaningful phenomenon. It has to do with spontaneity and the ability to do something quickly and to practice around that. More people should be taking acting classes. That might help.

Improv is a wonderful tool to get over the fear.

Every teenager should be taking improv. Let’s go back to phone dependency.

Part of this is related to that. If someone’s dealing with awkwardness and it’s related to this phone dependency, realizing like, “I noticed that I’d rather type out everything rather than speak extemporaneously at the moment.” Practicing that more frequently can be great, even if it’s in a small way. Chatting with your barista, chatting with the person at the grocery store, chatting with a neighbor on the street who has a cute dog. See if you can build up those muscles. With friends, try to get into more real-time conversations instead of always communicating via your device.

The device I believe is there as a bridge to help you get closer to that real-time conversation. Same thing with apps where you can meet people, like Meetup. The device is there to help you see like, “You both want to meet. You both have something in common. You want to connect. Now, get off the device and hang out.” Now, with COVID for the last few years, we’ve had a lot of virtual events. I do a lot of virtual events. I get it. The point is to get into a real-time interaction, not to spend time chatting and hypothetically you getting together one day. No, really do it. Do the thing.

Two thoughts. One is, Meetup’s mantra, “We use technology to get people off of technology,” which is exactly what you said that I love. The second is, more people I’m talking to, and they’ll say something like, “We were chatting.” Chatting used to be talking, but now chatting could be texting. Somehow chatting includes texting and they haven’t talked, but they consider that fully chatting.

Identifying quality connections versus less quality. Also, you wrote about it in your book. It’s hard. You don’t want to put people on some high-low hierarchy because it’s not about the person. It’s about the connection. Talk a little bit about what is a high-quality connection, what’s a low-quality connection. How do we identify? How do we move from low quality to high quality? I know that’s a great concept in your book. Please share as well.

This is very personal. There isn’t one answer for everybody because what I think is a high-quality connection and what you think is a high-quality connection might be different. That might be a place of friction or frustration in a friendship if we are matched, but we’re not very well matched because we have different ideas of what we’re each looking for. It’s like dating. Somebody might consider a high-quality connection in a dating situation to be different from somebody else.

In a friendship, it’s very much the same. It requires some self-reflection to say, “What are the experiences that you have in a friendship that allow you to feel seen, heard, alive, inspired, and connected? What are the things that you also want to commit to your friendships and hope to receive? Is it being there for each other in a time of need? Is it helping each other out with life stuff or helping each other out with career stuff?”

Being clear with yourself about what you would define as a high-quality connection, and then how can you be more clear with yourself and with others as you try to cultivate those relationships? How can you put yourself in these environments or with groups where that type of connection is more likely to occur so that you make it easier for yourself?

You turned the tables on me, so now I get to turn the tables back on you on this one. For you, what does a high-quality connection look like?

Personally, a high-quality friend connection looks like a high degree of willingness to have open-hearted conversations. That is a big one. People who want to go to new places in the conversational landscape. We’re not going to walk down the same seven streets with the same seven questions every time. We’re going to switch it up and try new things.

A high-quality friend connection looks like a high degree of willingness to have open-hearted conversations.

Let’s talk about the weather.

It’s important. It’s a part of life. The reason I made the Better Conversations Calendar is so we could have 300 alternatives to our most common small talk questions. Let’s talk about something new. Let’s play. Let’s experiment with that. Also, sometimes it’s play and sometimes it’s deep in sharing hard stuff. I don’t think this is unique to me, but I think people want to have stuff in common. Whether it’s stuff in common from your life experiences, your identity, the kind of work or things that you think about, or the kinds of hobbies that you like. We get along well with the birds that we’re of a feather with. Those are things that feel like high-quality connections.

Something else I’ve noticed particularly as I’m getting older is, flexibility is part of a high-quality connection for me. I’ve become more flexible with my friends and I want my friends to also be flexible too. I’m not the kind of person who’s going to get mad if you need to reschedule or cancel. I also hope that if life stuff happens, somebody’s not going to hold a grudge against me for six months if I need to reschedule or cancel. Life is too short to be upset about stuff like that. That’s part of a high-quality connection to me. It’s forgiveness and flexibility and being like, “Cool. Life is happening. I trust I will see you again. I trust we still like each other, so I’m not even going to stress about that.”

I’m thinking of someone that I’m close with. Their priority for high-quality friendship is someone who will be there for them in challenging times. For me, I don’t want people to be there for challenging times. It’s fine to have that. It’s wonderful to have that, but for me, I’d rather have people I can have fun and meaningful life experiences, grow, and do things together.

I have enough of a small core group of people that I could go to for challenging times. I don’t want each of my conversations to be, “What’s your challenge?” and spend our time talking about challenges. That doesn’t make me feel closer. It’s the doing of the things that makes me tend to feel closer. It’s about knowing what works for you. I’m different than most people, and that’s okay too.

That’s okay. This is exactly what we’re talking about. It’s different for different people.

You mentioned 300-plus different topics. I have to ask because you mentioned it. Don’t say all 300 or else we’ll go for a little longer than usual. Just give me 1 or 2.

In the Better Conversations Calendar, one of the pages is alternatives to what’s new. I have two that are pretty light, and then I’ll share one that’s a little bit deeper, maybe not the meaning of life deep, but okay. Two that are new but specific are, “Tell me about a good meal that you had lately, and also what kinds of stuff have you been googling lately?” That will tell you a lot about what’s new and relevant in someone’s life and where their mind has been. It tells you a lot about what might not otherwise come up. One that’s a little bit deeper is, “What’s an idea that you’ve walked away from that you want to revive? How do you feel about the stuff you own?”

I should throw away half of it, probably. There’s way too much stuff in my life. Talk about some activities, like relationship building that you would suggest.

I talk about this in the book because one of the most interesting pieces of research that I found and got so excited about had to do with a study that showed that, when we do novel experiences with people that we don’t know that well, it bonds us much more quickly than doing a state or a run-of-the-mill generic experience.

That’s because when we’re in an extraordinary situation, we are distracted from our feelings of awkwardness and we are mutually side-to-side looking and observing this extraordinary experience rather than looking at each other and feeling awkward and nervous. Novelty is like the inoculation against awkwardness. It gives you a shared memory and it gives you something to do, look at, or speak about together at that moment. Novelty is something that I think about a lot when you ask this question.

What are some novel things? What’s novelty?

It needs to be novel to each person. If I’m very used to doing improv and you’re not, it’s not going to feel as novel for me, but it’s going to feel super novel for you. Improv is a wonderful experience to do with friends, especially if neither of you is particularly familiar with it because of all of the things it does. It opens up your mind and creativity. It shows you that you can survive an unexpected experience at the moment, it will be okay, no matter what, everyone’s going to clap, and you’re going to move on to the next thing.

That’s how crazy everyone’s actual mind is because you have no time to think, so these crazy wacky things come out. I did an improv with people I didn’t know, and the exact thing happened to me. One of my closest friends now is the one I did an improv thing I barely knew before.

You also laugh together a ton when you do improv. Laughing together is also one of the things that help people bond very quickly together. It’s doing something novel like that. I would also say one of the things, and this takes a little bit more courage, but it was a wonderful strategy that came from the moment I interviewed. She said that when she has a new friend that she wants to cement that bond quickly, she will try to do a mini vacation together, even if it’s just a one-day road trip or, “Let’s get out of town for one night and go see this music or whatever.”

Laughing together is one of the things that help people bond very quickly together.

It creates this time outside of time where neither of you is distracted by your dishes or your errands. You have this concentrated experience of closeness with each other. You have a memory from doing this little mini getaway together. It creates this nice foundation for connecting because then it’s not just like starting over from scratch with another cup of coffee. It’s like you’re starting over from this place of real closeness. You can have so many more conversations that go to a different place when you’re spending 12 hours or 24 hours with somebody than when you’re only hanging out for 1.5 hours.

What’s funny is, I had a conversation the other day with a guy who read the book. He got in touch with me and said, “When I read this thing about spending the weekend with a friend, I’m a guy. A lot of guys aren’t going to do that with their guy friend, but I noticed that with this new guy friend that I made, we hung out Friday night, and then we hung out Saturday night, and then we hung out on Sunday. I didn’t even think about it, but we spent the whole weekend together. We just had breaks in between. We didn’t stay overnight. We just hung out three consecutive days.” I was like, “Awesome. That works too.”

One night, and then one early morning, and you go back. The depth of a friendship that could be built is very strong. I’m happy to say there’s a bunch of guys that I have done that with and it’s deeply meaningful. I got to do that more. I’m super intrigued. Please share a little more about the Connection Club as well.

Connection Club is a group I run. It’s a community for connection geeks. It’s a cross between an accountability group and a community of practice. The people who are in Connection Club are people who want to be intentional about cultivating connection in their life in some way. That looks different for different people. Some folks in the group want to get more comfortable hosting gatherings and hosting a dinner party. That might be something super new for them. For somebody else, it’s like learning to be a facilitator. They want to practice facilitation skills.

It’s very personal whatever your goal is. We meet every month. We go over our accountability and our goals. How did it go last month? What’s up for you next? What’s going to potentially get in the way? What ideas do you need? What support do you need to carry this out? We also have discussion circles in mini-workshops. If there are things that people want to learn more about or discuss in a group, this is a safe closed-door space where you can do that. It’s wonderful. I love it. We have wonderful people in the group because everyone values connection or they would not be there.

The people that are there must be so unique and special because maybe they have challenges with connections, but they have awareness of that and they want to change. They could see other people who share that. They don’t have challenges. They just enjoy making more connections. It must be a special group of people.

It really is. If anybody wants to join, head to my website, WeShouldGetTogether.com. Come on over to Connection Club.

Not just head to the website, but also buy the book.

Yes, and get the book.

Connection Club sounds a little bit like a Meetup, which is great. The more Meetup world, the better. You are a Meetup organizer. Share a little bit about your Meetup experience before we wrap it up.

I’ve been a member of Meetup for so long, definitely over fifteen years. I’ve started and run two Meetups as well. One was called Better than Small Talk, which is something I started before I knew I was writing a book, but I was doing these events and gatherings about connection. Better than Small Talk is one. Also, Bay Area Black Designers, which I started in 2015 and ran every month until 2022.

That was exactly what it sounds like, Bay Area Black Designers. We were designers in the Bay Area who were Black. It was the largest company-agnostic employee research group because we had designers from all over the region, from all different companies who were a professional supportive community for each other, and who felt isolated at work. Those are two of the Meetups that I’ve run. I’ve been to countless others as a guest

We’re so appreciative of your engagement with Meetup, your focus on making the world a better place and helping people to build connections. One of the things we say at Meetup is this. We did a little analysis around this. On average, we build 30 million connections a year between people. Some companies’ KPIs are revenue and profit, etc. Our KPI is the number of connections that we’re able to engender.

It’s the most important thing because when you have connections, hence the name of our show, Keep Connected, it helps do so many very important things, which are decreasing racism in the world, decreasing ignorance in the world, decreasing ages in the world, decreasing all these things. Just because people don’t have exposure to people who are different from them and the support that it’s able to provide.

We’re both doing the same thing, two sides of a coin. I read in your bio that you are a lover of puns. We won’t go into tacos. I have heard you love tacos and you love puns. You love puns about tacos and tacos about puns. You got a pun for us or you can’t do puns spontaneously. It doesn’t where it has to be ad-lib.

I don’t have a favorite pun, but we can taco about it. We could chat about it over lunch, but if they don’t have tacos, I’m walking out the door.

That’s a way to make a lot of friends.

Puns are very polarizing. People either love them or hate them. People who like puns are my people. In fact, one of my goals is to go to the Punderdome or the Pun-Off. There’s this pun competition and I want to do it one ear. I’m going to go. Not to compete, I just want to laugh my face off.

I just thought of something related to puns and something that we just talked about. I get this email every day. It’s called Nice News. I’m tired of the news always being horrible about terrible things. In nice news, one of the things they shared was that stupid dad puns help children specifically to get over awkwardness because they’re in more awkward situations when the “dad” or a friend makes the terrible pun. They’re able to handle awkwardness more often. Apparently, there are actual signs and research behind the value of puns.

I love that. I do love a good dad joke. It’s great.

Rapid fire questions. Quick question, quick answer. Here we go. When was the first time you saw yourself as a leader?

When I started poetry reading after college because I wanted to.

That is possibly the best reason to do something because you have a passion for it. If you could access a time machine and go anywhere in the world, any place, any time, where are you going and when?

Life wasn’t too awesome for Black people in the past, so I’m probably going to go back to when I was 21 because the first year out of college was super fun feeling free and adult for the first time.

What is one thing on your bucket list that you have not done and you would love to do?

I would like to get a massage every day for ten days straight.

That’s great. Aren’t massages wonderful? They’re so healthy.

It’s so great. That’s a thing I’ve never experienced. I don’t know if anybody gets to experience that, but it sounds like it would be amazing. It feels like a bucket list thing.

That’s a great bucket list thing. I’m in.

You can tell I’m a Taurus.

Last one. You’re many years ahead, what do you most want to be remembered by?

The legacy of being a person who champions connection, friendship, and community.

You are definitely that now. You are no doubt going to be remembered by it. We Should Get Together, get the book and learn more about all the amazing things that Kat is doing. I wanted to thank you for taking the time. You’re an awesome person. I do look forward to hopefully next time I am in the Bay Area, we could spend some time and get together in person and chat in real life.

We should. I have a favorite taco spot. I’ll meet you there, David, anytime.

Let’s taco it up. I’m looking forward.

Thank you so much for having me. It was such a delight to share this conversation with you and I would be happy to reconnect anytime.

—

Thanks for tuning in to this show with Kat Vellos. Many takeaways. Here are a few. The labeling of platonic longing is something that resonated for me, probably with so many others. The social media pause. Before you’re about to hit, before you’re about to share, find other people you could share one-on-one with. Having flexibility as a friend and the importance of that for others. Finally, understanding that high-quality friendships vary depending on what you most need. Everyone needs something different and understanding that. If you enjoyed this show, then subscribe, and leave a review. Remember, let’s keep connected because life is better together.

Important Links

• We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships
• Better Conversations Calendar
• Connection Club
• WeShouldGetTogether.com
• Better than Small Talk
• Bay Area Black Designers

The post Episode 61: Platonic Longing: Make the Friends You Want appeared first on Meetup Blog.

Tara Schuster was Vice President of Talent and Development at Comedy Central, and much of her identity and self-esteem was founded on that Emmy and Peabody Award-winning work. But when she was laid off during the pandemic, a severe identity crisis followed. Now, Tara is the author of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies and the forthcoming Glow in the F*cking Dark, two nonfiction powerhouses that use Tara’s life story to explore universal truths about finding internal validation. She and David sit down to discuss “unlearning” negative behaviors rooted in childhood trauma, silencing your inner frenemy, the beauty of journaling in the morning, and more.

Show Notes

This is a special episode with bestselling author Tara Schuster. This is an individual who worked at Comedy Central and has also written the books Glow In The F*cking Dark and Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies. It is not going to be all about F words, we promise. Happy reading and learning.

—

Tara, welcome to the show. You are f******* awesome.

Can you say hello to me all the time? That was the nicest hello I have ever heard. You are f****** awesome. Thank you for having me.

People might be wondering, “David never introduced, and says, ‘F****** awesome,’ to their guests. Why would he be saying that?” I say that because your previous bestseller is called Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies and your soon-to-be bestseller, Glow in the F*cking Dark, takes lots of comfort in that word. You are an amazing person. I’m glad to have you. We will throw a couple of bombs around, but it will not be with this level of persistence.

Thank you for having me. I’m thrilled to talk to you. When we chatted before, I told you about how I had such a good experience with Meetup doing an event around emotional health during the holidays. Your team was awesome. I was like, “This is its own Meetup. It is preparing for this event.” They were thorough and kind. One woman, Janine, set me up with a whole other organization. It was cool. You have good peeps in your organization.

It is important because you can’t make the shoemaker’s children go barefoot. What I mean by that is Meetup is a kind organization. We focused on ending loneliness and mental health and helping introverts and people that don’t have a community. We look for that in our people. When we hire people, we make sure to prioritize kindness as part of the priority. I’m glad you experienced that, and hopefully, many others will.

Let’s talk about your story. You have written and talked a lot about having to reparent yourself. You are F-up your childhood. Share a little context for people and help people to understand the background story for our readers. I know this is going to be the absolute first time you have ever told that. Try to doze and have the enthusiasm of a first time.

This is the first time ever, despite two books that go into this. Not to total mood shift, but I grew up in a house where things came to die, the pets and animals. It was super neglectful and psychologically abusive. I don’t blame my parents for those circumstances. They were deeply traumatized people who did not have the capacity to learn how to take care of my sister and me. What I learned from that experience was the only way I was going to get attention from adults was to hustle for my worth, get good grades, get into an Ivy League college, and get the best job. Isn’t this job fancy? I ended up at Comedy Central, where I was an executive in charge of shows like Key and Peele, working with David Spade and all these fancy people.

You get to tell lots of people at cocktail parties, “I work for Comedy Central. I work for fancy people. I must be happy and emotionally healthy.”

I’m like, “I’m in Hollywood. This is glamorous and fancy.” I only realized everyone in my past knew that there was neglect going on. I felt good being able to say, “I’m the Vice President of Talent Development at Comedy Central. I made it. I’m not a weirdo. Aren’t you jealous?” My whole identity was tied up in that.

How much did you hide or neglect, and people didn’t know and would have been surprised, versus they looked at me like, “Poor Tara?”

No, none of that. It was completely hidden. What I know is you can’t completely hide that. It is weird when you are not inviting anybody to your house and don’t want them to meet your parents, where you are evading the truth constantly. I didn’t talk about any of this until Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies came out. A lot of my friends were like, “That makes sense.”

I was ashamed. I was using this high status, “I have a great job,” as my external validation. That is all I had. I might have kept going that way, looking good on the outside, being good at work but bad at life, except I was a mess. I was severely anxious and depressed. I don’t talk about it in the first book, but now I’m willing to. I was flirting with suicidal ideation constantly. It was inside of me. It was like sandpaper on the soul. It was rough and wrong. I felt 10 out of 10 anxious and I had a disc track playing in my head. All I could hear was, “You are a failure. You are never going to succeed. You are not lovable.”

All that, Tara, would have surprised the people around you, or at this point, you were not as good at hiding it.

I am the master of hiding my emotions. Nobody knew what was going on at all. I would show up to work as the straight-A, good daughter of the office, and loyal. I’m like, “Look at all these things I did. Isn’t this great?” I’m going to get extra credit by going to this leadership conference that nobody asked me to. It is over the top. It might have kept going that way. Had I not, on my 25th birthday, drunk out my therapist and threatened to hurt myself.

It is a particular shame when you wake up and realize that is what happened because I listened back to her voicemails. That is how I even knew. I looked at my phone and I was like, “Why is my doctor calling me? It is weird. What’s up, doc?” It is Saturday night. In her messages, she was getting increasingly worried about finding me, getting me to go to a hospital, and getting me to be with someone. It wasn’t until I heard the worry in her voice that I started worrying about myself. I thought, “If I don’t do something to save my life, there is not going to be much more of a life left for me.”

That morning, I was hungover. In my Forever 21 sequin number, I got serious. I said to myself, “I didn’t have parents. I don’t have anyone to nurture me, wise mentors, or a support system. I got to figure this out now.” It was with urgency. I decided, “I got to reparent myself.” That wasn’t a term when I started this project. I knew I needed to go back and unlearn so much. I had to unlearn a bunch. I knew that I had to learn a lot.

I started a Google Doc because I was such a worker bee. We do everything with a Google Doc, even mental health. I wrote all the questions I had, “What are values? What are principles? What are vegetables? What are they? Which ones should I be eating?” I still have that question. I feel like Instagram is always telling me. It is one thing. We should understand this better at this point in civilization. I did this for five years. In the end, I had a 600-page Google Doc and felt like a completely different person. I read a memoir as self-help. I sought out adults to teach me, people I respected and admired. It was a constant battle.

Your journey, as you describe it here, is incredibly self-initiated. Did you go to a facility, a hospital, or seek any more formal process for therapy aside from the therapist you are going to, or you chose your own adventure to a large extent in your way?

This is a mystery about me. I’m what the writer Gretchen Rubin would describe as an upholder, which means I’m always hustling for external validation, but I’m the one doing it. I don’t need encouragement.

It is very initiative-taking.

That is a gift my parents gave me. I’m sure that is part of their personality.

That is what they had to do to survive to some extent.

My little survivor voice is if I didn’t do everything I did to get out of that house and get myself tools for mental health, I wouldn’t be here now. It was all self-led. I found incredible mentors in the books of Nora Ephron and Steve Martin. I soaked up everything. At the end of five years, I felt stable for the first time, which emotional stability seemed impossible. Some days, I’m not worried and spiraling. That was a huge momentous achievement. That is when I realize, “I have a whole guidebook. I have 600 pages of this journey. I wonder if this would be helpful for anyone else.”

I would have a book like this when I was going through it. Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies is an offering of, “You don’t need to have had as neglect full a childhood as I had.” We all have holes. Even the best of parents who nurtured this s*** out of you can’t do everything. They are humans. This book is for anybody who is looking to fill in some holes and learn how to self-nurture. That is what Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies is all about. That is the briefest version of how I can talk about my backstory.

Every childhood experience has its holes. Even the best parents cannot do everything because they are only human.

Do you have a relationship with either of your parents now?

Yes. I have an extremely close relationship with my dad now. I had this Comedy Central job and that was my status. I got laid off at the beginning of the pandemic. With it, I had a complete identity crisis. People introduced me as Tara Schuster, Comedy Central. It was my married last name. That is who I was. When I lost that job and identity, all of my worst traumas, which I had suppressed, came bubbling to the surface because no one else was defining me. I didn’t have a schedule to be on and these things wanted to be dealt with.

You define yourself by external versus internal. That is the problem with losing the external.

I wondered, “Do we have an essential self? Is there something more?” I had realized much of my life had been a reaction to trauma, not a proactive decision about who I am. One of the things I did was I stopped talking to my dad. I hadn’t talked to my mom for several years. I don’t have any relationship with my mom. I realized I love my dad. I need space. If I’m going to heal these darkest wounds, I cannot have him on my mind. I had taken care of his emotions for so long. I can’t do this.

I stopped talking to him. He got COVID. I found this out from my sister. I thought, “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to help him.” When I went to help him, I found out the craziest thing of all, which was he had gone to therapy every week of those few years to answer the question, “Why is my daughter not speaking to me?” I’m not exaggerating at all. He is 180% different. He thanked me if I helped him through COVID.

How old was your dad at that time?

He was 78.

That is a message that I want our readers to read, which is people oftentimes think of therapy for teenagers. They were like, “I’m figuring out life. I don’t know what to do.” To have that transformation at 78 years old and be 180 degrees different person in the ways that you want to be different, I find that incredibly motivating as someone who is a middle-aged person, but I’m not quite 78 myself. It is important for people to realize that.

The reason I tell that story is I don’t want that story interpreted as if you set a boundary, someone will change. That is rarely the case. Boundary setting is important. The point of even sharing a detail like that is that we all have more agency than we think. There isn’t a moment when it is too late. If you were to talk to my dad now, he would say that it was painful for him, and he is glad that I stopped talking to him because, as I write about in this book, he feels like a human for the first time. He feels like he is going to get to live a life. There is a sorrow to me of like, “I have a dad for the first time. Why couldn’t it have been like this much sooner?” It takes time it takes.

For a lot of people, it never happens. However many years he has left is a gift. It will be a gift to you too. You talk regularly now. You talk about your books and the past. He must be beyond proud of you.

He is very proud. People get afraid of honesty. If we talk about this, it is going to be worse. I don’t want to talk about this. What I learned through this whole journey is it was the secrecy that was rotting everything. Once I had the books, my dad, on paper, could validate. He was like, “Everything in here happened. I’m sorry.” It forced him to look at the situation more objectively. From my eyes, how that would’ve felt. If anything, our relationship is millions of times better than it ever was. I would write the books all over again simply to be closer to my dad.

You wrote your next book, Glow in the F*cking Dark. There is a f*cking series going on here.

When I lost the job, I did not take a moment to reflect. I didn’t say, “I’m well-resourced. I can take two seconds and think about this.” I thought, “I need meaning now. I need to be busy now.” How I dealt with everything was hustle, produce, and make.

As long as you don’t have to think, it is always easier. If you are doing lots of stuff, you don’t have to think. That works.

That job had been full-time, 24-hour. I’m passionate about this job. I needed something to replace it. It was 2020. I googled, “How can I help in the 2020 election?” I was like, “This is a big deal. This is what I will do.” The first search result was, “You can help register voters in Arizona.” I grabbed my Vitamix and a bag full of books that I would never read. I hopped in my Prius of Doom, and I moved to Arizona.

En route, somewhere in the Mojave Desert between Los Angeles and Flagstaff, I had a full-body dissociative episode. If you haven’t had one, it’s your mind is trying to shut down any traumatic memories and anything you don’t want to think about. It represses, but it makes your body feel like it is not present. You don’t feel present.

I could see my hands on the steering wheel and my shoddy self-done manicure, but it was like they were floating and they weren’t mine. I felt full-body sick. All of my insights could come up. I also felt out of control. I was going 95 and having trouble thinking how to stop. If you know me, I’m not a good enough driver to be going 95 anywhere, much less in the middle of the desert having this episode. For the first time in my life, I realized, “I have to pull over. I cannot keep hustling and overwhelming my way through life. This doesn’t work. It feels awful. Now I’m endangering my own life.”

If you keep on hustling and overwhelming your way through life, you are only endangering yourself.

Pulling over wasn’t physically pulling over it. It is metaphorically pulling over.

It is like my soul got to rest. I could not keep doing this. I pulled over. It was nighttime. In the Arizona desert, it looked like I was surrounded by a starfield. I was like glowing stars everywhere. Maybe that is because, in LA, we have so much pollution that you are like, “That is a star.” Someone was like, “No, it is a satellite. There are no stars.” I was standing there looking at these, and I wondered, “It is dark out here.” In 2020, it was such a dark world at this moment. I got no control over that. Is there a place within me that can glow as these stars do?

What is interesting is that stars glow due to stress and pressure. Stress and pressure are good for creating glowing. It is similar to us humans. I listened to something on a podcast. They talked about the importance of having small negatives, pressures, and stress to avoid big negatives, pressures, and stress. Pressure and stress are positive things because it moves you in the right direction as long as it is something that you can handle.

It is unavoidable. Good or bad, you are going to be stressed and pressured. It is going to happen over and over again. You have no control. The only question here is, how do you find internal safety? How do you stop being moved by the wind every time there is a gust? That is all we have control over.

One of the things that I read about that you write and read about, which I thought was well said, is about silencing your inner front me and shielding yourself from self-criticism and the importance of it. It is important. I want to pull it out. Can you talk a little bit more about that because everyone suffers from this to varying degrees? Help us understand it a little more.

I was addicted to self-criticism. All I could hear was this running disc track which was grinding me down because it is hard to dream, live or be happy if you are that negative about yourself. I knew that was happening. One of the first tools I was ever introduced to is journaling as a way to even see what was going on in my interior. I’m sorry to say this, but I have been journaling for more than a decade now, and it works more than anything.

Why are you sorry to say this?

It is because it is annoying. Who wants to journal? It is terrible.

Do you handwrite your journaling?

Yes.

Is it a different experience because I know you talk about journaling a lot, to write by hand versus to type? I was talking to a family member of mine. I said to her, “It is important to journal.” She was like, “I have never written anything in my life. I would type.” What is the advice here? Is typing okay or not?

Anything that gets you to journal is great. There is an added benefit to writing because your mind and body have to unite to do something physical. One of the most beautiful things about journaling is you get out of your mind and onto the page. How I do it is I word vomit three pages every morning, which is taken from Julia Cameron’s fabulous book The Artist’s Way.

It is without stopping and thinking.

You are not even writing. It’s more like you are venting. You are not reporting on what happened yesterday. You are asking yourself, “How do I feel?” It is something most of us do not take any time to think about nor know any of the vocabulary for. I was journaling all the time. I saw how little I thought of myself and how doomed I felt. That was mind-blowing to see that. What was great was, on the page, you can deal with those things.

I realized I have this voice within me. It is not quite my own voice. It is my friend and me within. It is somebody I have known forever, like an old camp friend, who I wouldn’t be friends with now. If we met, I would not want to hang out with them. We got history. I keep my friend of me within around. I needed to figure out how to let her be quiet a little bit more of the time.

What I did was I would write down everything she was saying about me. “Hear all the fiction,” she is saying about me. I would put a column down on a piece of paper. On the other side, I would write the facts, what else is true? Is it true that I’m going to be unloved, never find romantic love, and never have a partner, or is it true that I have so much love in my life? I have succeeded at everything I have ever tried once I put some effort into it. Why would this be any different? If I keep holding this attitude, aren’t I going to make things much worse? You are able to parse things out. Sometimes I would write a letter to my friend of me within, refuting all the charges and defending myself.

You would acknowledge the criticism first. It is not disregarding. It is acknowledging it, and not just acknowledging verbally but documenting it and finding ways to combat that criticism. Some of it would say, “That is true.” Some of it would say, “It is not true.” That was a way to understand which things to truly be self-critical about and which things, hopefully, in the majority of things, not to necessarily be and not to be as obsessed with.

One of the things you said at first is paramount, which is don’t dismiss these things. We often think, “I know intellectually that is not a real thing. I’m not going to deal with it.” The problem is we are not dealing with it. We are pushing it to the side. Whatever that little voice is, it wants to be heard. If you dismiss it, it is going to keep coming back tenfold because it wants you to hear something. I would take it a step further and say, “I realize you can’t reject your way to self-acceptance. You have to love those parts of yourself.”

You change a lot of things. You could harness it in the right way, but you can’t change who you are internally.

What I realized is those voices now work with me, not against me. It is unbelievably different for me how I walk around the world. I largely don’t criticize myself. I largely say, “I notice that. How interesting. Let me work with that feeling.” Through all these practices that I describe in my second book, like meditation, which I try to explain in a less annoying way than most people talk about meditation, journaling, or any of the practices, they give you more space within you. They are things that help you manage your emotions. You are less easily overwhelmed. It is not that I don’t get anxious anymore. I do. It is not the only thing. It doesn’t like to hook in and overwhelm.

When you do, you have a number of different actions that you can take. I was talking to a friend who gets anxious. What she does is she experiences all five of the senses and takes a pause. It grounds her. Everyone experiences some level of anxiety. It is a question of how you handle that anxiety when you are getting it.

You talked a little bit about meditation and journaling. One of the things you write quite a bit about is the morning time and once practice in the morning. I’m a big morning person. Not everyone is as lucky as me to love the morning. Part of it is that I want to get as many things as I can that are important to be done during the day. I know that if I get them done in the morning, I don’t have to worry about and think about whether I’m going to be able to get them done in the evening and have that stress. Talk a little bit about your mornings. What do they look like? What do you want them to look like?

I have another apology. I’m sorry that it works to be a morning person. No one is more sorry than I am. I hated the mornings. I’m going to comedy shows for my job. I’m not getting home until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.

Comedy writers were not known to wake up at 5:00 AM and go to sleep by 10:00.

I realized, “I have priorities that have nothing to do with my job or who I am externally. If I don’t do them in the morning, they are not going to get done because the world takes its toll. The world demands things of you, your partner, your kids, and your boss.” For me, what my mornings look like is I wake up at 6:30 every morning. The first thing I do is meditate for 20 to 30 minutes. A good way to begin is to be grounded and chill for a minute or at least alone, but conscious for one minute. Let’s do that. I journal for about an hour. It is 20 minutes of journaling and 40 minutes of writing. Twenty minutes would be great. It is word vomiting and then I exercise.

You haven’t eaten anything yet, no coffee.

I’m on an intermittent fasting schedule. I would have coffee if I were to even get more granular. I get out of bed, put the blinds down, and brush my teeth. It is a whole order. One thing follows the next.

People say to me, “My mornings are like groundhog day.” If you looked at my morning, especially in the last several years since COVID started, where it got consistent, it was like, go downstairs, make my athletic greens, drink my athletic greens, and empty the dishwasher. It is one after another. It is consistent.

My schedule is boring, which means I can be creative and risky in other parts of my life because I feel secure and grounded in those things. Creatively, I’m not scared anymore.

I love that for people whose every day they wake up and think, “What am I going to do now? That is scary.”

It is soothing to have a ritual like that. The other big thing is I don’t look at my phone for the first hour that I’m conscious. It is a game changer. Until you start doing it, you are like, “My life is immeasurably better because I didn’t get sucked down on Instagram or doom spiral. I wasn’t looking at a screen. First thing I was with me. If you wanted to jumpstart your whole self-care routine, you would sleep with the phone, not in your room. You would not look at it for the first hour you are awake. It is horrible and terrible part.

My wife does not let us have our phones in our room and guest room. We keep it outside. It is a little more difficult because I like to look at my little morning newsletters while I have my breakfast, but I’m going to see if it is possible. I love that morning ritual. That is amazing. Many people can learn from it. They don’t need to copy what you do. They need to figure out what the right thing is for them, and they can be inspired by some of the things that you do. Having a ritual is helpful.

I have many questions. I saw that you know Glennon and you have done some things with her together. Everyone talks about bearing it all. You were someone who didn’t share nearly anything about yourself. There are many people who are reading who also are in a similar place. Brené Brown shares it all. They also hadn’t shared much at various times in their life. How hard was it for you in the beginning? Is it harder than you thought it would be or easier than you thought it would be?

It wasn’t hard at all. It shocked me. I often wonder what is wrong with me. People would ask me this question, “How hard is it? You are vulnerable on the page. You are telling everybody everything.” I’m like, “This wasn’t normal. I should be scared. What?” What freaked me out was I didn’t even realize to be scared about it. It felt natural. What I would say is something I learned from Glennon Doyle, which is, “The stories that we are telling are not that personal.” I only will write a story if it feels like there is a universal truth. I’m using my details. You can see it through my eyes and maybe it resonates, but there are things that everybody can relate to. They feel different when I write them. If it is too personal and about me and it is not healed, I can tell. It is a weird, different vibration to the writing.

It is not something people can gain and learn from.

I only write something if I’m interested in it and it would be helpful to other people. Those are the two questions I always ask. If it is something else like I’m ranting, venting, or I’m like, “This happened, and I need to figure it out on paper,” that is not something I would include in a book.

It is healthy still to do.

There is a difference between my own journal and writing. One is deeply personal. The other is I’m using personal stories to tell a universal truth.

I have to ask it because I’m wondering, based on the way that you were parented and your unparenting experiences, do you want to have kids?

I am ambivalent about if I want to have kids or not. I write in Glow about my own. I didn’t know what I wanted. I was 35. A lot of 35-year-old women around me are like, “You should freeze your eggs. Give yourself more options.” I was completely ambivalent. I’m like, “I don’t know.” Enough people said it that I thought, “For the future me who has a better understanding of all of this and who is more healed, she might want more options. Since I don’t know, let me do this.” I had an expiring insurance benefit and I love a deal.

It is expensive.

I knew I was going to get a steep discount. I cannot resist.

Some people like to go discount shopping and you like to go to discount healthcare.

I did freeze my eggs and go through. It was a terrible process that I want to tell people about, and I do it in the book because I don’t know if I want to have kids. I have no clue.

You are a different person in your mid-late 30s than you were in your early 20s and you were in your early teens. You could be a different person in your early to mid-40s than you are now. Creating that option for yourself is prudent. It is good that you got the discount. It is a potentially great name to name your kid if it happens. Rapid-fire questions and rapid-fire answers. Are you ready?

I think so. Let’s try.

The first time you saw yourself as a leader.

At Comedy Central, when I started having meetings that people would come up to me and say, “That wasn’t miserable. Thanks for calling me out. Thanks for the praise.” I was like, “I’m changing our culture a little at this office.”

If you could access a time machine and go anywhere in the world at any time, where and when are you going?

I would go to New York in the Upper West Side in the 1990s to meet Nora Ephron and have coffee, rugelach, or something like that with her. She is my favorite author, director, and icon. There is a picture of her above my computer, staring at me at all times. I would like to meet her to hear her talk. I don’t even know that I have questions. I want to hear her opinion on everything.

Chocolate or strawberry rugelach?

Chocolate.

No cinnamon or strawberry food. Our readers are like, “What is rugelach?” Look it up. You could Google it if you are outside the US. Name one thing on your bucket list.

I want to go to Patagonia. I have been to Buenos Aires. It took a long solo vacation there, but I wasn’t brave enough to go to Patagonia, and now I’m like, “I got to get there.”

Do you want to see the penguins?

I want to see everything.

It is supposed to be incredibly beautiful. I have not been myself, but one day we will go together. Last questions. You have done many things. You are not even halfway done. Your third is done with your life. What do you most want to be remembered by?

I want to be remembered that people felt like they were seen, they felt special when I talked to them, and that I was present with people. That is what I want to be remembered for.

I felt that you were present in the conversation. Thank you for taking the time to be on the show. I feel connected to you. Hopefully, many of our readers feel the same.

Thank you for having me. This was fabulous.

—

Thanks for tuning in with Tara Schuster as our guest. What an exceptional individual. Some takeaways. The power of the morning ritual, whether it is meditation, exercise, and yoga. Not listening and interacting with social media is powerful. Her identification is not as her job or externalities but with an understanding of who she truly is and the importance of internal safety versus self-criticism. If you enjoy this episode, subscribe, leave a review, and let’s keep connected because life is better together.

Important Links

• Comedy Central
• Glow In The F*cking Dark
• Buy Yourself The F*cking Lilies
• The Artist’s Way

The post Episode 60: How to Turn Off Your Inner Critic appeared first on Meetup Blog.

Bakari Akil is a self-described scrappy entrepreneur bridging the gap between the corporate world and homegrown success stories. He’s also the organizer of two Meetup groups. His first, the Alternative Investment Club, has more than 5,000 members and is officially the largest private equity and hedge fund Meetup group in the world! Bakari and David sit down to discuss the keys to this club’s great success, as well as how the intense focus on business made Bakari want to lead another community for a more casual connection. That Meetup group, Black People Who Love Being Black, is dedicated to the pure celebration of Black culture through fun outings. Bakari and David’s conversation centers on making your own luck in life by being intentional and being bold.

Show Notes

We have had so many amazing people on this show, from New York Times bestselling authors to Grammy Award singer-songwriters. However, some of the best episodes are when someone cold calls emails and says, “I have read your show and I would love to share my story.” That’s what we’re going to read. We’re going to learn Bakari Akil’s story as a Meetup organizer of two different groups, the Alternative Investments Club and the Black People Who Love Being Black social group. It’s a story around the intentionality and scrappiness of someone who truly cares. Happy reading.

—

Bakari, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

You are clearly a “make it happen” kind of guy. I love when this happens. You cold emailed me and it worked, and you said, “I’m reading some episodes. I’ve been a Meetup member for a decade. I’ve been a Meetup organizer for seven years. You have a weekly Meetup event.” I was like, “We have to have this guy on the show.” It worked.

Thank you.

You organize two different groups. One is a startup fundraising investment group, and the other one’s a social group, Black People Who Love Being Black. Let’s talk about each, talk about one, then the other. You could choose which one you want to do first. Tell me a little bit about why you decided to organize each and start with either.

The Alternative Investments Club is an organization I founded back in 2016 because I had an interest in going out and trying to find a company to buy and run full-time as CEO. I played this game years ago from Rich Dad Poor Dad called Cashflow.

Lots of millionaires have come from playing that game.

From that game, I learned how important it was to see deals on a weekly basis. Not even weekly basis, but on a frequent basis. If anyone has played Cashflow, they understand the goal of the game is that you go around in a circle trying to get out of the rat race. The way to get out of the rat race is to do a good deal or do a bunch of good deals.

At the time, I was 25 and I had never seen a deal, much less any good deals. I created the Alternative Investments Club for two reasons. 1) To try to find a company to buy and 2) To see deals. I invited two camps of people who populate the New York City area. There’s one group of people who are high-wage earners in New York. They work at these major companies.

They got the money.

They have money, but they’re not able to participate in the big deals that Goldman or whoever’s doing. They’re not able to participate because while they have $200,000, these deals are $50 million, and $100 million. They get to participate as an employee in those opportunities. They don’t get to participate as investors or participants other than maybe their stock options or something as a partner compensation.

They have an interest in entrepreneurship. They have an interest in doing that type of thing, and they have the skillset to evaluate those things. Everybody they know who would be interested in doing something like that is working a corporate job. There’s this whole other group of people in New York City who are scrappy entrepreneurs. They are struggling to make it happen. They’re putting all their energy into it, but they don’t know the other group of people.

You were like, “These people should be connected by someone.”

Let’s connect these people. In my opinion, I was a bridge to that. I’m both a high-income earner and a scrappy entrepreneur. I created the Alternative Investments Club to bring that group of people together. From 2016 until the pandemic, every single Tuesday, we would meet at the 40/40 Club. Funny enough, the way I got into the 40/40 Club was very similar to the way I’m on this show.

I set up the meeting and then I went to the 40/40 Club and I said, “I got 50 people coming.” They were like, “We have these back rooms if you’d like to use one.” I was like, “Sure, let’s use the backroom.” The next week I came and I did it again. I showed up and they were like, “We don’t have anything going on Tuesday, so sure you use the backroom.”

It’s almost like the SATs. You get 400 points by showing up, but you seemed to get even more points by showing up. I love it.

I started continued bringing folks to the 40/40 Club and built a good relationship between us and them.

You didn’t have to pay the 40/40 Club anything for that.

Up until the pandemic, we didn’t have to pay. Now, we’re in a new place where we’re trying to figure out what the new dynamic will be. As you know, every restaurant and everybody was suffering. Instead of paying, I would ask people to drop off $20, buy a drink, or something like that to support the venue. In the 40/40 Club rooms, the back rooms, we used the big rooms, the Jay-Z Lounge, which could hold about 70 people. We used that backroom on pretty much every Tuesday for free for years.

One unknown data point is that when Meetup first started years ago, the model used to be that venues paid to host events. It’s not that at all anymore. We don’t get any money from venues, but for the same reasons that you shared. Please continue. Keep going.

Nothing was happening at the 40/40 Club. On Tuesday around 6:00, people would start coming to the 40/40 Club. From 6:00 to 6:30, people were mingling in the Jay-Z Lounge. It’s the typical happy hour type event. There was a decent group of people who hadn’t been to my event before, so they thought that it was going to be like everybody sitting around chatting like that. I didn’t like that type of networking. I felt like it wasn’t deliberate.

At 6:30, I would ask everybody to sit down. At this point, we had probably 50 people in the room and I wanted to give that 6:00 to 6: 30 period for people to get into the space. I learned pretty quickly as an organizer that if I set the meeting at 6:00, people are not showing up at 6:00. People aren’t showing up at 6:15. More likely people are going to show up somewhere in the area at 6:30.

I would have a quorum around 6:30 and say, “I’m the Founder of the Alternative Investments Club. This is basically how it’s going to work. Everybody in this space has the opportunity to get up for 5 or 10 minutes and talk about whatever you’re working on. Introduce us to the business that you’re working on, the real estate deal that you’re working on, or anything that you’re working on that you’re looking to raise capital for. We’re not a space for people who are selling a service. If you’re an attorney, if you’re an accountant, if you’re that type of person, there’ll be space at the end of our event to hop in and talk about that. Right now, we’re exclusively talking about deals.”

Everybody in the Alternative Investments Club space has the opportunity to get up for 5 or 10 minutes and talk about whatever they’re working on.

Over time, I started to realize that, at least in the beginning, people’s pitches were not honed in a way that was giving. In my group, while there were entrepreneurs and investors, there were people who truly did investing. VCs would come by, like legit VCs who ran firms and family offices that had real capital. They showed up in my group, but people were looking for a specific type of information. I realized that there were some people in the space who were scrappy and entrepreneurial but hadn’t done the work of trying to figure out the pitch.

I pulled together this document here that I’m showing you. I would hand it to the presenters as soon as they came up. It was like the mic. If you had this in your hand, then you were allowed to speak. It says, “I’m seeking blank in exchange for blank percent.” You start there and then it has several different questions. What legal structure have you incorporated your investment into? Is your investment a startup, an existing business, or real estate?

How much money did your investment earn in the last twelve months? How long will it take for us to get our money back? How are you going to spend our money? Have you raised any money yet? When was your business started? Those were key questions that I realized over time that people had not immediately set up and had accessible in their pitch for people who wanted to decide whether or not they wanted to learn about the deal.

From that introduction to the event and giving people the opportunity to speak, between then that would be about an hour. From 6:30 to 7:30, people would be getting up round robin and say, “I’m working on a fire hose construction business,” or whatever they’re working on. There would be about 5 or 6 people who would get up at different points and then the room would jump in and interject with questions. An investor who’s in the space who may not be as comfortable getting up and saying something or asking a question might hear somebody sitting right next to them ask the exact question that they want to know. Now the entire room is participating in hearing from everybody in that space.

Did you ever try to track how many investments came from these conversations? It’s hard because you don’t know, but I’m sure you know of a few investments.

I can highlight some that I know about. I know one of my friends met an investor in the space who was not a real estate investor. He had never done a real estate deal and decided to do the deal that he invested $40,000 into a rental property in Pennsylvania. They sold the property. The investor who invested got his money back plus a return. I know specifically about that particular transaction.

I can’t speak all about all of it because ultimately, I was trying to get people to meet one another. In that space, what’s in it for me was that I have 70, 80 entrepreneurs and high-income people in this space. At some point, I would get up and say, “I’m looking for a company to buy. If you know somebody who’s looking to sell a company, let me know. I’d be interested in potentially doing that.” Entrepreneurs tend to come from entrepreneurial families. People would tap me on the shoulder and say, “My dad is thinking about selling his construction business. If you’re interested in construction, let me know.”

You didn’t end up buying a company from that, did you?

I didn’t buy the construction business, but it created a real amount of deal flow for me that was tangible and worth me dedicating the time on a weekly basis to host an event so I can find that company.

Deal flow is one of the most important things for capital. It’s something that many venture capitalists struggle with in trying to get access to those deals. You were getting access to tremendous alternative deals, not just your typical big tech deal.

There are technology businesses that are now a lot larger than I saw back when they were in my space as a 2 or 3-man team pitching to the folks in my space. For me, it’s exciting seeing that development and growth. The way I would wrap up the event and this is what, in my opinion, made it different than most other events. I hope somebody who’s reading this would replicate this and do this in another city. This is important in terms of the way to create real meaningful networking. At the end of the event, everybody in the room would get up for two seconds and say, “This is my name, this is what I do, and this is what I’m looking for.”

Let’s say there are 40 or 50 people in the space. That’s a good fifteen minutes of everybody popping up. Regardless of who’s in the space, who may not have gotten a chance to pitch, everybody’s heard from everybody. As a result, you walk out of the space, and you’re like, “I didn’t know that was an attorney over there. Let me go talk to that attorney. Let me go speak to that guy in that space in real estate. I didn’t know that person was here in the space.”

Everybody got a chance to hear from everybody. The final thing I did as people were leaving, I would collect everybody’s contact information and let them know, “This is what I’m going to do with it.” I would email every single person who was in the group with the sheet that I collected of everybody’s contact information, which included a description of what they do.

It added to the levels of when you get back home, you look back at the sheet and say, “I meant to talk to that person, but I didn’t get their contact information. Luckily, I have this sheet with everybody’s information on it.” I did everything I possibly could to take the guests and the loss of opportunity away from people. People still, to this day, reach out to me and say, “I came to your event back in 2018. There was this guy I was looking for. Can you send me the sheet from that event? That was the day I came there,” and I can check my records and send that off to them. That’s the final way that I handled that.

Intentionality is so important. People oftentimes say, “I got lucky.” Oftentimes, luck is hard work. It means being very intentional. If your networking is a game of darts and throwing a lot of things against the wall, you get lucky and maybe you meet someone. I love how intentional you made it to be able to get people to find the right people and connect.

I bet what ended up happening after that is a whole bunch of lingering after the event. I always say that the best Meetup moments are the lingering in the parking lot, the hallways, a doorway, or the bar afterwards. That’s where real connections oftentimes happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if people hung out 30 minutes, 1 or 2 hours afterwards in that location. Other locations too.

That’s exactly what we saw. We closed out our event roughly about 8:00, so starting from 6:00 to 8:00, but we’re in the 40/40 Club. It’s a beautiful place. Plus, you now know so much about the people who are in the space. It’s not like you’re having to walk up and say, “What do you do?” You heard that person say what they do. You know exactly what they do. You can start the conversation straight up from that. I did a lot to make that. I would say most frequently, we didn’t leave and close out until around 10:00.

Two hours later. That’s important, by the way, for our audience to hear because oftentimes, when people think an event’s over or ends, they leave. Sometimes the absolute best part of an event is the post-event time. Thinking through how you can maximize that time for real meaningful conversations is something that you institutionalize. A lot of events don’t do that. I encourage people to find ways to do that. I want to hear next about the Black People Who Love Being Black social club, how it started, what you want to do with it, and what your goals are.

One of the things that I like about Meetup is that every once in a while, an organizer will say, “I’m moving. I’m leaving town. I don’t have the interest or the passion for organizing this group anymore.” I’ll open up the option for other people who are members who want to organize the group.

About 30% of groups that someone wants to end, end up having someone that wants to step up and take over.

For me, that’s a valuable tool because it allows me to launch off of an already existing platform of users and members and an organization that already has a culture to it. I come from the world of buying businesses. I’m already predisposed to things that have already existed and have years of data behind them. I can look back and see what members enjoyed and what they didn’t like and use that to try to determine what I’m going to do in the future.

That’s how I became the organizer of Black People Who Love Being Black. I wanted something social that was unconnected to my business world. I noticed that a lot of my life had been dominated by buying companies, which I do now, and all of that business stuff.  I wanted to hang out with like-minded people who enjoy being Black. That’s it.

When this opportunity came up, I wasn’t anticipating that it would pop up, particularly with this group, because that had been around for so long. It’s one of the oldest social clubs of its type on Meetup. When the opportunity to become an organizer came up, I took over the group and then I didn’t do anything for it for a period of time because I wasn’t certain of what to organize.

Every once in a while, I would organize something and I noticed only a couple of people would RSVP. I would look backwards and there had been a time when 50 or 70 people were RSVPing. I was like, “What is the difference between what I’m doing and the way this is happening?” I realized that there was at least some part of this where I was going to have to step out of the Meetup platform and invite people to the Meetup platform

To re-energize it.

Years ago, I hosted a birthday party for myself and I asked a lot of my friends to give me their email addresses. I didn’t want to do it via text, so I did it via email. I had a platform similar to like MailChimp that allowed me to send out mass emails. Text is not the easiest for doing that mass thing. I’ve got everybody’s email address and I had a list of maybe 300 people.

My Meetup group had 4,000 people in it, but I needed to energize that group so that they would look at it and say, “It’s more people.” These are people who knew me personally. I sent them the message. I played basketball at Equinox, have a lot of friends from my Equinox group, and invited a lot of those people. Once it hit twenty people who had RSVPed, that’s when the tipping point happened. A lot of people who hadn’t been active on my Meetup page at all started popping in.

They see, “Three people are going. I don’t want to go to that event. Cool, 30, 40, or 50 people are going. Now, I’m interested.”

It went crazy. I was hosting game night at my house and I have a two-bedroom apartment.

Were you playing Cashflow or not?

No, I didn’t. That’s a great point. What I did was I went to X & Co and I said, “Give me all the games that when somebody walks in, they would expect to see that game at a game night.” I got Jenga, Monopoly, Connect Four, and Scrabble. I live in a two-bedroom apartment. It’s pretty big. I was worried because it hit 100 RSVPs. This is after scheduling different events and only 7 or 8 people RSVPed. Now we’re at 100. I have friends hitting me up like, “Can your place hold 100 people?” I started to suspect two things were likely going to play out.

Only half the people would show up. That helps.

Second, half of those people are not going to show up at the exact same time.

People come late. They leave early.

I’m happier with the larger RSVP and I think I can deal with that. I sent the message over to my landlord and said, “I’m having a game night at my house. I want you to be aware that there are some people coming.” At the height of my party, there were probably around 45 people total in the apartment. It never got uncomfortable. It went pretty well.

Since then, I hosted a Super Bowl at my house and a lot of people came for Rihanna’s performance. It was funny. There were so many women who came to my apartment. There were a decent amount of guys, but so many women who came to my apartment for the Super Bowl. As soon as Rihanna finished, that was it. They’re like, “This is so great. Thank you so much.”

Super Bowl for half of America is just the halftime show.

That was a fun experience. Now, we’re doing a book club.

I assume it’s a book club related to Black culture or Black history. What’s the book?

We’re reading Kindred by Octavia Butler, which was a Hulu show.

It was easy to cheat and watch.

That’s exactly what I said. I said, “You don’t have to read the book, but you could watch the show.”

The theme between both of these is an incredible amount of scrappiness. It’s the story of your life in certain ways as an entrepreneur and building things. You could probably give a lecture on what it means to be scrappy. What are the traits that are important? How do you approach being scrappy? I have to ask because it’s something that you clearly excel in and I want to learn. Share anything you can about scrappiness and why people are not scrappy enough, etc.

I don’t know how to not be scrappy. My advisor at Columbia Business School invited me to be a lecturer in his group. He loves to tell the story. That’s his favorite story to tell. He was a professor at Columbia Business School and he taught the subject about buying companies. I was not a student at Columbia Business School. I lived in Harlem. I learned online that he was teaching this class and I needed to learn this information. I didn’t know any other way to learn this information. I went to the class and sat in the class.

Instead of paying $10,000 on average per class, you were like, “I can show up.”

They were right there in Harlem. It’s not like the building was locked. I was like, “I’ll go sit in the class.” I sat in the class for most of the semester.

Did he know you weren’t a student?

No.

How big was the class?

It was like 40 to 50 people in the class.

You’re showing up and not doing anything.

I tried to sit. For MBA programs, there is a lot of assigned seating, so I sat wherever I didn’t think that was an assigned seat.

This is scarier than going to a football game and trying to move a couple of rows down.

Eventually, I introduced myself to the professor towards the end of the class. He was so impressed by the fact that I would come to the class. Going forward for the next three years, as he taught that class, he would always call me in and say, “Do you know how I met this guy?” I would come in and speak about my experiences trying to do this hard thing of searching for and acquiring a business.

Do you think to yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

That’s basically right.

What could happen? He could say, “Get out of my class.” By the way, if you’re not allowed in the class, it’s the same thing if you didn’t go to the class in the first place.

I got the idea from Steve Jobs. During his Stanford commencement speech, he talked about how when he dropped out of school, he was in a position now to take any class that he wanted. I was like, “That’s an absolutely true statement.” When the opportunity came, I took advantage of it. I don’t know how to do things without looking for an opportunity to be scrappy. For me, it matters if I’m trying to learn something, I need something, let me be creative and get it done.

If I need something, let me be creative and get it done.

Why aren’t more people scrappy and say, “I’m going to show up. What’s the worst that can happen?” Obviously, fear, anxiety, etc.

In my case, I guess the real downside to somebody is the feeling of being embarrassed. It’s this idea that the professor might at some point say, “Who is that?” The entire class looks back and says, “I do not know this man.” That feeling of being embarrassed or humiliated is probably the thing that scares most people from doing things that are harder. I could have brought 50 people to the 40/40 Club and the 40/40 Club said, “Turn around and go home.” That was an absolute possibility. To me, it was unlikely. The 40/40 Club as an incentive. They want to have people in that space. I didn’t expect us to get the free room. That was a bonus.

I knew that they would host us. I knew they would, on a Tuesday night when nobody’s there, be willing to host us. Worse come to worse, I didn’t feel like people were going to lose anything. If they came to the 40/40 Club, we got a chance to all meet up and maybe we walked to a different bar. There was no true harm and it was only a real opportunity. That’s the reason why I went.

You’re thinking about it from a cost-benefit standpoint and you’re saying, “What’s the benefit? Significant. What’s the negative? Fairly minimal. Let’s do it.” Anyone who’s reading this right now, most of you have heard Steve Jobs’ commencement address, because it’s one of the most famous viral videos ever, but if you have not heard it, then I encourage every person here to listen to it. It is what Bakari is referencing as well and an incredible motivation for so many different people across many different things.

I have to tell a quick story, which is related to you having two groups. I’ve spoken with an organizer in San Mateo, California. He told me that he has two groups. One group is a bowling group and he did it because he loves bowling. He loves hanging out bowling. The other group he has is a career progression networking group, a business group, etc. He did it to find a job and help himself and his career. He said, “I have to say this, I got in my last two jobs from my bowling group, and I met my best friend at the career networking group.”

What I love about that story is it’s the business side, which is your ultra investing club, and the social side, which is your other group. The overlap that can exist between those two and how amazing relationships can develop from an investing club and how career opportunities can come out of the Black People Love Being Black club. Have you seen that? Have you seen that juxtaposition?

I’ve been running the Black People Meet club for less time. I’ve been the organizer for about a year, but I only started hosting events after about eight months. Thus far, the social side of the Black People Meets club has taken the front of that side. It’s still mostly career side on the Alternative Investments Club. That said, for years, I was only the Organizer of the Alternative Investments Club and met a lot of close friends. They had a lot of good experiences. My actual attorney is not just my attorney. He’s my friend. I met him through the Alternative Investments Club. That’s similar to a lot of different people who I’ve met through the Alternative Investments Club. There’s an overlap between both our social lives and our professional lives.

One of the things people don’t realize is that sometimes the best networking or way to build relationships is to show up. Go to something that you’re interested in and you’re passionate about, whether it’s culture history and identity, or whether it’s investing and you never know what’s going to happen. Magic will happen when you show up.

When I first got to New York, that was like the main way I would go out. I used to go to a Meetup group for improv classes then I would see different tech Meetups. There were lots of different Meetup groups that I would attend until before I became an organizer.

It was hard to go from a member to an organizer. About 80% of our organizers are previously active members. It’s a path. A lot of people like going to parties, but not a lot of people necessarily like throwing parties. You’re a throw-a-party kind of guy. Weren’t you beforehand? Weren’t you an invite-100-people-over-your-two-bedroom kind of guy before?

I will try. The first time I became an organizer, I tried to organize a group and one person came. For me, that was demoralizing. I’ve seen other Meetup groups go from 1 to 10 to 15 to 20. I knew if I stayed consistent with it, that was likely the outcome. For me, it felt like a grind that I wasn’t ready to do if I was going to start from zero. I’ve looked for opportunities to take over existing Meetup groups.

At the time, I didn’t know that was a real thing. In fact, I thought there was a little bit of an imposter problem with that. I used to think when I first joined Meetup when somebody would say, “Do you want to step up as an organizer,” that if I did, everybody in the group would say, “Who is this guy?” It took years for me to feel the confidence to say, “I’ll step up as the organizer and take over this group.”

You are the ultimate growth hacker in life and in business. I love it. That’s a total compliment to you. Rapid-fire questions, rapid-fire quick answers, here we go. The first time, Bakari, that you saw yourself as a leader.

I’m not sure I see myself as a leader now. I want to be, though, so I’m still working on it.

Next one. If you could access a time machine, and go anywhere at any time, where do you think you would go?

My instinct is to go get the Sports Almanac out.

A little Back to the Future. Spoken like a true entrepreneur. Name one thing on your bucket list.

I’m in early conversations right now with a group called Remote Year. It’s an organized group of 40 or 50 remote workers who travel around the world for a month at a time. They live in different countries for the entire year. I’m in the early talks with Remote Year about going on a world tour with them and working remotely.

I wonder how to navigate Meetup in that context. I know Meetup is an international organization. There might be groups out there that I’ll be able to engage with and connect with while I’m out there. Right now, that was the thing that was on my bucket list. It was the goal of traveling the world. I’m fortunately in a position financially and professionally where I can take that time to do it. Ideally, I hope to be able to pull that off by the summertime.

What an amazing experience. We have over 40% of RSVPs to Meetup events happening outside the US. We’re in 200 different countries. I am confident you’ll find many Meetup events when you’re in your Remote Year, which is what an amazing life experience. The last question is, what do you most want to be remembered by?

I would hope to be remembered. I want to do something. I don’t know what that thing is yet, but I’d like to do something in the future and near future. A hundred years from now, people will say, “Bakari was cool. Remember what he did? That was dope.” That is what I’m working on now.

A hundred years from now, people will say, “Bakari was cool. Remember what he did? That was dope.”

I’m confident that will happen. You are doing so many different things and each of those things presents tremendous numbers of opportunities. You look to be a source of good and connecting and helping others. Thank you so much for being on the show. I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for reaching out. What would happen if you weren’t scrappy and reaching out? Have a good one.

Thank you very much.

—

Thanks for reading the interview with Bakari Akil. I hope it was a good alternative investment of your time. One of the things I loved about the conversation is how intentional Bakari is around relationships, connecting people, and helping people. His tenacity and scrappiness are things that everyone can learn from. If you enjoy this episode, then please subscribe. Leave a review. Check out my new book, Decide and Conquer, and remember, let’s keep connecting because life is better together.

Important Links

• Bakari Akil
• Alternative Investments Club
• Black People Who Love Being Black
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Cashflow
• Kindred
• Remote Year
• Decide and Conquer

The post Episode 59: How to Make Your Own Luck appeared first on Meetup Blog.

Ximena Vengoechea listens for a living, as an expert in UX Research for Pinterest, and previously for Twitter and LinkedIn. She is also the author of Listen Like You Mean It: Reclaiming the Lost Art of True Connection. Her book is a practical and immediately-applicable guide to empathy and understanding of your fellow humans through conversation. Ximena and David sit down to discuss the United States’s cultural hangups with listening as purely a means to an end, and how to transform this dynamic with just a little bit of effort and curiosity. Their conversation touches on tips for staying engaged with a topic that’s not your strong suit, the subtle mastery of interruption in group settings, avoiding questions that begin with Do or Is, and more.

Ranked as one of the top 25 CEO podcasts on Feedspot, Keep Connected with Meetup CEO David Siegel is a podcast about the power of community. For more details on other episodes, visit Keep Connected on the Meetup Community Matters blog.
We hope you’ll keep connected with us. Drop us a line at podcast@meetup.com. If you like the podcast, be sure to subscribe and leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts.

Show Notes

Welcome to the show. In this episode, we are talking to Ximena Vengoechea. We all know how important listening is. Many of us want to get better at it. Ximena has written the book Listen Like You Mean It with so many practical tips on listening. I hope that you could take 1, 2, or 3 practical tips from this conversation.

—

Welcome, Ximena, to the show.

I’m so excited to be here.

As you can tell, I’m a talker. I’m a bit impatient. I cut people off. I’m not proud of it, but at the very least, I’m aware of it. You would think that awareness would translate into becoming better at it, but I need help. Can you help me?

I can. I should also say that I can relate to a lot of what you’re saying. I want to dispel this idea that you have to be naturally gifted in listening to be a good listener. There are actions we can take. We can do this.

Ximena is the author of Listen Like You Mean It. She’s a user research expert, has worked at Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, and is an amazing person as well. I’m looking forward to learning from you. I’m looking forward to listening from you. Talk about yourself a little bit. Talk about your listening past. Let’s hear it.

As a listener, there are some things that I probably naturally did well, and then some things that I had to learn along the way. For context, because I do think this informs so much of the kind of listener we become, I’m one of four girls. There were four of us growing up, competing for my parent’s attention. The part of me that is comfortable with interrupting and with, “What do I have to do to get my parents’ attention?” Those are probably the skills that don’t necessarily naturally line up with being a deep listener.

On the other hand, something that I noticed also growing up was that I was a big observer. I was interested in people and their stories. I remember in middle school, I got this reputation for being someone who knew all the gossip. I wasn’t necessarily spreading it but was a person who could receive it. Even at a young age, there was something in my listening where I became a space for people to share. That part was because I was deeply curious about people. I was interested in their feelings, emotions, and what was happening. It was a combination of those two things.

Eventually, I realized that these are at odds. This desire to be center stage and interrupt and also this desire to deeply know someone and understand them. The rest of my listening path has been figuring out how to tamp down the qualities that are maybe my gut reaction and not as productive for listening, and then trying to dial up those other aspects that help me connect with someone.

I like the way you described it as listening is the path toward connecting. It seems like you see it as that critical ingredient. When you were that middle schooler and for some reason, people unburdened their challenges, whatever the challenges are for middle school kids, which are probably different back then than they are now, you knew that that was important. They connected with you. We all know listening is important. It’s a cliché. We know that, but why is it even more important than we realize? Help us to understand that a little better.

Even in the context of thinking about why listening is important, first of all, most people don’t think about it. Culturally speaking, especially in America, there is the sense that when it comes to communication, what is most important is getting our message across. This is why we have so many public speaking classes. There are Toastmasters. There are all these workshops you can take on how to influence other people, how to persuade them, or how to negotiate. This is all about getting our message across and getting what we want out of an interaction.

That’s where we tend to focus as opposed to thinking about this other piece of the puzzle, which is, “How do I deeply understand the other person? How do I get to know their experience?” That is ultimately what allows us to connect with someone else. It’s too easy to think about listening if we think about it all as a transaction. It’s like, “I’m going to listen to my boss because I need to keep my job. I’m going to listen to my partner because I live with them. I have to do that. That’s part of my job in being their partner.”

It’s like a means to an end.

Exactly. It can feel like an obligation or a chore when if done well, it can be an opportunity for us to understand this person, what motivates them, and what their needs are. It’s like, “Why exactly is my manager so interested in this aspect of my work? Why does my partner always read the newspaper headlines? I’m not reading that paper with them. Why are they doing that?”

It’s thinking about, “What could this mean? Maybe it’s a bid for connection. Maybe this is a way for them to connect with me even on a small level.” Starting to get curious about how we communicate and what someone is trying to communicate is a step toward understanding them as a person, as an individual, and all the way down to the level of emotions. That’s where that human-to-human connection occurs.

Getting curious when communicating is a step forward to understanding another person and building a strong human-to-human connection.

Curiosity sounds like the linchpin for you for effective listening. Listening is the key to connecting. Therefore, curiosity leads toward connecting. There are curious people in the world. You are clearly one of them. There are people who are less curious. Is curiosity something that everyone has? Is it something that everyone should have? Is it so important for listening and is it also a prerequisite to some extent for it? How important is curiosity, and can one try to build curiosity?

Curiosity is very important in terms of building that connection and understanding a person. There are people who are more naturally inquisitive than others for whom it’s a stronger personality trait, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be learned. Similarly, there are people who are more extroverted and more comfortable giving a talk in front of a room, but even introverts can learn that. There are natural traits, but there are also traits that you can learn.

There has been research that was done on curiosity and connection. There’s a researcher, Todd Kashdan. He looks at curiosity. One of the things that he discovered is that there’s this assumption when we’re meeting people at a networking event or we’re building a new friendship or a partnership.

In those early stages of a relationship, there’s this assumption that as an individual, we need to do a good job of telling a great story, pulling people in, being funny, and being charming. We’re creating this magnetic pole in order to create a connection. Building rapport quickly comes down to being curious about the other person. It’s less about, “I need to be interesting,” and it’s more about, “I need to be interested in the other person.” Having that as an intention going into conversations is useful.

There are things that you can do very tactically to practice this. Even if it’s an atrophied muscle, you can build it and strengthen it. Some of that comes down to asking good questions. If you have a kid, a partner, or anybody who has tried on a regular basis say, “How was your day?” and gotten that one-word response where they say, “Fine. It was okay,” but you learn nothing else, then you know that not all questions are effective. Some questions are naturally going to lead us to dead ends unless that person happens to be in a great mood or wants to unload and get something off their chest.

We want to think about asking questions that are more open-ended. You want to avoid questions that are naturally going to end in single-word responses or yes or no responses, and ask things that are much more open-ended. Instead of saying, “Did you have a good day?” you can say, “Tell me what happened today. What happened at the office?” or whatever it may be. You want to think about questions that start with what and how as opposed to questions that start with do, is, or are.

Any parent of teenage kids can benefit from that in trying to get their kids to talk a little more than the one-word answers. These are great tips. Can you try to talk about the American culture a bit and how we skew not in the right place from a listening perspective? Is there a culture that you found or that research has found that gets listening right or better than others?

What I would say generally is that probably the biggest difference is between more individualistic versus collective-minded cultures. The US is very individualistic in nature. It’s all about me and what I can do, “Dream big. You can make it happen.” It’s all about hard work, hustle, and all of that. It’s what’s good for me is good for me as opposed to what’s good for me is good for the community or what’s good for the community is good for me. You see this in many ways across cultures. In certain parts of Europe, they have way better childcare support.

I was thinking of the Scandinavian culture that they’re much better listeners. A little more socialist ethos will have a greater influence on that.

That’s right.

There is another question before we get into some additional tips because I want to get as practical as we can. One of the things I love about your book is how practical it is. It’s incredibly practical. You talked about the party situation where there’s somewhat a more charismatic person talking and telling stories, and we think that that’s the way to build friendships, etc. The important thing is to try to ask curious questions.

It made me think about a lot of people that I know who are curious people. They love asking questions and listening one-on-one, but then when it comes to a group-type setting or 3, 4, 5, or 6-people, cocktail party, dinner, etc., they clamp up. It’s a lot harder for them to be active listeners. Do you have thoughts related to one-on-one listening versus group listening that could also be helpful?

What you’re getting at is that in some ways, those are fundamentally different skills. The ability to draw some one-on-one in conversation is quite different than facilitating or moderating a group conversation. The minute you add more personalities and more bodies, everyone is going to be using that conversation for something different.

One of the core concepts in my book is the idea that with every conversation comes a need. There is a hidden need. We often think of conversations as throw away, “We’re just chatting. It’s just water cooler talk, whatever.” There’s always something a little bit deeper if we can stop, think about it, and look for it. It can be a need for information, validation, support, encouragement, or a need to be heard.

There are so many different things that it can be in a one-on-one conversation. Maybe this is what is happening with those individuals. Maybe even without articulating, they are able to intuit what that need is. They’re getting a little bit curious and they can feel that they’re getting closer. There’s a lot to work with there. Whereas in a group conversation, suddenly, you go, “That person is talking a lot. That person is not talking at all. This person’s eyes are glazing over because they are not interested in talking about the stock market, sports, or whatever the topic may be.” That’s a lot more to track and a lot more to facilitate.

Going back to what we were talking about very early in our conversation, it takes the willingness to potentially interrupt. This is where interruption that is gracefully done can be useful. You can say, “That’s so interesting. What do you think about this?” and then point to another person or the person who is being quiet as a way of including them. The role of the listener becomes much more than getting to know someone, but also making sure that everybody’s voice is heard. You become this inclusive facilitator of the conversation, and that’s pretty different.

It is a very different skillset. It takes a much higher level of confidence probably and also aggressiveness a little bit in terms of taking a conversation that is going in someplace and moving into a separate direction. It is important and a role that I tend to like to play. We were talking about tips earlier like not asking open-ended questions and no yes-no, so I’m not going to ask you a yes-no question. It would be interesting to hear more about some additional tips. I was about to say, “Can you tell us more tips?” That would’ve been a terrible question, so I can’t ask that. Hopefully, I phrased it in a better way.

One of the things I’ll say is as you’re asking these questions, I like to think of it as a funnel. Your initial questions, when you’re asking these open-ended questions, are the broadest questions that you could ask. This is giving the other person the space to take the conversation wherever they want to go. That can be useful for people who may generally clam up or who you have a little bit of a challenge getting traction with, or going on a conversational adventure. You’re letting them lead the way. That can be wonderful and surprising.

As you’re asking those questions, maybe there’s an area where you sense, “There’s a lot of passion here. There’s heat in the conversation.” There’s something they are gearing up toward or that they’re processing with you. You start to narrow in a little bit. This is when you can use more encouraging questions, which take a specific topic and you’re taking it a little step deeper. They’re very subtle. That can sound like saying, “What else?” or, “Tell me more about that.” One that I like is once a person finishes talking and you sense that maybe there’s a little bit more to be said or there’s a why behind what they’re saying that’s not being expressed. You can say, “That’s because,” and let them fill in the blank.

That is amazing.

These are ways that you’re progressively getting narrower and more specific, and guiding the person there based on where you’re saying, “There’s interest there on their end and also on my end.” You can tell when there’s interest also because you’re starting to pay attention to things like body language, voice and tone, or pacing. If someone is generally a deliberate speaker and then suddenly starts talking fast, that’s a signal. You can start to track those things and know, “I’m getting somewhere.” You then start to use these phrases to keep nudging things along.

One of my favorite signals as a talker is when I see someone taking out a pen or even their phone and start writing something down that’s being discussed. They could be writing down, “Daffy Duck is my favorite cartoon character.” I wouldn’t have any idea, but I feel so happy. I’m like, “This person cares, or has listened to what I’m saying. They’re wonderful posterity.” They might be writing their shopping list. I don’t know. I don’t care, but I feel so good. There are quite a few other things that I imagine the audience can do that you’ve mentioned which makes the other person feel heard.

As you were saying it, that’s exactly the phrase that I was thinking. This act of writing makes you feel heard. It makes you feel like someone is paying attention. They’re picking up what I’m putting down. They think it’s important enough to capture on paper, and that’s validating. Maybe for someone, it is writing things down. In your case, it might also be reflecting back on what we’ve heard. It’s not word for word.

If someone is telling you about all the challenging things that are going on in their life and are like, “This is happening with my kids. This is happening with my partner. This is happening with school,” and all of that stuff, you’re not playing back like, “It sounds like this is happening with your child. This isn’t right.” It’s not a bullet point. If you can capture the essence of their experience because you were listening and asking those questions, and then be able to reflect back and say, “It sounds like you’re having a hard time.” That can be validating for someone to feel like, “I am. Thank you for getting that.” As opposed to someone responding and saying, “It sounds like you have so much on your plate. Let me recommend to you this.”

If you capture the essence of another person’s experience by listening and asking the right questions, you can connect with them instead of playing the role of a problem-solver.

It’s the dreaded solution provider, which I exactly have tried to move away from. It’s a major problem. When you’re a leader in a company or a CEO, you’re constantly thinking about solutions. It’s very important to have a different conversational and listening capability at work than at home and with friends. At work, be the solution person. Outside of it, avoid all solutions because no one wants to hear solutions

You could ask. That’s another helpful response sometimes. It is to say, “It’s fine if you’re solutions-minded.” I call this a problem-solving mindset, and I have this too. It’s reasonable to say, “My instinct right now is to give you some suggestions,” or, “My instinct right now is to offer you my experience or whatever it is. Would that be helpful? Is that what you’re looking for?” Usually, the person can be like, “No. I am venting. I am not ready for solutions.” They can say, “That would be helpful because I feel myself spinning. I need to be grounded in reality. Thank you.”

I love that because you’re showing that you do have potential ideas that can help, but you’re not in any way shoving them down someone’s throat or making them feel like they couldn’t have thought of those ideas in the first place. That’s great to ask a question like that. That’s beautiful.

There is also staying present in conversations. You talked about body language. For me, the biggest thing is looking into someone’s eyes. You could see it. When someone’s not present, their eyes are darting. Especially if you go to some dreaded networking event or even a non-dreaded networking event, you see people’s eyes moving all over the place. When I see that, I will try to either leave the conversation because they may not be interested, which is perfectly fine, or something is wrong if I see people’s eyes darting.

Are there any other thoughts you have about staying present in conversations? In this world, especially with phones and all the distractions that we have, the ability to stay present is harder now than ever for humankind. Please, our audience can benefit from this. Any and all thoughts on staying present would be very helpful.

At a high level, what I would say about staying present is part of it does come down to setting external factors, and the other part is internal. The external piece, I think about technology. There are lots of pings and notifications. They can pull you out of the conversation. The best way of managing that is to have the device completely out of your sight.

I used to do this myself. I would get a one-on-one with somebody, and as a sign of what I thought was respect, I would turn my phone face down on the table. It’s like, “I can’t see anything. Don’t worry. I’m here with you.” As I was doing research for the book, what I learned is that even having the device in your line of sight decreases your capacity to empathize with that person. Don’t even have it on the table. Put it away. Get it out of your sight. To the extent that you can do that is going to be useful.

There are other things to think about for a setting. Are you in a crowded and loud spot where there is a lot of stimulation or a lot of visual stimuli? For example, I hate going to restaurants that have a TV even if I’m not a TV watcher because 9 times out of 10, I’m with someone who can’t not look at it. I understand that impulse, but it’s super frustrating. I’m like, “Don’t even put yourself in that setting if you’re trying to have a good conversation.” It’s thinking about things like that.

You also want to think about what you need as an individual. For example, if I’ve had 4 intense one-on-ones, by the 5th one, you’re not going to get much out of me. I’m too tired. Cognitively, I’m overtaxed. I can’t be present for the other person. It has nothing to do with them and everything to do with me. It’s figuring out whether your number is 4 or 2. Honestly, some days, it’s 1. Are you sick that day? Are you feeling under the weather? Is your child not sleeping? All of those things can affect you. The other piece is knowing for yourself as an individual, “What are the topics, people, or scenarios that I tend to tune out during?” I made that comment earlier about the person at the dinner party who is like, “They’re talking about sports,” and they tune out. That is me.

When people start talking about golf or cars, I’m like, “I’m going to get a drink right now. Does anyone else want a drink?” I’m wholly uninterested in those two topics. There are a lot of men especially who love talking about golf and cars. It sounds like that’s you for sports.

What can help there is to know that is the case, be aware of it, and then bring some intention into those conversations. We talked a little bit about curiosity before. Sometimes, on the face of it, you think, “That topic of cars or sports, I’m not interested in it. I can’t get curious about it.” What I have found is if you can attach it to the person and get curious about that person like, “Why are they so into cars? Why are they so into this sports team?” That can be an interesting way of getting into it because then, maybe you learn this has to do with a childhood relationship, a childhood adventure, or some kind of story that you’ve never heard before.

Get into the interests of another individual by attaching them to the person and being curious why they are into those things.

My husband is into college basketball. I still don’t know much about it, but what I can get excited about is when he tells me about the drama between coaches, player traditions, and rituals. That aspect is pretty interesting. I’m never going to follow the sport, but I can get interested in some part of that conversation.

There is psychology and humanity in everything. Especially in sports, there’s a lot of psychology and humanity in sports. I got to share a couple of things based on the things you said. In terms of reading the New York Times daily briefing that they send out, they shared a statistic, which was that 50% of a teenager’s time is in front of their phone. It’s not a couple of hours a day. It’s eight hours a day.

I want to share a couple of things that I tried to do to be more present. There’s a class I started going to on Friday mornings. I noticed that it was so easy for me to get distracted and look at my phone during the class even though I was interested in the particular class. I start leaving my phone in the car and not taking it with me. I’m so much freer and I enjoy that time so much, leaving it in the car. Meetup is not going to fall apart for that 45-minute class. That has been very helpful.

The second thing that I have started to do more of is it’s much healthier to stand at your desk than to sit at a desk. I found that my ability to listen is much greater when I’m sitting down than when I’m standing. When I’m standing, it’s higher energy. When I’m sitting down, I am able to be more present and focused on what the other person’s saying. I’m a little lower energy, which is important and non-interrupting. For example, when we’re talking, I’m sitting down. Whenever I’m the guest on a show, I’m always standing up. Whether one is sitting or one is standing, one’s posture can make a big difference for me in terms of being present.

The last thing I’ll share is something I love, which is that one of my kids is in a gap year program in Israel. During a lot of the day, they have a basket and all the kids throw their smartphones. When you even see the phone or see it in front of you, it has an impact. It’s amazing. Most teenagers have been asked the question, “Would you rather lose a limb or lose your phone?” The answer is, “Lose a limb.” A vast majority of the time, people prefer to lose a limb than the phone.

Having that phone there affects people. I love so many of the things that you said. Thank you so much. I have to ask you this. It’s not planned. Have you ever thought of being a therapist? In middle school, everyone divulged their innermost secrets to you. You’re all about listening. I’m shocked that you’re not a therapist.

It’s a yes. You are an astute observer. I have thought about it. Where there is overlap is I’m interested in people and getting to know them and going there in conversation. What I also enjoy is not having to go there every time. One of the chapters in my book is about rest and recovery from conversations. Anyone who does a lot of deep listening, whether you are a therapist, a podcast host, or in my case, a user researcher, or any role for which listening is a major part, it can be exhausting at the end of the day. I’m not even in that therapy role where I’m having potentially traumatic conversations. It still is exhausting even for topics like, “Let’s talk about the usability of a website.” It’s intense listening that can happen. I have thought about it, but maybe in a different life.

It could be a future career. There are some people in their 40s and 50s that are looking at doing something new. Let’s just say that I would sign up for you. You have so much wisdom. You’re incredible at what you do. I had to ask that question.

Thank you.

You mentioned rest and recovery. The word on the street is that you are publishing or working on another book called Rest, which I find shocking because it doesn’t seem like you rest very much. You do a lot. Perhaps it’s the shoemaker’s children who are going barefoot. Tell us about your research on the importance of rest and recovery, and healthy rest versus unhealthy rest. I’m sure there’s such a thing. I’d love to learn more. I’m curious.

I started to become interested in the topics initially in the context of listening that you have these potentially draining conversations. How do you recover from those? How do you reset? In the context of listening, a lot of it is about finding activities that are restful to you, whether that’s journaling or going for a run. It’s also making sure that you have relationships in your life in which you are not the sole listener but you are heard as well. It’s ensuring that even if you have therapist-like tendencies, you’re not always in that armchair therapist role. Someone is creating space for you as well. I wrote my book while I was partly on maternity leave during the pandemic. I was back at work from 9:00 to 5:00.

You did not get much rest.

I wasn’t resting. After publishing my book, I had my come-to-Jesus moment of, “This is not sustainable doing all of these things.” It is very much my nature and always has been, but it is probably not a good idea to be go-go-go all the time. That’s when I started to explore the topic of rest. One of the first things I realized was I decided, “I’m going to take time off. I’m going to maybe take 6 weeks to 8 weeks max away from the tech industry, recover, and then I’ll go back.” I quickly realized that not having that 9:00 to 5:00 does not mean that you’re resting or that you are getting well-rested.

Especially with a little child at home.

Exactly. I certainly had this idea, and it’s pretty common, that if you’re not working, you’re resting. It’s not true. That was what prompted my journey into understanding rest a little bit more deeply.

Watching TV, for example, can be restful. This is not for everyone, but for me. After I watch TV for a while, let’s say more than an hour, I don’t feel good about myself. I don’t feel necessarily more rested. I feel like I wasted a bunch of time. That’s me. Some people can feel rested or more restful. If I take a nap, for example, for 45 minutes, that’s rest. I feel great afterward. What’s healthy rest? What are some potentially less healthy resting things that one could be doing?

I’ll name a few. The thing I’ll say first though is that what you’re hitting on is rest is personal. That is a theme of the book. There are lots of rest techniques that you can take. It’s not one-size-fits-all. What works for one person will be not restful at all for another person potentially. In the case of things like watching TV, it’s generally not considered to be a positive rest practice. Usually, the way we use that is when we are tired but not ready to go to sleep or not wanting to go to sleep. There’s this term bedtime revenge procrastination.

The idea is when we’re busy during the day, we need a moment to ourselves. Even if it’s late and we’re tired, we’re like, “I deserve something. What do I deserve? Let me see what’s on Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, or whatever.” It’s easy to do that. It’s easy to look at your phone and disappear for what maybe feels like a few minutes, and then it’s an hour later. It’s late and you’re like, “Now, I need to go to bed.”

It’s a common practice. It’s not restful for a few reasons. It’s not restful because it pushes your bedtime back. You’re cutting in on sleep, which we know is truly restful. It’s not restful because devices are stimulating. The blue light from devices messes with your whole circadian rhythm. It’s not restful because that content can be activating. There are a whole bunch of reasons to not have that be part of your rest routine. What you replace it with becomes personal.

Naps can be great. Except if you have trouble sleeping, then you maybe don’t want to add a nap in the middle of the day because that is going to potentially make evening rest more difficult. For me, one of the things that I learned was how restful reading fiction is. I read a ton of fiction as a kid. I studied literature in college, and then I stopped reading it and only read non-fiction until fairly recently. I started getting back into fiction. I was like, “Why did I stop?” That is restful for me, with the exception if it’s a murder mystery or something. That’s too activating for me. If I’m trying to calm down, getting lost in a different world is useful. The book is filled with certain practices. Depending on your personality and what you’re interested in, there’s something for everyone.

I’m so excited to get it.

It’s out on September 26th, 2023.

We’ll have to have you back on. You also mentioned that you’ve gone through so many different stages in your life and different places that you moved. You mentioned earlier that Meetup has been somewhat helpful in those times. Can you share a little bit more about Meetup, how it could relate to listening, and how it could relate to rest? Any thoughts on that would be great.

For me, where Meetup has been most useful is thinking, “What is something that I’m interested in? How do I meet like-minded individuals?” I had an earlier career in the art world where I was working in an art gallery. I had done museum fellowships, and I was in a PhD program. I thought I would become a curator and then an academic. I realized that was not for me. I was interested in the tech world.

Those feel very different, art and tech. Luckily for me, there was a Meetup that was called Arts Tech NYC. It was the blending of those two things. When you’re in those transition moments, it’s almost like you can feel that you’re shedding the old skin and building a new one. You don’t necessarily know if you’re ready to turn your back on the old skin. You’re trying to figure out, “Is the new skin brand new, or do I get to keep some of the old stuff?” That was a space that felt like, “Maybe there is a way to have these two things merge.”

During moments of transition, it’s almost like you can feel you’re shedding an old skin and building a new one.

For me, it has always been a way of exploring and figuring out my interests and finding your people. Once you’re there, that’s when you get to practice all those listening things that we talked about. You’re like, “I’m in a room with a bunch of people I don’t know or who maybe I know from social media. Now, I’m going to make conversation and get to know them, understand them, and build some friendships, work relationships, or whatever it may be.”

That’s beautiful. You’re going to have to start a Meetup group for people who have written a book about listening and a book about rest. See if they could have both of those two skins. See if they could find their people as well. It may not be a big group, but if you find anyone else, that could be a great conversation.

It’s true.

I have to ask you quick Rapid-fire questions. Quick questions, quick answers. Here we go. When was the first time you saw yourself as a leader?

In high school, I was the editor of our yearbook. We were very intense about the yearbook. It was an award-winning yearbook. It was intense. That’s me. My nickname was the Red Pen.

If you could access a time machine and go anywhere you want at any time, where are you going and when?

I’m going to Paris when Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and all of these writers and artists are hanging out in the salons. Being around all that creativity would be very intimidating but also inspiring.

You can’t do that because it’s in the past, but you can do other things in the future. What is on your bucket list?

I’ve always loved traveling. I’ve spent time abroad. I would love to keep doing more of that after several years of the pandemic no-fly zone. Also, I’m especially feeling that travel itch. It is continuing to explore and probably learn more languages too. I speak French, Spanish, and English. I’ve always toyed around with, “Should I add Portuguese or so over something there?”

You can go to Brazil and Portugal and have a great time. This is the last question. What do you most want to be remembered by?

What motivates my work in the different forms that it has taken and maybe it will take, I’m always interested in knowledge sharing. I believe in not having to reinvent the wheel, and anything that moves the needle on helping you live a better life and make more connections. The small things that I’m learning motivate me to write and share. That’s what I’m here to do.

Something that strikes me is you love people. You are fascinated by people. It is so enjoyable having this conversation with someone who is so wise and inquisitive. All that listening is not just listening, but you integrate that into how you live. To me, that’s one of the most beautiful things. Thank you so much for being on the show. I feel more connected to you as well. I hope to continue the relationship. Thank you again.

Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.

—

I hope you enjoyed listening. Here are some of the takeaways. Ask broad questions and then get more specific. Choose your own adventure. Don’t necessarily jump right into one specific topic. I love that piece of feedback. The other thing I liked was the importance of asking what and how questions, open-ended questions, not just the yes-no. If you enjoyed this conversation, then subscribe and leave a review. Remember, let’s keep connected because life is better together.

Important Links

• Ximena Vengoechea
• Listen Like You Mean It

The post Episode 58 | Listen Up: How to Build Rapport appeared first on Meetup Blog.

Less than one year ago, Anthony Paul moved from Brooklyn to the Boston area without a single previous social connection. Today, he’s the organizer of the Cambridge “Finer Things” Culture Club, a Meetup group with more than 760 members! Anthony and David sit down to discuss the key elements behind this community’s meteoric rise and its place within a larger “human empowerment” movement. Topics include the often misunderstood connection between fulfillment and happiness, how to take small steps toward a big vision, and pursuing “edu-creation” as a path toward deeper friendships.

Show Notes

In this episode, we are talking to Anthony Paul. He’s the Organizer of the Cambridge “Finer Things” Culture Club in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also one of the most thoughtful people about what his role in the world is, what his talents are that he brings to the world, and how to combine those two together to build a meaningful, fulfilling life for himself and others. If that’s important to you, and I hope it is, enjoy our conversation.

—

Anthony Paul, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I am very grateful to be here and excited to chat with you.

I am grateful for your email. I’ve never done this in a show, but we’re going to do things a bit differently because you’re a different guy. I’m going to start with an email that you sent to me months ago after we chatted at a Meetup event. Here’s what you wrote, “I came to the conclusion that my moral obligation was to maximize my potential, and hopefully, in doing so, help others maximize their potential.”

“For so long, I spent too much of my life programming video games with the goal of making them high art. I didn’t spend enough time socializing. By starting my Meetup group, I too can continue to learn for the long term while meeting people, helping people, and enjoying my time.” Have you sent an email to the CEO of other companies and expressed your connection to what they do beforehand or was this a one-time thing?

Was I the one who wrote that? Are you sure that wasn’t someone else? I’m kidding.

That was good. You got me nervous. That was great.

I can abstract that answer because it’s not particular to CEOs, but a few years ago, after a lot of thought, I wanted to connect with people who I thought shared my value systems and where I wanted to go. I’m a very open-minded person, but I also knew that I couldn’t be a fish out of water. I’ve reached out to a lot of different people doing interesting things. They’ve been kind enough in a lot of cases to respond.

When I was at your Meetup, forgive me that I don’t remember what you said that necessarily caught my attention. I was like, “That’s a guy who’s thinking of the things that I’m thinking about.” You are aware to a degree of where I want to be. That email is like, “I’m going to state my intentions and let people know what I’m trying to achieve. If that resonates with them, great. If not, that’s cool too.” The things you said resonated with me. What’s neat is I read your book and you talked about people’s potential in your fictional press release. I didn’t know that when I wrote that to you. It’s a nice thread, so I sent the right email to the right person.

Thank you. I love that you do that because I get dozens of emails probably a day from people who I don’t know, and yours stood out to me as someone thoughtful, who wants to have a meaningful impact on this world, and who lives life to the greatest potential that they can. It was someone who finds Meetup to be such a helpful community-building platform for yourself and others.

I read and forwarded it to our internal team and said, “We have to talk to this guy. He sounds amazing.” I love the fact that you’ve done this with others as well. Is there another example of something that’s come from you sending an email out? Do any meaningful relationships or other relationships come from emails that you’ve sent out like this?

This gentleman was on about one of the most successful shows you could be on and he was somebody who would help people who were not particularly good people but worked with them. These people did not like him, but he wanted to understand and help them. In doing so, he helped turn around a lot of those people’s lives. I thought a person with that empathy was a person I want to connect with. He responded. I told him, “It was a tough time. I could use a friend now, you’re the person that I’d want to be friends with.” He was amazing.

What happened? Did you get on the phone and talk?

We eventually did. We talked about working on a game together. It didn’t come to fruition because we both got pulled in different directions but he is a great guy. There are examples like that. He’s doing great things and it helped to instill, “Let me keep connecting with those that have the values that I have and are trying to do big and important things.

This is a stranger perhaps, and to say, “I need a friend.” What do you lose? For many people, it’s hard to even verbalize that, let alone to someone that they don’t know.

In an ironic way, sometimes, I feel more connected to those who are trying to achieve big things. Once I’m in an ironic role reversal, I was the shy kid between myself and my brother. I would freeze up when people would talk to me. When I was introduced to Lawrence Taylor, the greatest football player ever with the Giants, my brother froze up and was shy. I was like, “I chat with you. You and I should connect, me and the greatest football player ever.” It’s weird where my insecurities end, but my confidence begins.

This is an incredible lesson that everyone can take from you for this. Be yourself. When you are yourself, it’s the best way to connect with others. Be proactive. Reach out to people. One of the terms that I hate more than any other term is, “That’s above my pay grade. This person is at different strata of society.” No one’s above your pay grade. No one’s at a different level of society.

We live in a world where anyone ideally should feel comfortable reaching out to anyone else, and I love it when people do. I hope that people will continue to do this to me, and thank you for doing so. Let’s go right into your Meetup group, Cambridge “Finer Things” Culture Club. Share a bit about the story. You founded it. Why you founded it? What happened after you founded it? I would love to hear about that.

I grew up in South Brooklyn, in the border of Bensonhurst and Borough Park. I felt I had grown out of where I was. I kept visiting the Boston area a lot. I loved it. I had a lot of things I loved about New York, and things I didn’t love about New York weren’t here. I’m like, “It’s a beautiful city with old architecture and great universities. It’s clean at the same time and has the great cobblestone floors. I’m moving here.” Finally, I upped and did it in April of 2022. The funny thing is people kept asking me, “Do you even know anybody out there?” I was like, “No. It would be a good idea.”

You knew no one, went up, and moved to Boston.

I went up and moved to Boston. I love the idea of being surrounded by these great universities. I had done Meetups before in New York, and it was great for me. I had a tough time. There are two great ones I’d love to shout out. There’s a Star Trek Meetup group that I was doing in New York, and they’re amazing. You should be speaking to them more than me, to be honest.

There was a New York City Scrum User Group, and I missed both of them dearly. I started joining Meetups here. A little funny story was that I was in a club setting, which was not my scene, but I was like, “I’ll do it.” I’ll do these different things. There’s this young woman. I walked to over to her and asked her, “Tell me, what’s your moral obligation to society?”

That’s some pickup line you got.

She’s looking at me like, “What?” I’m like, “Your moral obligation to society. You don’t think about that?” She goes, “I want to enjoy my drink,” which is the exact right answer to that question that I asked, but it clued me as, “Let me build the thing that I want to build.” I’m very big on efficiency in part because I have big goals. It’s like learn, collaborate, and create. This is the vision I have going in my head. I haven’t fully realized it yet, but it’s like, “Let’s get together with people so that we can learn. We then chat about the things that we learn about. That could tie into a creation.”

That leads to learning again. It’s a continuous loop.

Now, you’re building a community around that. There’s this thing in particular during the pandemic and even prior to that, when everyone was at each other’s throats for one reason or another. I read the apology again for the second time probably in a while. Socrates goes around explaining how he kept meeting people who knew things, but they didn’t know the things that they said that they knew things.

I want to live in a world where we’re aggressively, proactively learning that if we speak to others, we’re speaking to a place of knowledge. I have beliefs. Your brain has to make shortcuts on belief systems, but I don’t want to start preaching until I’m strong in my knowledge of different things. I’d love to help people have more shared understandings because history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

We must strive to live in a world where everyone is aggressively and proactively learning. This way, we can speak to a place of knowledge when talking to others.

That is one of my favorite quotes. It’s incredibly important to learn from our past. Learning from your past led you to create what group?

It’s one that’s curious, open, interested in aesthetics, and likes to create. Honestly, it’s also simpler than that too, which is what works about it. At the same time, I feel like going to this museum. If you want to join, come as you are.

You have a number of different types of events. Some are discussions and some are activities. I like that mix. Many groups are solely discussion-based and other groups are doing activity-based things. Talk about why you have the mix of events that you have and why that’s important for you.

I had this vision of learning things about early history progressing forward. One of the first discussions was the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is the earliest literature that I could find, and amazing how apropos it is now.

There are also incredible similarities between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible, Noah’s Flood. Parts of Noah’s flood are taken from something that had been written many years prior. It’s interesting to compare the two.

It’s great for people to know these things. I think it’s all of it. Its experiences, communication, and a lot of my background were how I envision running an academic summer camp program where it’s a combination of things. My next event is the logical conclusion of one of the bigger things I’m trying to do. I’m calling it Edu-create.” We’re going to pick a topic. In this case, it’s the history of music. Study that topic, discuss it, and create a video or something.

What I’m excited about there is we talk about Web3 and stuff. What if Web3 is the way of using technology, the lift, but still building that community? It’s almost like a blue ocean of digital content where it’s not me coming and creating content, but it’s this group that’s almost creating this network together. I’m realizing maybe that’s a direction of where I’m going.

I like that and I know many of your members do too. I heard that one of your members said that they wanted to create a hype house. What does that mean exactly? I think I know what it means. What does it mean that someone wanted to create a hype house?

You need to tell me because I still don’t know what a hype house is.

What I thought it meant is that they loved your group so much that they want potentially for you all to live near each other and be in close proximity to each other because having frequent events isn’t enough. They want to find a way to be part of this neighborhood community together.

Here’s the neat thing about that. I don’t know how much credit I should take for that. It seemed early on, people were very excited about this thing. People were telling me, “We’re excited about this thing.” I’m talking to other people. They’re excited about it too. There’s something about the algorithms that you put together though. You matched the right people.

Anthony, you have people of what ages? What’s the youngest age and what’s the oldest age person in your Meetup group?

It’s the entire gamut.

You have people in their ‘70s in the group. Is that right?

Yes.

Do you have people in there that are teens?

Probably early twenties, but not children.

This is good because our policy is you have to be 18. You have 20-year-olds and you have 70-year-olds in the same group that ultimately, potentially want to start living together. The first thing that intrigued me is that so much of America is bigger and better. We all need to have the SUVs, minivans, and giant subway sandwiches. Bigger is better, that’s America. It’s terrible.

You don’t believe that. You believe that smaller groups could be far more meaningful and there’s good reason for that. Some of your events are small and some are medium-sized. Can you talk a bit about the pros and cons of smaller-sized events and smaller conversations versus bigger ones? What do you prefer and why? Help our audience appreciate and understand that it’s not about going to an event with 200 people. Sometimes that event with 4 or 5 people can be far more powerful.

I’ll address your phrasing a bit. I don’t think smaller is better. Deeper is better. I love a good Super Bowl. If you do it with a lot of quality and depth, great. There’s a saying that runs through everything I do from being a programmer to being a game designer to processes. “The great designer knows he’s achieved perfection, not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.”

This is maybe my agile background to me. If you could facilitate a smaller group, you have fewer channels of communication. You could create more depth and meaningful conversations. As that broadens out, as a Meetup organizer, “Am I ready to scale?” I could say, “We’re in a growth phase right now on Meetup, but it’s not ready to scale to develop those meaningful connections.” I’ll work with anything. Let’s say I had 100 people. I would work to self-organize to break that down into smaller groups. It’s great. It’s cool. It’s a big group. We can make that work but breaking it down into smaller groups allows you to focus and rally around something.

I love that the focus is depth and size is just a means towards that. You could achieve depth either way, but it’s much easier to have a deeper, more meaningful conversation. The famous thing is you get 10 or 15 people in a room. Maybe the only thing they have in common is that they’re frustrated with the weather in some way, shape, or form. That’s not an interesting topic to talk about.

There are a lot deeper, more interesting topics. Also, unlike yourself, many people are more reluctant to talk about things that are deep and potentially private to them in much larger groups. In smaller groups, there’s a greater deal of comfort for talking to some people. Not a lot of people that are very comfortable talking to Hall of Fame football players.

I’m not as good with large groups immediately.

Many are like you.

In its clinical sense, I would be considered introverted. It doesn’t mean you don’t want to connect with people, though some might struggle with that more. It’s more of having a liberating structure to start facilitating and understanding the rules of engagement to make the connection. If I’m in a room in a place with 10,000 people, it’s I don’t even know where to start with this. If we’re dancing, I’m asking you what your moral obligations to society are. It’s setting that up.

Someone mentioned this to me in the Meetup and again, I got this from being at summer camps. I would start the Meetup and it was a subtle thing, “Let’s go around the room, introduce each other, and share a few facts for each other.” The first time I did that, a gentleman came up to me and said, “I want to thank you for that because it helped me get comfortable with the group.”

For the extroverted person, I don’t know enough to speak for them, it’s easy to jump in and make those connections. For other people, you need that connection point. Even a Lawrence Taylor example is, “I had a connection point. I watched you win the Super Bowl. I watch you recover a fumble in San Francisco.” It’s bridging that gap for people and having something other than talking about the weather.

I love the concept of the circle and people sharing things about themselves and people finding a way that they have a connection with that other person that shared something. It’s such a great best practice. Speaking of best practices, you have run dozens at this point of successful events. You’ve also been to other Meetup groups that didn’t run the way that you did. What other best practices would you be open to sharing? What other things do you do around your group around your event? I love for people to learn from you.

It’s double-sided. I don’t like to go through the motions with anything. A few subtle things come a long way in making people feel. You don’t take it seriously that it’s difficult to integrate, but you take it seriously enough that you care, and people feel cared for. It’s all the little things like introductions. If somebody came late and they’re trying to find you, it’s tracking them down and integrating them. It’s the things that you should do as a person if you take the responsibility of facilitating something.

I also perceive you as someone who’s not controlling per se. If you’re overly controlling, people can’t necessarily be themselves. Talk about the need for perfection and the need to control all the details in an event or a group. A lot of our organizers do have that natural inclination. What do you do to avoid that? What thoughts do you have that you could share with them?

Control the quality. Don’t control the people. I saw a similar group. I saw a gentleman. I’d like to reach out to this person, who was posting frustrations about things along the nature of, “If you RSVP and you don’t show up, it’s a strike against you,” and getting upset that people who might not show up RSVP. This is valuable. First of all, go to events, sign up for events, and realize that you have a life the same way other people have lives. Nobody owes you anything. The things come up. It’s low friction to click RSVP. Understand that they’re not committing so much. Relax.

That’s empathy. It’s saying, “Let’s understand that things do come up.” Let’s try not to get frustrated at the person, but let’s appreciate the fact that it’s low friction to RSVP and high friction to show up. We want as many people to show up as we can but we understand sometimes when people don’t.

It’s okay if somebody wakes up and says, “I’m not feeling it that day.”

Anthony, it seems to me that what you are quite good at practicing not being judgmental. As a Meetup organizer, you’re not judging the people. You’re looking to help people, collaborate with people, meet people, and connect with people. I felt judged in my life. I’m sure you felt judged in your life. When people can feel judged, it’s never a good feeling. You exemplify that.

You’ve had quite a few events even though your group has only been around for months. Is there a story that you could share around a challenge that someone had without the name of the person or with initials that could be helpful for people to learn from?

I didn’t know what to expect. I came in without expectations. As I mentioned, there were a lot of older folks who showed up. One woman said, “You filled a need. The people here age out very quickly. At 26, you’re aged out.”

That’s in Boston specifically.

“There isn’t a place for us. You filled this need.” That made something that I could do to enjoy. I have these big thoughts but at the same time, there was no pressure but added a level of obligation to it for me. I took a break for a month or so, which is a good idea. If you don’t want to do something, don’t do it. Don’t go halfway on something. A couple of people called me and one half-jokingly said, “You abandoned the group.” I’m like, “It’s been a month.”

At the same time, it made me realize that this means something to people. Small things could have big effects on people. You have no idea. If you do put this together and people are showing up, you might have more of an impact on people than you know. That’s not just with Meetup. It’s every interaction. Be careful about your interactions with people because you don’t know how to move someone in the right direction.

Thank you for sharing that. I think about Meetup and what you did. It makes me think about how we essentially democratize leadership. Anyone could become a leader of a Meetup group, and the impact that you have had on many people is amazing. Let’s also talk about the impact that this group has had on you.

For me, it’s the best way I know how to make friends. I wouldn’t have any friendships up here if I didn’t put this together. My friendships revolve around doing stuff. “Let’s work. Let’s create something. It tied in nicely with that for me. I can think very big and ambitious, but the man that moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. This was a low-pressure thing I put together. When I saw a group forming around it, and now I’m seeing the possibilities, it’s like, “This is something I could start small with because I didn’t have this huge ambition. Now, I could build and learn off of this.”

Before we go and move to rapid-fire, I do have one last question. You referenced my book earlier on. I have to ask, is there a particular takeaway aside from the one you referenced that in terms of future perspective that resonated for you in terms of Decide and Conquer? If so, I’d love to hear that.

There is a lot. Allow me to pitch your book for you, if I may. I’ve been reading books like this. I have a vision for what I want to do in building teams and groups. If you’re familiar with the book Culture Code, that is a book that’s more case study driven. Your book is one biographical long case study, which has a nice different take on what I’ve read before.

I had read a lot of great case studies, but here’s something that we could go a bit deeper and more anecdotal. I found that to be strong and I mean that sincerely. It’s not because we’re in the room talking to each other. I was very happy when I read the book, and I have too many takeaways to be able to articulate them now.

Thank you, Anthony. We’ll have to set up another time and I’d love to hear any takeaways for version two, maybe the book one day. We’ll see. We’re going to get to a segment now, which is rapid-fire, quick questions and quick answers, and go from there. First question, when is the first time, Anthony, that you saw yourself as a leader?

Always.

When you were three years old and all the other kids were hanging around with you at the playground?

when I was five, I knew I was different from the other kids. I already knew I had a way of wanting to do things a certain way. In school, that would end up naturally becoming like, “What do we do? I got a vision. Let’s go with it.”

You were organizing a playgroup at 5 or 6 years old at what people would be doing.

It wouldn’t be playgroups, but if there’s a group assignment, I did notice people would look to me. For whatever reason, whether I should have or shouldn’t have, I had a vision. I was going to go my own way and hopefully, people will follow.

You have gone your own way and people are following. Your vision was present. The next question is, if you access a time machine and go to any place in the world at any point in time, where would you go and when?

Here.

No one has ever given that answer. It’s the ultimate answer.

This is the greatest time in human history, despite all of the challenges. My grandfather suffered through the great depression and was forced to fight on the wrong side of World War II. I have it pretty good.

Name one thing on your bucket list.

I want to meet the Coach of the New York Giants from years ago, Bill Parcells, to thank him. I learned a lot about leadership from watching the way he approached things.

He’s an incredible leader. Winner of how many Super Bowls?

Two. One of them was not a very good team, relatively. Here’s the thing I take away. He treated everyone differently because he understood that different people had different needs. When I was a kid, it didn’t mean anything, but it resonates a lot with me now.

The last question is, what do you most want to be remembered by?

Hopefully, people have bettered their lives in some way, and I could help them with that.

Let’s repeat the sentence. You sent me an email, “I came to the conclusion that my moral obligation was to maximize my potential. Hopefully, in doing so, help others maximize their potential as well.” It seems you’re doing all the things that give you meaning. When you’re able to do something that gives you meaning, that’s the ultimate basis for happiness, and it’s great.

I’m glad you mentioned that because I don’t think you aim for happiness. You aim for fulfillment and that’s something people are sadly missing and don’t realize it. When you’re focused on your happiness, it’s hard to obtain that. If you focus on fulfillment, that’s a different thing. That underlines what I want to do with this group.

When you’re focused on your happiness, it’s hard to obtain that. If you focus on fulfillment, that’s a different thing.

I have no doubt that with all the things that you do, all the ways that you help many people, and the many decades that you have in front of you, you are going to be helping thousands of individuals and hopefully, in that process, gain enlightenment and growth for yourself and for those who you love. Thank you much, Anthony, for being on the show. I enjoyed it tremendously. I look forward to continuing the conversation in the weeks and months ahead as well.

If I may, I’m not worthy of the praise, but I’ll try to live up to it. I have a lot of gratitude for you doing this. As I said, I read books from leaders and to have one say, “I’d like to chat with you,” take their time to do it,” I appreciate it. Thank you very much, David. It was a pleasure.

Thank you.

—

Thanks for reading our episode with Anthony Paul. You never know, you could be bumping into someone in the street that is an Anthony Paul. You could be starting up that conversation in a coffee shop with an Anthony Paul. Find those people. There are special people out there, and he certainly is one of them.

Some takeaways are it’s about fulfillment, not necessarily only about happiness, control, and quality of experiences, not necessarily try to control the people. It’s about the depth of the conversation, not the size and the number of people that are there. Finally, my favorite quote is, “You move a mountain in one rock at a time.” If you enjoy the show, please leave a review. Subscribe and remember, let’s keep connected because life is better together.

—

I have something important to share. Check on my new book, Decide and Conquer to get to know my story at Meetup. You know the hardest thing about community leadership is making tough decisions when the stakes are high. I’ll tell you, they were never higher than when Meetup was owned and sold by WeWork.

In my new book, Decide and Conquer, I’ll walk you through a counterintuitive framework for decision-making and the epic journey of Meetups, surprising survival. Good leaders deliberate. Great leaders decide. Order my book by visiting DecideAndConquerbook.com or anywhere books are sold. Think you’ll like it.

Important Links

• Cambridge “Finer Things” Culture Club
• Lawrence Taylor
• New York City Scrum User Group
• Decide and Conquer
• Culture Code
• WeWork

About Anthony Paul

Less than one year ago, Anthony Paul moved from Brooklyn to the Boston area without a single previous social connection. Today, he’s the organizer of the Cambridge “Finer Things” Culture Club, a Meetup group with more than 760 members! Anthony and David sit down to discuss the key elements behind this community’s meteoric rise and its place within a larger “human empowerment” movement. Topics include the often misunderstood connection between fulfillment and happiness, how to take small steps toward a big vision, and pursuing “edu-creation” as a path toward deeper friendships.

The post Episode 57: How to Prioritize Fulfillment appeared first on Meetup Blog.

Dr. Marisa G. Franco is a psychologist, an interdisciplinary professor at the University of Maryland, and a top writer on Psychology Today. In her new best-selling book, Platonic, she shares her expertise in the subtle art and social science of adult friendship. Marisa and David sit down to discuss the value of platonic relationships, and why they ought to be treated with as much care and responsibility as romantic relationships. Their conversation ranges from teachable friendship skills (like intention-setting and follow-through), the alchemy of mixing different groups of friends, how to not confuse conflict with combat, and more.

Show notes

In this episode, we are talking to Dr. Marisa G. Franco. She’s a psychologist, a professor at the University of Maryland and the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Platonic. She’s a true expert in adult friendship. If you care about that, which I know each of you does, read intently.

—

Dr. Marisa G. Franco, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me here. It’s such a pleasure.

You have been a friend of Meetup for a while. You hosted a Meetup Live with over 4,000 RSVPs. Thousands were listening to it afterward on YouTube. You’re a top writer on Psychology Today and other places on adult friendships. You’re the author of the blockbuster New York Times bestselling book, Platonic. There’s a huge success with Platonic. I’m so happy for you on it. I have to ask to get us started. My understanding is that you use Meetup as well. I would love to hear a little more about that.

I was in Mexico City. I wanted to connect with people. I knew it doesn’t happen organically. I have to put myself out there as a friendship expert. I don’t wait for it to happen. I attended a Meetup group. That was a good idea because when you attend a Meetup group, you are self-selecting into a group of people that are ready to meet people. Your chances of success of connection are so much higher. I attended this language exchange. It was Spanish speakers and English speakers. I met a guy there, Jose. I brought my friend David. We all ended up going to Lucha libre at the end of the week. There were eight of us at the Lucha libre match. I had met some of them from going to that one Meetup event.

I always have believed that the absolute best use case for Meetup and there are many, is when someone is new to a city. It’s your journey. When people focus to the extent that you have on friendships and building friendships, were friendships easy? Were they challenging as a kid? How were they as young adults? I feel like there has to be a story or experience in there based on what you do.

I almost say proudly I was mediocre at friendship before I wrote Platonic because when it comes to friendship, you have the skills or you don’t and you have to be a natural when it’s a learned skill. That’s why I wrote Platonic. What inspired me to write the book was that in my young twenties, I went through this breakup. I decided to start this wellness group with my friends where we are practicing wellness together as a way to heal from grief. We were cooking, meditating and doing yoga. It was life-changing for me. It wasn’t the yoga or the cooking. It was the community and being in a community with people I love who loved me every week.

It made me question some of the beliefs that I had about romantic love versus friendship that I felt were contributing to that grief, “Romantic love is the only love that matters. Your worth is dependent on whether you have a romantic partner. If you don’t have romantic love in your life, you don’t have any form of love.” I looked around at my friends and I was like, “Why doesn’t this love matter? Why isn’t this significant?” I wrote Platonic because I felt like we had such an entrenched hierarchy of love and platonic love was always at the bottom. I wanted to be part of the culture change in leveling that hierarchy.

How big was that community? Was it 3 or 4 people? Was it 8 to 10 people?

There were six of us.

It’s important to recognize that it doesn’t have to be 10 to 15 close loving friends. It could be 1, 2 or 3 even and that makes all the difference. Was the relationship between the six of you relatively tight between all members of the group? Was it more that you had a tight relationship with each of the six? Meaning, how important is it to have that web of friendship versus the one-on-one type of relationship?

For anyone that might want to start such a group, one thing that I did to make it less intimidating is I approached one friend first, Heather. When she was down for it, we were both co-leading. It’s scary because you’re afraid of rejection but once you spread out the rejection, it’s a lot easier. Whenever I want to initiate something new, I always try to get buy-in from one person to do it with me. If you each have one person, you have enough people to already create this group.

Each of us was friends with the other but the group made us so much closer to each other. It gave us a group identity. It became normalized for us to all hang out as a group whereas before, we hung out sporadically with each individual. When you have a group, you feel the network of support. Even when you have a need, you can ask the entire group. Whoever has the capacity to give it at any given time can give it to you versus having to rely on one person. The research finds that if you do have more of a group where your friends know each other, then your friendships are more likely to maintain because at that point, one person in the group could reach out and everybody stays connected.

When there’s some event, you all see each other automatically. It’s not only on you to try to get each of those relationships together. Sometimes there’s an interesting dynamic that occurs. This has happened in my life and also my kid’s life where you introduce two people. You were friends. Somehow they end up becoming even closer friends than you were. Sometimes that’s hard for people because when you have that group dynamic of 6, 7 or 8 people, it’s important not to have ego be a basis to that because sometimes that can hurt group dynamics. Feel free to share more on that.

Here’s the other thing I’ve learned about mixing friends. I have my very close friends and then my low-dose friends. We love each other at low doses once a month. One of the hazards of introducing friends can be this. If they become friends but you’re not in control, you might have to see each of these people all the time. Are you ready to see both people all the time? I’m going to mix the friends that I know I want to stay close to and that I don’t mind seeing all the time and be intentional about whom I mix. There’s a bit of art to friend mixing. You have to think through it a little bit and not do it haphazardly or automatically.

Here’s one more question about your experience. When you first had that romantic breakup, I don’t know if that was devastating or difficult but you probably had no idea what that would open up for you and how that would dramatically change your life. It’s such a great example for our readers. We have all seen in life that things that were the most devastating or challenging experiences could end up changing our career trajectory and life trajectory. One time after another, I keep hearing stories like that.

It helped me realize that for every loss, there is an offering. Going from losing a romantic relationship to being single made it sound like I was losing connection but we know from the research, for example, that single people spend more time with friends. They tend to have higher-quality friendships. In some ways, being single is the jackpot of friendships. If you have a vacuum of connection in your life, it’s not that they will be emptiness. Other types of relationships have room to fill that space. As we go through life transitions, it’s important to recognize that every loss also has an offering and figure out what that is.

Research has shown that single people who spend more time with friends tend to have higher quality friendships. With that, in some ways, being single is the jackpot of friendships.

First of all, I’ve heard the concept has an opportunity but I love the verbiage. Every loss has an offering. Talk about that word and why you’re using that word versus other words that could be used.

It feels like a more emotional and spiritual word. There’s something spiritual about loss and the identity change that comes with it. We come to know ourselves more deeply and change some preconceptions that we had about what we need to have a happy and fulfilling life. There’s this deep recalibration that’s happening that feels spiritual to me in the way that it feels transcendent. It feels bigger than you. It feels like it connects you to meaning and purpose. That’s why the term offering in particular resonates with me.

It feels so much more proactive that you could do something about it and make an offering. In your writing, both in Platonic and other writing as you’ve done a lot of writing, which is wonderful for fans like me, you talk a lot about good friendships and bad friendships. Oftentimes people think of the term friendship as a good thing. All friendships are good but it’s not true.

Some friendships could not be good. I don’t know if they would be called friendship or not. How do you know if you’re in a bad friendship? There’s the concept of breaking up with a friend. Help people to understand a little bit more about a bad friendship because you don’t want to end it too quickly. All friendships have dynamics where there are some good parts and challenging parts. Share with us a little more on that.

I was at a friend’s wedding. My friend’s husband had his bachelor party. Half of his friends canceled last minute. Everyone had to pay $1,000. He was talking about these friends that he was trying to keep in touch with. At that moment, I was like, “That’s not friendship. That’s good company, not good friends.” Good company is people you like and enjoy spending time with them but friendship is an investment and a responsibility like, “I’m going to show up for you in those times and follow through. I’m going to be there for your happy moments and sad moments.”

It’s intended. It’s effort. It’s not just liking who someone is. We need to remember that so that we can hold ourselves accountable to our friends because a friendship is a relationship like any other. You need to try and put in an effort. I come up against the ways that we sometimes dichotomize intimacy so much that we think, “In a romantic relationship, this is what you do to be intimate. In a friendship, this is what you do to be intimate.”

To be honest, there’s a lot more overlap than there are differences. You probably wouldn’t want to cancel on your romantic partner last minute if you were going on a special vacation. You don’t want to do the same thing to your friends. There is this transferrable property to intimacy. We can use the skills that we learned in one relationship to help us get better at the other.

I believe that if you practice some of the principles that are in Platonic, it will directly help in your romantic relationships as well. It’s an important message to understand. I think about my best friend. My best friend is my wife. How important is “friendship” when it comes to marriage? We’re on the topic. I thought I would love to hear more about that too.

It’s beautiful that your spouse is your best friend. From a research perspective, it’s a good idea because being married gives us a bump in our mental health but being married to your best friend increases how much your marriage will improve your well-being exponentially. Sometimes people don’t choose to be in romantic relationships with people that they wouldn’t be friends with. They’re in a relationship with them but they wouldn’t want to be friends with them.

The research shows us that being friends with your partner and feeling like you have that sense of friendship is related to how long the relationship lasts. It’s even related to how good your sex is. It’s funny that we always dichotomize platonic and romantic love when platonic love is part of the foundation for what makes romantic love succeed. That’s great and important. The only thing that I sometimes see that I try to push back against is that we have this narrative that one person should fulfill everything.

That’s dangerous.

That’s a narrative that hurts people in relationships because you’re putting too many expectations on one person. They can’t possibly live up to them. Whatever you do to improve your mental health improves your spouse’s mental health. We know that people that make friends outside of their relationship not only are less depressed but their spouse is less depressed too.

Whatever you do to improve your mental health improves your spouse’s mental health.

Generally, I don’t want there to be tension between platonic and romantic love. I want us to understand. If you’re in a relationship, it benefits your relationship with both people. Find friends outside of your relationship. It’s not like, “You’re spending time with your friends. You’re not spending time with me.” It’s like, “You’re spending time with your friends. Now, we can have more quality time together.”

Some of your close friends love skiing. If your significant other does not love skiing, that’s okay or whatever thing out there. Skiing is an example of potentially dozens of things. People are complex. They have so many different parts to them. I do see frustration among my friends at times that their significant others are not into certain things that they’re into. It’s so myopic perhaps and dangerous in a relationship to put that kind of pressure. There should be some commonalities but it’s okay to even have significant areas of passion and interests that are very different from a significant other.

I hope that instead of those differences feeling like, “This means we’re not compatible,” they mean, “I know that I want to find friends that also share those interests with me.”

There’s something incredibly special about the friends that I’ve had since elementary school and high school. I put a lot of effort into maintaining those long relationships maybe because it’s almost like family and because of the history there. Sometimes I put perhaps even too much of an emphasis on that to the extent that I might even deprioritize closer friends or make new friends. Do you have a perspective on old long friends? Is it important to put this perhaps even pressure on me to maintain those relationships even if we have gone in different ways or not?

It makes me think of this relationship model by a researcher named Rusbult. It’s Rusbult’s relationship model. What the model gets at is that sometimes we think the only reason we stay in a relationship is how satisfied we are in that relationship but three factors predict whether we stay in a relationship, only one of which is how satisfied we are. The other is, “Do we see us having alternatives?” If people have a friend from childhood, they feel like, “I can’t make any new friends.” They’re likely to keep that friendship even if they’re not as satisfied with it but the third thing is how much investment have you put intents for the relationship already.

People weigh how much history we have as a very significant factor in terms of determining whether they want to continue the relationship. It’s a resource because people you have a history with expose you to sides of yourself that have become buried as you’ve gotten older. They remind you of who you were. Being able to reminisce with someone improves our mental health and feelings of connection. You’re traveling without leaving the space together. While I don’t think investment alone if there’s no satisfaction in the relationship is enough to keep you in, it’s also okay to acknowledge that this is part of the glue of our relationship. That’s okay. That’s even to be expected.

I’m glad to hear it. I don’t know if my old friends are glad to hear it because I keep trying. Reminiscing is so powerful. It’s the amount of joy I get in sitting down with someone and talking about things that happened in the past. First of all, the reason why reminiscing for me is particularly helpful is I find reminiscing at times to also be reflective. You think about where you were back then and where you are now. You potentially could think about where you want to go. You think about where you’ve worked on yourself or where you are not as strong as you would like to be. For me, reminiscing does help to accomplish that as well.

It’s interesting. If you think of it that way, it’s almost like a marker of your success or your progress too.

That potentially is nice depending on the situation. Conflict is healthy. Too much conflict is potentially not healthy depending on the situation. Every friendship has tiny conflicts, “I thought we were going to get together. You showed up fifteen minutes later than I expected.” That’s a tiny conflict. There are enormous conflicts that exist in friendships as well. I would love to hear insight about the value of conflict in friendships, good conflict, challenging conflict and anything around how conflict potentially could be a basis for also enriching friendships.

This was the biggest growth area for me. Before writing Platonic, I was like, “I’m going to try to get over it and be okay.” That’s what it means to be a good friend. It’s to try to get over it on your own. I read this study that found that having open empathic conflict contributes to more intimacy. I’ve read the research that finds that people that value relationships address conflict directly rather than trying to ignore it. The people that constructively address conflict are more popular.

It started to lead me to question some of my assumptions about conflict. I was a confusing conflict with combat, “If I bring up an issue, it’s going to be a fight. It’s going to be antagonistic.” I should have realized because I had to learn this in romantic relationships that there’s another way. Conflict doesn’t have to be combative but we so rarely are upfront about issues within friendships that sometimes it feels like we can catastrophize it. It took me learning how to do conflict with friends, which involves framing, which means you bring this up and say, “I’m bringing this up because I love you and I want to make sure nothing gets between us.”

That context setting is so important.

You use I statements like, “I felt hurt about this.” Your perspective take is, “What was going on for you at that time?” You ask for your needs, “In the future, maybe we can handle it this way. What do you think?” It’s more like a reconciliation and a coming together than it is an attack. I don’t want to use the word toxic because I feel like it’s overused but it was a bit toxic for me to be ignoring conflict. I thought that by ignoring it, it would go away but instead, by ignoring it, I would withdraw from people and not even give them a chance. Sometimes I had a problem with someone that wasn’t true or there was some extenuating circumstance going on. I was holding people guilty before giving them a trial.

I talk about attachment theory. Out of all the different ways that you could be anxiously attached, this was the one I was most anxiously attached to, which means I feared rejection and abandonment. I felt like if I bring this up, this person is going to leave me or abandon me. It’s understanding there’s a possibility that this could make us closer. Your prediction of how this could go has to be positive to will you to do it and do it in a way where you’re not attacking someone because if you assume they’re going to attack you and reject you, you’re going to go in with that aggressive energy.

I had a friend. She’s a very close friend. I invited her to my book launch for Platonic and she never responded. I drove in for her wedding and bridal shower and flew in from Portugal for her bachelorette party. I was like, “This has hurt me that our relationship has existed at these different levels of investment. You’re such a loving friend in so many ways but I haven’t felt like there have been similar levels of effort. I want to let you know because I want us to be able to work through this and stay close.”

She said the most loving message in response, “I’m so sorry. I love you so much. This is not an excuse but this is what’s going on in my life. I want you to know how much I’ve been rooting for you even if I couldn’t be there physically. Thank you so much for bringing this up.” Honestly, I felt healed. It was beautiful. I realized that there are some forms of healing in relationships that you can’t do alone. You need it to be a relational process of healing. Otherwise, it’s still going to be there.

If you meditated on that relationship, it would not have been the same frankly as if you had that discussion. Have you had those discussions with someone else in the past? They didn’t react the right way. I imagine the best approach is to continue or recognize, “This is not going to a good place. It’s time to shut this down.” It doesn’t always turn out the way that it turned out with you. I’m sure you’ve had examples where it hasn’t turned out that way. Can you share an example of where it didn’t turn out and what you did in that situation?

I have a friend. She goes into fight or flight mode in conflict. I realized that sometimes when people do that, we think that’s who they are but when you’re hijacked and in fight or flight mode, I don’t think that’s who you are. Your brain is being hijacked. You’re in a state of red.

In a time of stress, that hopefully is only a small percentage of how you are.

I didn’t address that conflict in the best way either. I’ve learned this too with conflict. It’s helpful to go and ask questions if there’s any ambiguity rather than assuming your perception as the truth, “What happened in this situation?” Instead of, “I felt hurt that you did this but what was going on for you?” There were things that I did wrong too. It didn’t go well. There was no perspective taking happening. It was like, “This is my point. This is your point.”

I talked to a friend about it. She was like, “If you still feel uncomfortable, the conflict isn’t over. It’s still there.” You almost have to go back in the second time. I had to think about what am I going to do the second time to make this better. I was wanting to go and de-escalate or repeat back what she says, acknowledge her perspective and say, “This is what I feel is true. This is how I contributed to this issue,” while not folding on what I needed as well.

I did that in the second conflict. She was still pretty reactive but at some point, I took a step back and made a comment on our dynamic. I said, “It feels like I’m trying to perspective take and understand your perception. I don’t feel like I’m getting that same effort from you.” She realized that it was happening because she didn’t even realize that it was happening. That changed the course of the argument where she was like, “I don’t want to be like my dad. I know he does that all the time. I do want us to be able to talk about things and bring things up.”

Before I did it, it felt very masochistic to be like, “I know that this is going to be hard but here I am jumping back into the fire.” I learned that you can influence people in conflict. You can’t determine how someone reacts but if you try to de-escalate, affirm them and tell them, “I love these things about you even while we have this thing that stresses out.” Be responsive to them, “I didn’t respond well in this way. I want to own that.” Those are the things that can hopefully pull some out of that fight-or-flight mode a little bit.

You have a lot of fodder for Platonic part two whenever that comes out. Hopefully, it will at some point. I want to get to something that you do as well in your day job, which is working with companies. You’ve talked and written a lot about the employee myth and employees’ feeling of belonging to each other and the company. That myth is broken in potentially irreparable ways but it’s to be decided.

What are some of the ways in which you’re working with companies? What are some of the things you’re seeing about the relationship that companies have with employees, which has probably changed quite dramatically, especially with your employees coming into the office every day, especially in the tech space? Share a little bit more about that and friendships among employees.

Remember, some CEOs have gotten into trouble. They say, “We’re a family. Meetup is a family.” You’re not a family because if you were a family, you can’t fire a family. Let’s not say those things that are absolute mistruths but we can say that we have a community, belonging, friendships and relationships. Share a little bit more about that. I would love to hear data about the importance of friendships and relationships vis-à-vis companies as well.

The employee myth is the term I use to describe how we think we get to work. Our fundamental human needs are gone. Being an employee replaces our humanness. We can clock away at the computer. We don’t need to feel belonging or connection with people. We know from the research that this is untrue. For example, lonelier employees are more likely to miss work. They report poorer performance at work. When people are friends, their teams perform better. They’re more creative, innovative and likely to stay in their job.

We think that when we’re at work, our fundamental human needs are gone. They’re not. This is called the Employee Myth.

For all of the outcomes that companies want, a connection is so important to achieving them. There was one study that looked at different factors that relate to workplace fulfillment. A connection was number one. It’s the most important. It’s people feeling like they’re valued. They have good relationships. They belong somewhere. Even if people are doing jobs that they love, if they don’t feel valued, respected and connected, they’re going to leave those jobs because for us, being disconnected is a chronic state of stress. That’s what loneliness is.

It’s going to impede your happiness no matter how much you love the work you’re doing. It’s going to impede your mental health, your physical health and your ability to do the job because you’re not feeling good. You’re not feeling optimal. You’re feeling like you’re in a stress state. That is why I feel like it’s so important for companies to think about how they can create connections among their employees. Google, for example, starts its meetings with highs and lows where people share the high points of their week or low points of the week.

What is important is that people stop talking about work. There’s a study that found that the more time you spend together at work, the less you feel. What might be happening is that people aren’t their real selves. When you’re interacting in a role repeatedly over time, you feel more inauthentic. Giving people the latitude to be their real selves, it’s doing relational skills like affirming people.

These companies will send you things for your birthday or a gift card. They will do a virtual lunch, things like that or a retreat with all these fun activities. There’s this term repotting, which is changing the settings in which you interact, which contributes to connection. Workplaces and employees are trying to meet up with their friends at work outside of work, “Let’s go for a walk together. Let’s go to this museum together.” When companies do retreats, what benefits them is their relationships are usually repotted. You’re in a different setting that encourages less formality.

Those are some ways that we can bring our human side to work. I’m very focused on it because I teach. I know that for Gen Z, the rates of mental health issues are half of them. I meet the criteria for mental health issues. I also do things like every week, we have a photo share where everyone shares photos that represent fun facts about them and then my appreciation hat. In one class someone brings in a gift to give to someone whose appreciation or contribution they appreciated in that class time.

I’m a professor too. I teach at Columbia University. I teach entrepreneurship and strategy. As one professor to another, I have to ask. Tell everyone about the name of the course first. Start with that.

It’s called the Loneliness Crisis Origins and Solutions.

Is that under psychology or sociology? What department would that be put under?

It’s the honors program. It’s interdisciplinary.

The University of Maryland has an excellent honors program. I have quite a few friends that are in that as well. Do you think many of the students are taking that for their needs and interests?

Absolutely. Unfortunately, Gen Z is the loneliest generation we have ever had.

You’re seeing that many of the students are taking it. They want to practice what they’re learning as opposed to purely academic reasons.

To be honest, I’m trying to change society through the course. I teach two courses. In one of them, everyone became friends. The others didn’t hang out outside of class. I was trying to figure out what the difference is. I realized that one of my classes had someone that I call an igniter. The igniter turns to everybody and says, “Does anyone want to have lunch after class?”

By extending that invitation, many more people feel connected because that one person was willing to ask. They create this infrastructure of connection. Everyone who starts a Meetup group is an igniter. My goal is, “Can we create more igniters or people that are taking it upon themselves to create these infrastructures for connection?” That’s what I hope the course will do.

To connect it to companies, we have an employee at Meetup. I won’t say his last name but his name is Trevor. He is our cultural igniter. He will send messages in Slack, “I’m going to play volleyball. Who wants to join? We’re going to have board games this afternoon. Who wants to join?” He’s an amazing engineer but on a whole other level, he is this cultural igniter that has a meaningful impact on the rest of the company. As hirers of talent, which all companies do, hiring igniters can have such an enormous impact on driving culture and success in the company more so even than a CEO or a Head of People because it comes from the people as opposed to coming top-down.

I’m trying to formalize the igniter role and I haven’t had so much success. I was like, “You don’t have to write this paper if you want to be the classic igniter.” They’re so afraid of rejection. I’m experimenting with, “How do you create an igniter?” Like what I said about connection, you can create things. People aren’t born this way. I’m trying to figure that out. Maybe next time I’ll tell you what my observations are.

There are certain inclinations. Igniters are going to be more extroverted than introverted. They’re going to be more organized. They value relationships but those are things that can be learned. I’m intrigued to hear more. Quick questions, quick answers. Here we go. When was the first time you saw yourself as a leader?

In high school, I was part of a group called the Adventure Crew. We dog-sledded and did camping trips, ski trips and cabin trips. I was the president of the adventure club. That was it.

It’s a shocker that you became focused on friendship when you were the igniter already in high school on your adventure club. That’s amazing. If you could access a time machine and go anywhere you want at any time you want, where are you going and when?

My favorite author is a Black intellectual named Bell Hooks. She passed away in the last couple of years but her book All About Love taught me what love is. She says, “Love is helping someone express their deepest self and the essence of who they are.” Thinking of love like that changed my life. I would try to have lunch with Bell Hooks.

What is on your bucket list? You’ve done so many things. What is still left on that bucket list for you? It could be personal or professional, whatever you prefer.

I would love to live abroad again.

Where did you live before?

I’ve lived in Trinidad and Tobago and Haiti. My dad is from Italy. He sent us to live with our family when I was younger. I’ve studied abroad in Florence. The home base will be DC but I want to live abroad.

You’ve done so much and you’re going to be doing so much more inevitably. What do you most want to be remembered by?

I’m not sure but I want to feel like I did when I was out at a social event. Someone came up to me and they were like, “Dr. Franco, I know your work. It’s transformative for me. It’s the reason that I’m here at this social event.”

If you could save one person, there’s a saying that you could save the world. That is a great example because that’s one person that was at that event that built the confidence, the tools and the skillset because of what they have heard and read from you. The beauty of it is that there are hundreds of thousands of people that have done the same. You may not know who they are but they’re out there. It’s a beautiful thing what you do. Thank you so much for sharing it with Meetup. We appreciate your continued friendship at Meetup and also sharing with people how helpful Meetup is for many people who are looking to grow friends.

Thank you so much for creating Meetup. The impact you have is vast. It impacted me too. I appreciated this conversation.

—

Thank you for reading this episode with Marisa G. Franco. There are so many takeaways. I’m going to share a few. Here are some golden nuggets. There’s a big difference between someone who’s good company and someone who’s good friends. Focus on good friends, the importance of igniters and the multiplicative impact that an igniter can have in a company or a friend group, the importance of platonic love and how it makes romantic love ultimately succeed and the saying that every loss has an offering. I hope that was an offering for each of you. If you enjoyed this, then please subscribe, leave a review and remember. Let’s keep connected because life is better together.

—

I have something important to share. Check out my new book, Decide and Conquer, to get to know my story at Meetup. The hardest thing about community leadership is making tough decisions when the stakes are high. They were never higher than when Meetup was owned and sold by WeWork. In my new book, Decide and Conquer, I’ll walk you through a counterintuitive framework for decision-making and the epic journey of Meetup’s surprising survival. Good leaders deliberate. Great leaders decide. Order my book by visiting DecideAndConquerBook.com or anywhere books are sold.

Important Links

• Platonic
• Dr. Marisa G. Franco
• All About Love
• DecideAndConquerBook.com

About Dr. Marisa G. Franco

Dr. Marisa Franco is a New York Times bestselling author, professor, and psychologist. She communicates the science of connection in digestible ways and is passionate about sharing research with the people it could help the most.

The post Episode 56: The Skill of Adult Friendship appeared first on Meetup Blog.