We're in a very lonely era.
Our own surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, has declared that America is in a loneliness epidemic.
And I've noticed that in part because of that, there are many people who's wanna brag their building community, but really they're just compiling lists.
Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of the Art of Communities Conversations.
I'm your host.
My name is Seth Resler.
I'm the founder of Community Marketing Revolution.
And this is a series of conversations with Charles Vogl.
Charles is the author of the International Bestseller, The Art of Community, and we are having these conversations because there's a brand new second edition coming out with 25% more content sense.
In addition to this book, Charles is also the co author of Building Brand Communities, a book that he co wrote with Carrie Melissa Jones, in which won an Axiom business book gold medal.
Charles' work has used to develop leadership and programs at Google, Airbnb, Twitch, Amazon, and the US army.
He is presented at the Yale Leadership Institute Harvard Law School, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, among others.
I wanna welcome Charles Charles.
Charles, how are you? I'm so excited to be doing this with you, Seth.
It's wonderful to get to create a project with you.
Yeah.
You too.
Congratulations on the second edition of this book coming out.
It's been almost ten years.
I mean, it's it's, uh, it's been a long time.
And I gotta tell you, these books that you have written have been absolutely fantastic.
It has, uh, introduced me to the world of community building and really shaped my thinking, uh, in a huge way.
So to be able to have these conversations with you is absolutely amazing.
Uh, I'm curious what originally inspired you to write this book.
Well, Seth, I spent the early part of my adult life, uh, doing things that could be generally called activism, like to be more specific.
I, uh, lived in a radical homeless shelter in Southern California, um, in my twenties, uh, for a while.
And then after that, I, um, served in the US peace corps in Northern Zambia, which is in Sub Saharan Africa.
And there I worked on community health and, um, some human rights issues that came up while I was there.
Subsequent to that, uh, I came back to United States, and I created a production company and created work that was largely funded by PBS, uh, that touched on, uh, genocide surviving, uh, education and, um, civil rights history in America.
And then, uh, while I was doing that, I experienced worker abuse as a restaurant worker in New York City.
So I volunteered as a restaurant worker organizer, uh, for my former colleagues, The reason I mentioned that is I didn't realize the time that all those projects I just mentioned, I was learning how to bring people together around shared values and purpose to, uh, create an outcome, and I could not depend on transactional relationships.
Then I went to graduate school to study religion philosophy and ethics, and, uh, I remember being in graduate school and having exposure to these spiritual traditions that have been bringing people together for over a thousand years.
And I remember sitting in class and being inspired that I could leave class that very moment and find people in these traditions who are continuing to gather in these traditions and have been for a thousand years.
Got out of grad school.
Uh, I was a former PBS filmmaker who didn't wanna make films about genocide anymore.
Had a degree in religion, but I wasn't planning on or ordination.
And so, uh, I was just talking with people to find out, well, what can I do in the world to contribute? And I had a lunch, a guy named Kevin Lynn, who had recently or fairly recently, started a company called Twitch.
And for those who don't know, it reaches an online platform where now, uh, about a quarter billion people gather, uh, to connect largely using video around video game enthusiasm.
And I was talking to Kevin.
He was saying that he knew his company would grow.
But what he really wanna get better at was connecting the people who are already showing up on the platform.
And he didn't say this to me because he wanted me to solve it.
I thought I could solve it.
He was just, you know, describing the challenge he was facing growing his company.
And in that moment, my head wanted to explode because there were all these ideas I wanted to share with him.
So I went home to write what I thought was gonna be 10 pages for Kevin, and maybe it would help him with his growing company.
But after I sat down to write, it turns out I had more to say.
Turns out it was book length.
And then it turns out the first publisher that saw that book length project wanted to publish it.
And as you now know, that book is around the world, and it's been a delight to find out that a lot of people wanted to learn, uh, these lessons that we put in Yeah.
That's an amazing story.
Well, let's actually pull the book up there.
There it is.
This is the brand new second edition that's coming out.
And like I mentioned, it's gonna be 25% more content, uh, in this edition.
Um, so let's talk a little bit about how this series of conversations is going to work because you organize the book into seven principles of community.
And so we're gonna have a conversation about each of those principles.
We're gonna take them a one by one In fact, in this conversation here today, we're gonna talk about your first principle, which is the boundary principle.
But before we get to that, I do want to take a moment to actually define what we mean by community because that's a word that gets thrown around a lot.
And I think sometimes people are using it in different ways.
And I so I think it's very important just to make sure that we're all on the same page, so to speak, pun somewhat intended.
Uh, so let's start with your actual definition.
This is what you write in the book.
I define a community as a group of individuals who share a mutual concern for one another's welfare.
It's distinct from a group who members may share ideas, interests, proximity, or any of other number of things, but lack concern for one another.
Let's just start there.
I mean, when you think of a community, what are you thinking about? Well, um, as you just read in definition, in my work, affinity is when we have a group of people who care about one another.
And so that can be people in your neighborhood.
That can be people you do sports with.
Uh, that can be people in your book club.
Um, it can also be people you work with.
Or people in your field.
We don't have to look very far to find people who are in community or people we want to knit together into a community as long as, uh, when we're done, uh, participating together, there's mutual concern.
And it's important at this point in conversation to say, look, uh, we're in a very lonely era.
Uh, our own surgeon general, Vive Murphy has declared that America is in a loneliness epidemic.
And I've noticed that in part because of that, there are many people who wanna brag their building community, but really they're just compiling lists.
And let me be clear set.
There's nothing wrong with lists.
But if you, uh, sell pizza and you have a bunch of people who buy pizza, you have not created a pizza community, uh, that's a customer list.
And if you produce a concert, and I know you've done that in the past, Seth, uh, and people show up, if you have a list of the people who came to that event, you don't have a music community, you have an audience list.
And so on and so forth.
And this is really important to distinguish because some people want to brag about how quickly and how well they can build community when all they're really doing is building lists.
Now lists may be a great beginning to an investment that does knit together relationships where there is mutual concern for one another, but it is not the end game.
And so I don't anyone who's listening to us because they wanna learn how to build community to be distracted by people who are bragging about that, but they're not actually accomplishing what we're allowing for and will actually serve our era that's filled with so much loneliness.
You know, you bring up the fact that, uh, I've produced concerts.
So my background is actually in radio broadcasting, and I've also done a lot of event production over the years.
And strangely enough, reading your books, one of the things that it really made me think differently about is events.
My first, uh, introduction to producing events was producing concerts.
And I thought of it much in the same way that I thought about my radio station.
You know, I'll take my chemical romance.
I put them on the air.
I play their songs on the air.
We attract an audience, and we monetize them.
And then it was just, oh, I take my chemical romance.
I put them on stage.
We attract an audience, and we monetize them.
And I think that's, you know, exactly what you're talking about when you say it's an audience.
Mhmm.
That's not really a community.
Now when I think about events, I think about events that can be spaces where people can actually get together and connect with each other and start to form relationships, and that's where it starts to be a community.
But I think that's really interesting to make that distinction I know in your later book, uh, you and Carrie Melissa Jones draw a distinction between Mirage communities and actual communities.
Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah.
That a term we coined because we were so frustrated with people bragging about communities that they were building, and they would build it in one event or one weekend or one retreat.
And we knew that that was not what was happening, that they were compiling lists largely of people who attended.
Right? And attendee lists are not a problem.
They're just not the community we're seeking to assuage the loneliness that so many of us feel.
So we say that a Mirage community is something that somebody calls a community, but when we look closely at it, and we have an educated eye, we notice that it's not a community.
I'm certain that there are friends that went to that chemical, my chemical romance concert.
And I'm certain that some people there probably met somebody there and had a really good conversation and and maybe traded phone numbers and contact information.
And so maybe there was some connection going on there, but when you put something on the stage for us all to stop and watch, we are not needing to gather the relationships amongst ourselves that create a community.
And there are a lot of people who create events, even festivals, and say we created a music community.
And, uh, if I talk to those participants, and they don't have the content information and don't know the name of the people who attended with them, then that's not much of a community.
And kind of the litmus test I have personally, I don't make this a scam for the world, but I wanna know uh, did you create relationships there that you could call when you need help? And it may be that you start relationships there that will develop so that you can call them when you need help, but it didn't happen at that one concert because when we look at how relationships are formed, We know that it takes dozens of hours.
And we also know that the context in which those relationships are formed matter on how quickly those relationships formed, and I'll give you a hint, uh, Seth, it almost never happens standing in a room watching something else next to each other.
That could be the beginning of something, but that's not where the friendships form where we're supportive to one another, um, outside of that venue.
Yeah.
And that's what I mean when I start to think about, you know, look, going to a movie is an event, but it's not a it's not one where I'm likely to build a relationship, but the guy sitting in the chair next to me.
But going to, for example, like a wedding reception or something like that, that's a place where I might develop a It can be if that wedding reception is structured so that that's possible.
Some wedding receptions are so loud.
And there's so many activities that you and I won't have the chance to have the conversation where we would learn that we share, uh, some level of values and purpose in life that we believe, hopefully, accurately, that we understand each other enough that feel a connection.
So we feel connected largely because we perceive other people share a value and or a purpose, hopefully several, and they understand us intellectually and emotionally.
So you and I have spent professional part of our lives in media.
You and I understand the standard that it takes to be professional, and we understand the tension it takes to make it good.
And people who have never been a professional don't have that.
So we believe that we understand each other level that non professional media makers, uh, will never know.
So, uh, we feel more connected than if, uh, we just didn't have that in common.
But in order for us to understand that, we needed a venue where we could recognize that's going on.
And that doesn't happen if I'm watching a wedding band.
And that doesn't happen if I'm listening to toasts.
Toast are not bad.
Wedding bands are not bad, but if we don't have this intimate experience where we discover we have this shared history and we both wanna create media that's enriching people in a really tough era, then we won't get that chance to create that connection than just together something that's part of a community.
This is gonna come up over and over again.
I think as we go through each of the seven principles.
And like I said, your book, uh, actually goes through the seven principles of community.
Let's actually talk about principle number one today, and that is like I said, the boundary principle, this is what you write in the book.
A boundary is the recognized demarcation between insiders or members and outsiders.
This boundary should be more about making the inside space safe for insiders than about keeping outsiders out.
Where there's a boundary, insiders feel more confident that they share values and that they understand one another better than outsiders.
And I actually want to talk about an example that you use in the book because I think this example does a great job of illustrating what you're talking about here, and that is this example of firefighters.
Uh, you can you you tell us the story and and how that illustrates the boundary principle? Absolutely.
Uh, just to clarify, uh, you know, the role of the boundary, I've noticed that we live in era where many people have a mistaken uh, belief, a form from a very generous, uh, orientation, but nonetheless mistaken, that if we're building community, we need to invite everybody to everything all the time.
And, uh, that just doesn't work.
And the Fire Fire example is gonna illustrate that.
One of the ways we know that that's not a good way to build a community is if we're investing to create community and having that grow amongst a certain group of people that we care about.
If we don't have a boundary on who's invited in or who's in and who's out, then we don't know who we're investing in because there's several billion people in this planet, and you nor I Seth can invest to knit together 4,000,000,000 people by ourselves.
Right? So we need to know, well, who are these people? And We can pick any standard we want, but it can't be everybody all the time.
And I talk about the firefighters in the in the book.
I interviewed a fire captain from New Haven, Connecticut.
Her name is Melissa.
She, uh, was the first woman firefighter in the long history of the New Haven fire department.
And she shared with me that, um, over career firefighting, obviously, firefighters are exposed to very sober and grim experiences and scenes, right, uh, literally confronting death.
And she shared with me that one of the things that comes out of that And its firefighters develop a very dark sense of humor, which in part helps them process and live with the very sober things that they're experience to.
She shared with me that it's so dark that they know that non firefighters can't handle it.
And if they don't understand this culture of firefighters who are exposed to this sober stuff, it's just gonna seem sick and offensive.
And so she explained how firefighters use this dark humor when there are only firefighters in the room.
And she shared how if there's a firefighter gathering and somebody brings one spouse, uh, the presence of that one spouse will radically change the conversation that can and will happen at that gathering.
Keep in mind, it has nothing to do with with whether they like that spouse.
It has nothing to do whether spouses are important to firefighters.
Absolutely nothing to do with that.
It's just that the presence of an outsider who doesn't fully understand the emotional toll of being a firefighter and that dark humor that grows out of that is not gonna be, uh, welcome to that kind of conversation, and so the whole conversation has to change.
I hope this is a great example that we could need to create spaces for communities we want to knit together that are set aside.
And it doesn't mean that the people who aren't invited, uh, aren't light, uh, aren't important in our lives, aren't people we wanna see a lot of.
It's just that many cases when we're bringing people together, it's not okay to bring everybody to every event at every time.
And as I like to say, uh, we can like those people.
We can be friends with them.
But this event is not right for them here and now.
And I've read this as part of your book, but I I wanna reiterate it.
This is what you mean when you say the exclusion is not about keeping people out.
It's about making the people who are inside feel safe.
In other words, making those, uh, firefighters putting them in a place where they feel comfortable, you know, being able to talk to other people, and you even say in the book, you know, they have shorthand.
They have words they use that only each other will understand or or certain examples or principles.
Uh, I think about it in another, uh, uh, scenario.
You know, I recently went to an event.
It's called fifty first jokes, and it involves a bunch of stand up comedians.
And, uh, the whole idea in stand up comedy is that it's not something that you can just sit there and write your material on your own.
You gotta go out and actually try it in front of people.
And the first time you tell jokes, they often don't work.
They they get sort of workshop and wordsmith over time.
And this idea of fifty first jokes, it's 50 comedians that get up and write the very first joke that they have written of the year.
And Some of them are great, and some of them just completely bomb, but the audience is okay with it because it's a it's a safe space.
They're all on the inside.
They all understand that their reaction is helping those comedians get better.
And and so it's okay for them to be inside in that place.
And so I I I see this principle, you know, now that you talk about it in so many other places that are out there.
Just to provide some depth into this that insider knowledge, you're referring to the fact that, uh, comedians know that writing funny jokes is hard.
So the early jokes are then great.
Uh, that insider knowledge we call esoteric knowledge.
It's not an important term to know, but that's what we call it.
And esoteric knowledge is very important for needed communities because it frees us up to talk about the things that we wanna talk about at a more deep level without having to on ramp or warm up a visitor.
And that's another reason why the boundary is important is I just, you know, as media makers, we wanna get in.
We already know how the economic models work.
We already know how distribution models work.
We already understand how how IP works.
We don't wanna have the basic conversations.
We want to get into the deep stuff with our esoteric knowledge.
And, um, I'm delighted you have a good example of that.
You know, I was Doctorary filmmaker, professional Doctorary filmmaker for many years, And, uh, when I went to graduate school, uh, the film department at the university invited me to many events because I was one of the few former professional filmmakers on campus, and they were delighted to have me and, and, uh, I could share the perspective of being a real Finrite filmmaker in the world.
And I remember, uh, an academy award winning, uh, Doctorary filmmakers invited to campus, and there was supposed to be a small gathering of people to, uh, spend time with him.
And they were all supposed to be people who are already familiar with the film we're And somebody had brought a friend who was a law student, as a matter of fact, and that law student, um, asked this academy award winning filmmaker, all kinds of basic questions about film, about revenue models, and distribution models, and uh, production, all of which were questions that a professional filmmaker would already know because that's just the buy in to understand how the industry works.
And that, uh, student didn't know that she had hijacked what could have been a high level conversation asking what were very basic questions for us.
And nobody was bold enough to say, please stop asking questions.
This event isn't for you.
And that person probably left thinking that was a very interesting conversation because they learned a lot.
That's another great example where a group of us were stolen what could have been a really powerful conversation because the boundary wasn't strong enough.
And the event was hijacked because she didn't know enough about the esoteric knowledge to allow us to have a more complex conversation.
A great example where this is a friend of one of the attendees.
That person's not bad.
We don't wanna see them.
Uh, they shouldn't be kept away from filmmakers, but, uh, because there was a not very good boundary, the event was kind of ruined.
For those of us who showed up because we didn't wanna hear rudimentary, you know, filmmaking answers.
And these examples are really helpful because it helps illustrate what we mean by this.
You've got any other examples you could share with us? Yeah.
One of the things I've discovered is that many people who are creating community may call it something else like a club or an association.
They don't recognize that there is a boundary or they're in denial that they have a boundary.
And I wrote about this in the book, one point, I was invited in New York City because there was a a group of spiritual leaders that had an association, and they invited me to participate and they wanted to grow it.
And I was very confused when I was there about who should be in this group.
Should be invited, who is it tailored for, and that kind of thing.
And when I asked about that, they said, oh, no.
Anybody can be in this group.
I thought, well, that's just obviously not true.
Right? This is a room of very highly educated, uh, many cases, spiritual leaders, really involved in the national international scene about spiritual growth, obviously not everybody is supposed to be in this group.
And so I asked, well, I'm curious, uh, was there ever a time that somebody was asked to leave? And they said, oh, yes.
And it turns out sometime before there had been somebody in the group that was, um, advocating polyamorous marriages.
And that was too radical for this group, and so they were asked to leave.
And I asked people who asked them to leave because what that would tell me is who had the authority to ask someone to leave, and and they told me.
And I said, well, it sounds like there is a boundary.
There is a standard about who can be here, and it sounds like you do have people who will remove somebody if they're not a good fit.
And, uh, that really gave them pause.
And up until that moment, the people who had asked that person to leave had considered themselves not actually a leader, but just a facilitator.
But then I revealed, well, actually, you wields some authority and you do have a standard and you step in within that standard, uh, needs to be held.
And none of that is bad.
It was just curious to me that they just wanted to believe that none of that was in place when it had been in place from what I could tell for years.
And it started to knew the conversation then.
Well, then who do they wanna invite in and how do they hold the standard? So this leads into another concept that you talk about, which is gatekeeping, and the role of gatekeeper.
Can you explain what a gatekeeper is and what their role is? Yeah.
Well, if we have a boundary, then, um, it someone needs to enforce it.
And gatekeepers are amongst the people who can say, no.
You're not a good fit now.
For example, you're a beloved spouse of a firefighter, but you're not a firefighter.
So this event or these events or this time is not for you, uh, we will have other events for you.
But the more important role of of the gatekeeper is to help visitors frost the gate into the community.
Yeah.
I visited many, many churches and a number of spiritual denominations have asked me to help them.
And, you know, many of them ring their hands because young families aren't joining.
And so I ask, well, when someone shows up and they're interested, who's helping them become integrated into the community of the church.
And, uh, often, you know, they don't know.
And if we don't know as leaders of the community, who's gonna help a visitor cross the boundary inside, then goodness knows the visitor's not gonna know.
And we shouldn't be surprised that they're confused.
Well, then how do I get in? Who's gonna make the invitation? Who's gonna who's gonna spend the time? Who's gonna explain how the events work.
You work weekly? Is it quarterly? Are there informal events? Do you have to have a certain credential? Uh, do you have to sign up in time? Like, they don't even know.
So if you wanna grow your community, if you wanna keep it strong, you need to understand, well, who are these people? We have several of them.
They're helping those who do have the right values and are pursuing the right purpose.
Uh, how do we help them across the boundary to be to come inside? An example came to my mind where this really failed, Seth, At one point, I joined a mountain sports group here in California because I'm a mountain sports enthusiast, and this, uh, club had been around or has been around since nineteen thirties.
And, uh, I was a new father and was looking to join the club and as my family to older, we would participate.
And so they said, well, you can visit our lodge up in the Tahoe.
And so I drove four hours through the snow to get there.
And when I showed up, I was told there would be a member there that would show me around and orient me.
So I, uh, you know, drove far to the snow, unloaded my car, made my way through the snow up to this giant cabin, free story cabin.
And I came in, and, uh, in the atrium, I, brush off the snow, and then this member opened the door, the interior door, and her first words to me were, uh, boots don't go there.
They go downstairs.
They ostensibly wanted new members.
I, uh, wanted to get involved in a club for mountain sports.
I had driven four hours.
Nobody oriented me on the rules, the protocols, the traditions.
And the first thing she said to me was that I was doing it wrong.
Does that sound like a club that knows who their gatekeepers are and the role of the gatekeeper? How are they gonna help people come inside if the first thing new members here after driving for four hours in the snowstorm is you're doing it wrong.
They have no clue how their gatekeepers work.
So as I'm picturing gatekeepers and you're talking about this, I'm picturing it less as like a night club bouncer who's there to keep people out.
And more, uh, I actually got the mental image of the, uh, the mythical boatman that helps people cross the river sticks, uh, when they die in Greek mythology.
Right? It's the Yeah.
And there may be times where you need the bouncer, but I I don't see that very often.
Because if someone doesn't fit with the values and purpose, they usually, uh, don't want to invest to get in.
So there's a fair amount of self selection.
There is a fair amount of people recognizing, you know, for example, one of the communities I'm involved with is podcast movement, which is a conference, uh, and and group of people who are all podcasters.
And I yeah.
Most people kinda get.
Alright.
I need need to either have a podcast or be thinking about a podcast before I'm gonna be part of this podcaster community.
And so there isn't a real need to sort of throw people out because they don't have a podcast because they just kinda they get it.
They know whether they belong or not.
But that's a good example, Seth.
It could be that I'm a I wanna sell microphones.
Right.
Right.
Or I wanna build my affiliate program that sells microphones.
And so I show up at a podcast and conference, and I have no interest in creating a podcast to understand how distribution works or understanding trends and graphics, I just wanna build a list of microphone buyers.
At some point, it's gonna be clear I'm not contributing the conversation.
In fact, I could be distracting from it because I'm more interested in selling microphones.
Right? And so at some point, it may be important for a gatekeeper to explain to me Uh, it's great that you sell microphones.
It's great that podcasters buy it.
This is not the event for you.
This is not the right space for you now.
Right.
You talk about the importance of having an exploration zone.
For communities so that people who think they may be interested in joining a community can kind of try it out first.
Can you talk a little bit about that? Whenever we discover new community, we don't go from, I don't know, anything about you, I don't know anybody in the community, to, uh, I'm definitely gonna pay the dues.
I'm definitely gonna shut regularly, and I'm totally gonna volunteer for all your events.
Right? That doesn't happen.
We need a place in a time where we can learn, well, what do people do? What are the actual values that you're growing into? What does it look like to spend time with you? And as we talked with the firefighters, uh, the firefighter community needs time where it's only firefighters so they can have the conversations appropriate to them.
But if anybody wants to learn, well, do I wanna be a fire fighter? Do I wanna hang out with these firefighters? Do I wanna grow in the way that these firefighters are growing? Then they need other times where it can be firefighters and visitors.
And, uh, we call those visitor rings where their events, where the vision can come.
And we talked earlier about how one spouse of firefighter had radically changed the conversation going on, uh, at a firefighter event.
But, uh, there's perfectly good to have events where spouses and best friends and neighbors and cousins who are in town can come and spend time with firefighters.
So when we think about the boundary, we can look, well, what are events are we really holding the line about insiders only? And what are events where we have members there and visitors can come and learn, uh, what it is to spend time with us and how we're growing? And this is an opportunity to try out not just sort of the activities that happen within a community, really the values.
Right? Because you place an emphasis on the fact that there are shared values in a community, and I think about this from my own life.
You know, I was a swimmer growing up.
I was a club swimmer, on a club swim team.
And then when I got to high school, I just went, oh, I'm a swimmer because I've had been a swimmer in the past.
So I needed to join the high school swim team.
And one of the things that I found out was that the values were different.
That that being a club swimmer was really about, uh, social experience and building friendships, and being a high school swimmer was about competition and just trying to win and be fast.
And I wasn't a % on board with that.
I I, for me, swimming was a social outlet.
And so it would have been really helpful if I had had that exploration zone and and could have known that before I had actually joined the high school swim team because had I tried it out for a week and realized that.
I probably would have gone, nah, this this isn't my thing.
So talk a little bit about how communities can create an exploration zone that really allows people to understand the values of the community.
So there's a number of ways to do that.
One is to simply make sure you have events where it's clear that visitors can visit and participate in some level so that it would have been great if you came to practices and you learned what they prioritize, but you weren't fully signed up for the team.
I don't know what level of commitment you had to make, you know, in the early days.
Another way that's very common is there's, uh, what we call a novice level.
Uh, it can go by several different names, but the idea is you're not fully a member, but you're a novice.
You're learning how we do things here, and it's a time for you to figure out, is this a good fit? Are we here to have fun or are we here to win at any cost? And it's a good time for the members to learn, well, um, are you a good fit in a sense that we recognize that you are valuing what we value and you're willing to commit the level we'd like you to commit? Both of those are great ways, uh, but we need to make sure they're there.
You know, I've been to events or groups where they didn't get that.
Like the example that's coming to my mind is my first book came out.
I was invited to an authors group and they had a retreat and I was invited to the retreat.
And, uh, it was really designed for older authors from a different era.
And I wasn't that crazy about it.
And there were three of us who were newer authors, and we mentioned how things could be changed.
And I remember at least one person saying, well, you should join the board and change that.
I thought, wow, I just showed up.
I haven't spent two full days with you all yet.
I don't even like being here, and you're assuming that what I should do with my life is be a leader of your group.
It was a total misunderstanding of the relationship of a visitor.
That visitors are still trying to figure out do I like you? We're not looking to sign up to commit our life to try to change what you've been doing for years.
And that was really off putting that they didn't understand my relationship to them.
They thought that I was fully committed and fully onboard I didn't even like being there.
It's the difference between getting married right away or dating before you get married and seeing how you, like, been in the relationship.
That's a perfectly perfectly good analogy, Yeah.
I I we I don't even think we were dating.
I thought we were just hanging out at a coffee event to figure out if we like talking to each other.
And they said, well, gee, uh, you know, you should change your deed to make sure that the inheritance is gonna go smooth and they're like, what are you talking about? We are we are I'm I don't even know if I like the coffee here.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Some.
Uh, let's talk about another distinction that you may that I think is important when it comes to getting community members, you know, new people to join, uh, and that is the difference between making an announcement and extending an invitation.
Can you talk about that distinction? Absolutely.
So in my work, we define an invitation as request to spend time where the person invited knows that someone cares if they show up.
I'll say that again because it's so important.
An invitation is request to spend time where the person invited knows that someone cares if they show up.
I don't care how they know because different people are gonna perceive that differently, uh, but they need to know that.
If uh, the person invited does not know or recognize that anybody cares if they show up, we have a name for that.
We call that an announcement.
Now there's nothing wrong with announcements.
In fact, uh, that's a really good way to let a lot of people know that there's event happening.
But when we're talking about building community and having leadership in community, when you do recognize an announcement does not have the power of an invitation.
So very often when I go to a community, uh, that says they want help, be that a spiritual organization or educational institution or a working team.
And I say, well, we wanna build more community and nothing's working.
We can't get people engaged.
It's a bunch of questions I could ask.
The first questions I I ask is, well, what are you inviting them to? And very often I find out the answer is nothing.
That a group email is shot out a couple times a year, maybe once a month, announcing that there's a thing, and that's it.
And our response is, well, let's not be surprised that no one is coming to anything or not enough if you're not inviting them.
And invitations are, uh, almost by definition inefficient.
Right? Because we need to communicate in a way that someone understands, you matter.
Uh, I would really like you to be there, and that can't be done in a mass email yet.
So, um, if you're not sending invitations, let's not be surprised people are, you know, showing up at your events where they can become connected and become members.
Alright.
That's a lot to unpack right there.
And that's just the first principle.
That that is just the boundary principle.
Uh, like we said, we've got six more to go.
So I am looking forward to these conversations.
Charles, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation.
It's exciting to share this with you, Seth, and hopefully reach people who also wanna knit together relationships that will enrich all of our lives.
Yeah.
And once again, the book is the art of community, seven principles for belonging.
The second edition is, uh, now got 25% more content.
We are gonna be going through a lot of that.
So I'm looking forward to a lot more of these conversations.
We'll talk to you soon, Charles.
Alright.
Till next time, Seth
