One of the chaplains at this military base told me how there were some warfighters.
He recognized, experienced some really serious stuff, and we're having a really hard time dealing with it.
And he took the small group down to a pond where they ritually washed the blood and the dirt of war off their uniforms together, preparing them to return back to civilian life in their family.
And I remembered when he was sharing me this story, he wept, and I was moved to tears by the power of taking a moment to wash war off their clothes to come back home.
Hello, and welcome to the Art of Community Conversations.
My name is Seth Resler, and I'm the founder of Community Marketing Revolution.
And this series of Conversations has been inspired by the book The Art of Community by Charles Vogl.
Uh, Charles Vogl, uh, is the author of this international best seller.
It's got a new second edition that is coming out with 25% more content.
That is what inspired these conversations.
He's also the co author of Building Brand Communities, a book which won the Axiom Business Book Medal award, and his work has been used to develop leadership programs at, uh, Airbnb, Twitch, Google, Amazon, and the US army.
He's presented at the Yale Leadership Institute Harvard Law School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, among others, please welcome Charles Vogel.
Hi, Charles.
How are you? This is a fun time to get to spend time with you and to talk about something we think is important.
Yeah.
I love this.
And and so, uh, if you're just picking up, this is the first conversation you're listening to, uh, the way the book is organized is you outline seven principles of community.
And so we're gonna talk about one of those principles today, and that principle is the rituals principle and so I wanna actually bring up a passage from your book.
You say a ritual is any practice that marks a time or event as special or important.
These actions are imbued with meaning.
They connect present with things in the past and with our hope for the future.
So that's a great place to to start.
Give me an example of some rituals that you see in communities.
Well, uh, the good news is Seth is, uh, we have a lot of rituals in our lives that, uh, we, many of us take for granted, uh, birthday rituals, for example, I think uh, you, and I, and everyone listening has attended a birthday.
And, uh, in our country, uh, a birthday ritual often includes a cake, candles, some singing, usually friends, and some exchanging of gifts.
Now that doesn't necessarily happen in the community, but the idea is is there's a ritual, but there is a action that indicates that a certain time in this case a birthday is more special than other times.
And when we look at communities that stick together, uh, they have rituals, they some kind of action that indicates, hey, this time is special.
When we have new members, uh, when we've had some success, uh, when we're getting through a time.
Uh, well, we've had a big loss.
There is something that is done that acknowledges that.
And one of the things that's going on in our culture is, uh, for better or worse, Americans are largely running away from their home faith traditions, often for good reasons.
Uh, what we also often lose when we leave our home faith traditions is we no longer participate in a community that has rituals that recognizes uh, when we have matured and changed in our lives.
And so many of us are missing experiences where the people around us gather and acknowledge that we're changing.
And we call these rights of past message.
So in communities, it's gonna be very powerful when, uh, there's a gathering that acknowledges.
You're no longer a student, you're a teacher, or you're no longer new, your experience.
Or you're no longer single.
Now you're married.
Like, whatever that is, there's a ritual for that.
And, uh, you know, we talked briefly in our last conversation, how when I was a peace corps volunteer, I spent literally months of training and preparation, and there was a moment.
There was a ritual when someone from the state department, uh, said a few words about the founding of the peace corps.
And amongst the things that happened is I was given a pin with the peace corps logo for me to wear, uh, on occasion.
And that was a ritual acknowledging that I was going from a candidate to an actual peace corps volunteer.
And, uh, I wish that everybody is participating in a community, be they living overseas or, uh, bicycling together? That there's a moment where they get to gather and acknowledge what is changing and how a particular time is special.
So we talked about initiations before.
Uh, an initiation can be a ritual, but there can be a lot of other rituals as well.
As people make their journey through the community.
Is that what I'm understanding? Absolutely.
So my son is part of a martial arts community.
He's studying martial arts, and, uh, we've talked a lot about community at his gym.
You know, one of the things they have built in in their process are the belt ceremonies where students earn a new belt and the entire class gathers, and there's, uh, certain words said, and there's certain traditional activities made for a student to get a new belt.
And that's, uh, in a moment where that student recognizes that other people in the studio recognize that they're maturing in the tradition.
Obviously, uh, receiving belts has been around for a long time in this country in martial arts.
Uh, but the idea can be used anywhere.
This idea that when we notice someone is maturing in our community, be that academic, athletic, political philanthropic, volunteering, for example, this is a moment where we acknowledge that someone has matured.
I noticed that last year, there were a lot of rituals in my life.
For example, we had a baby shower for one of my stepdaughters.
Uh, my other stepdaughter, you know, got her degree.
She graduated.
And, uh, she went to an online school.
So she didn't necessarily feel a lot of connection to her fellow students.
She wasn't sure, uh, whether she wanted to go to the graduation because the students are spread all over the, uh, the country, you know, they held a couple of graduation ceremonies in different places.
So we wound up driving down to Ohio, uh, and there was this, you know, when she wore the gown and walked across the stage and everything, and I'll never forget her saying afterwards you know, I I didn't really think I wanted to go or it was gonna be important.
And she said it was a it was a big deal.
Like, it made her feel part of something.
And I think this speaks to the meaning of these rituals and why the meaning is so important.
Can you elaborate on, you know, the meaning? Absolutely.
Uh, so I think I think that's a fantastic example.
She was clearly part of a student community Right? Uh, even though she was physically removed from them.
And she, uh, voiced something that I've noticed in my travels that, uh, people very often underestimate the power and the importance of rituals.
In a graduation ceremony, it's pretty predictable.
Right? And there's usually nothing unique about them.
Right? We know there's gonna be a stage and families in chairs, and there's gonna be black robes, and there's gonna be walking across the stage.
Like, it's not creative and dramatic.
And yet, Uh, it can be profoundly meaningful.
I guess the point I wanna really land here is when we're bringing people together, be that a family or enthusiast in our neighborhood, we can notice that rituals can be, uh, more powerful than people know.
An example, it stands out in my mind, which I like referring to, as I was visiting a military base in The United States some years ago.
And, uh, the leadership were telling me that one of the challenges they had is they didn't have proper or good rituals transitioning, uh, warriors from war to reintegrating into family life, that they largely land.
Uh, there's something very perfunctory, um, in a school gymnasium, and then boom, they're back with their families.
And, uh, one of the chaplains at this military base told me how, uh, there were some warfighters he recognized need something more that they had experienced some really serious stuff and we're having a really hard time dealing with it.
And he took the small group down to a pond there on the base, and they had a ritual where they ritually washed the blood and the dirt of war off their uniforms together.
Preparing them to return back to civilian life and their family.
And I remembered when he was sharing me this story, he wept, and I was moved to tears by the power of taking a moment to wash war off their clothes to come back home.
And I still remain sad that that powerful ritual was only made available to a few warriors and that it isn't a common ritual or there aren't similar rituals to help with that transition.
In life, from going from one way, a warrior to another, a spouse, and a parent.
We are free to create these in any way that we want, and it doesn't have to involve gore, and it doesn't have to involve, you know, ritual washing.
There's something you talk about in the book, which is ritual silence.
Can you explain that concept and what that means? Yeah.
I've noticed in our culture when there's a great loss, maybe a death or, a tragedy for an organization, there's a seemingly instantial longing for taking a moment of quiet.
And what we can recognize in that is rituals are a time that's special special is different from normal time.
So if a place is normally loud, then quiet is special.
If a place is often quiet, then loud is special.
Similarly, if a place is usually a coughiness, a lot of conversations going on, then melodious is special.
So, uh, that longing for a time of quiet during loss can be seen as a way of wanting to honor and acknowledge that this is a different time.
In this case, a sad time, And the one of the ways we can do that is by making the space special by making it quiet.
And, uh, that's a perfectly good way to use silence, a perfectly good way to punctuate, uh, a moment of honoring something that's changed, uh, but it's not the only way.
You talk about different types of rituals, uh, and I wanna go through some of these and have you give examples and explain what they are.
Um, one of them is rites of passage.
And I think that the things that we've been talking about fall into this, like the graduations or even the the pod the the belt ceremony, uh, in martial arts, but explain what a rites of passage is.
The right of passage is when a community is acknowledging and honoring that someone is transitioning from one way of being to another.
So a marriage, a wedding ceremony, rather, is a way of acknowledging that someone is going from single to married.
A graduation is a rite of passage from going to be a student to a graduate.
And in our own communities, uh, be they just neighbors or athletes? Uh, we're always maturing.
We're maturing because we're simply getting older and learning new things.
And it's very easy to notice how someone has changed and then honor that rite of passage.
Someone may go from just a simple neighbor to someone who's a safety coordinator.
And there could be a very simple, fun ritual honoring that person has stepped up to be a leader in the community to keep the neighborhood safe, uh, in a disaster.
If it's athletic, we can acknowledge someone who has gone from becoming a beginner to someone who is an advanced practitioner.
Um, or even an instructor, which is to say it's not simply a matter that they are now better at that sport or teaching that sport, but we take a moment that we can let them know that we see that they have changed.
Even that's ten minutes or that's a two hour fun dinner, those are often the highlights of community experience.
So you also talk about community displays.
What are what are those? So rituals can be very intimate.
They could be two people or just a handful of people, um, celebrating something or acknowledging how something has changed.
But very often, when we talk about bigger communities, there are rituals that bring everybody together or at least invite everybody together.
And those can be important because then members can see that they're part of a much bigger community.
That bigger community might fill an auditorium or it might fill a stadium.
Or it might fill, you know, days of activities.
One thing that comes to my mind is athletes work for years to become Olympic athletes.
And the opening ceremony in a large stadium where the athletes are invited to parade in is a very inefficient use of athletic time.
They're not sleeping.
They're not training.
They're not building up the nutrition.
They're literally standing around waiting to process and then they process.
With that ritual of the athletes processing into a stadium, gives them a chance to see that they're part of this athletic community that has trained for years to participate in the Olympic games, which brings us to another point of rituals.
One of the things that make rituals powerful is that they're inefficient.
Uh, when we see rituals happen, be the graduation ceremony or birthday ceremony or the Olympic games, uh, usually all the time we can notice it's a really inefficient use of time if we just wanna get something done.
As I said, it's inefficient to ask thousands of athletes to dress up in special uniforms and walk around a stadium.
They're not training.
They're not sleeping.
Yet it's profoundly powerful.
And so When we create our own rituals, it's okay.
In fact, it can be can be great.
It was an inefficient use of time.
If there's a faster way we could give out pins, there's a faster way we could sign people up for an event, that's okay.
And when we're looking at rituals of other communities, we are not in a place to decide if other rituals are good or not.
They may look silly to us.
What's important is that they're meaningful to the people who are participating in them.
Now there can be dangerous rituals, there can be demeaning rituals, but we can't know if they're meaningful by how silly they look as outsiders because they're meaningful to the people who are inside the community and it's telling them what the community recognizes about who they are and how they participate.
You know, we're talking about meaning again in our last conversation, we talked about, uh, symbols and tokens and how important they were to conveying meeting.
And as you're talking about each of these rituals, I'm picturing them in my head, and I'm realizing that what I'm picturing are those symbols and those tokens? I'm picturing the belt in the martial art ceremony.
I'm picturing the the cap, the tassel, the diploma.
I'm picturing the torch and the flags of the different countries.
Can you talk a little bit about the role that Cymbals and tokens play in rituals? Yeah.
They're not necessarily required.
Uh, there can be fantastic rituals, uh, between an elder and and students that involve no symbols and tokens.
However, they're often very, very powerful elements because, they remind us of values and their relationships.
So for example, those athletes coming into the Olympic Arena are carrying the flag of their country.
It's, uh, reminding them and a symbol to the world that they are not only athletes who have done well in their field and are competing, but they are in fact representing a country that they are connected with.
And, hopefully, at some level, that can tree is supporting them.
So that ceremony could be great without national flags, but certainly the national flags add a level of meaning and importance.
And so when we're creating our own communities, we can notice, well, what are the symbols we can bring forward to remind us how we're connected and what's going on just to make that ritual more important.
But it's not strictly speaking required.
You talk about a another type of ritual, which are play rituals.
What are those? Uh, plate rituals are, um, for the purposes of this conversation, we'll say things that we do for fun that have meaning.
And in the book I talk about when I look at spiritual traditions that I've been gathering for over a thousand years, everyone, everywhere feasts together.
And feasts are meals that celebrate something, that recognize that something, um, has changed.
And that's just one sort of play ritual So ritual does not only have to be speeches and bowing and exchanging of pins and belts.
Uh, there can be a lot of fun involved.
In fact, I hope there's a lot of fun involved.
And the reason I found it important to write about it is because I think that there if there are no, uh, play rituals, then, uh, there's something deeply missing there.
And so we can look when we're bringing people together, we'll where are the moments of play that we're bringing people together to celebrate and to have fun? And this may sound silly to you, Seth, that, well, gee, are there communities that don't like to play that like to have fun? But I go into nonprofits that are working with volunteers go into corporations that are really depending on highly skilled people that work really hard.
I've talked with spiritual organizations that, you know, wanna invite people in and get them involved, and they forget the play part.
When they forget that we need to invite people to things that are fun and meaningful.
And if they're not fun, largely people don't wanna do them.
It's we need to remember that play rituals are an important historical part of strong community.
So give me an example of a play ritual list or one that you've seen over the years that you really like? Yeah.
So years ago, I was invited to participate in a Hash House harriers running event.
The Hash House harriers are a non competitive running group play this particular game.
That's a long distance running game, uh, where they have to, uh, run a particular map.
And, um, at the end of that game, there's traditionally a barbecue or meal afterwards where the runners gather and share meals together, And during that meal, the runners who are part of this community break out in traditional songs and their silly songs.
And there are songs that they know only because they participated in the community for years.
And for those of us who are guests, we obviously don't know the songs, and we recognize the songs are really silly.
And what I loved about sitting in that lunch listening to these silly songs is I was watching people who are ostensibly gathering ring to run long distances in a game, sit around and sing silly songs just for fun, and they were sharing songs that only they knew, and we have a fancy name for that.
It's called esoteric knowledge.
They were sharing their esoteric knowledge of being part of the community and celebrating their community.
And, uh, it was a ritual because the songs had no technical importance.
Right? It wasn't important that to run the game.
You knew the songs, but it just celebrated their interest in coming together, uh, for fun and being connected.
Yeah.
I can think of things in my own life that are smaller, but fun.
You know, I was on a swim team growing up, and the swim team season ended with sort of this championship meet where, you know, that was sort of the big it was like our Super Bowl, right, uh, of, of swimming.
And then at afterwards, we would always have a pizza dinner, and the team would go out for a pizza party at the end.
And we didn't have to do that, but I think it was a fun ritual and and a way for people to just get together and relax and enjoy themselves.
So, yeah, I I I could see this in in my own life, uh, in a lot of places.
This is fascinating.
Well, and Seth, when you recognize that pizza party was less about just people having pizza together, but that it was a celebration of your relationship.
And a punctuation of that day or that week of athletics, then it opens up the opportunity of you embellishing it a little bit to make it important.
So hopefully at some point, that pizza parties somebody stood up, uh, gathered their attention and said out loud, um, how your relationships were important, how the commitment to one another is important, how the support of other athletes to one another has changed your life and how much you appreciate and celebrate these relationships as you grow older and grow more mature as an athlete.
Now in the book, you've got a whole script for rituals, and I'll let people read it and they can go through the whole thing.
But can you highlight some of the key points, especially for somebody who is either thinking about creating a ritual for a community, or maybe even tuning up a ritual that they have in a community.
What do you think are the really important things to include in that? Yeah.
Well, in the book, I just provided a very light structure for someone who wants to create a fun ritual for a community.
They don't know where to start.
They can start with the structure that I provided, we're just informed by how spiritual traditions have been structuring rituals for millennia.
It's not the only way to do it.
It's not the right way to do it.
It's just a way to get you started.
And so some things I mentioned, for example, it's important that someone punctuates the beginning.
We call it an opening collect.
You're collecting people together.
For example, at a pizza party, someone stands up and says, is deeply meaningful to me? That all of you have gathered here when you don't need to be here that we spent the whole day in in sport together and you're all tired and yet we're here around a table, you know, to create friendship.
It's meaningful that we can celebrate this time together.
Uh, we've punctuated they gather ring time and they gather third time.
And I've noticed that when people gather for play rituals, there's often a lot of resident, uh, reticence for someone to stand up and just state, uh, why we're together and why this is important and punctuate the beginning of this celebration together.
Another element I mentioned is to, uh, invoke or reference wisdom that's relevant to your gathering.
So I know you're you know, you were a swimmer athlete, assess.
There was probably a coach or a famous swimmer or someone who talks about the importance of sport and maturing that you can say, and since we know that, uh, people who build their bodies up and build these friendships in sport, make them healthy for the rest of their lives and teach us the resilience we need to be successful in life.
And what that does is that reminds the group that this thing we're doing today is not the only time this happens.
But we sit in a tradition of people gathering and we're continuing that tradition.
So for example, you know, I was invited, uh, to speak to, um, heads of schools on the East Coast at a conference they've been hosting for dozens of years every year.
And that year, I was invited to do some teaching there.
And I was able to say in my presentation of this isn't just a bunch of educators listening to a book author talk.
This is a reconvening of educators in a place where educators have convened for many, many years in an effort to become better in their fields in order to make the next generation stronger than the last.
And I don't know if we're gonna accomplish that today, but I know that we're standing in that tradition of educators becoming stronger to do a better job.
Now after I had said that, It was the same group educators in the same room with the same guy in a microphone in the front of the room, but because I had referenced the tradition that had come before us that we were standing in, uh, authentically, the gravity of what we were doing, uh, felt more important because we were acknowledging it's not just about these few hours we're gonna spend together.
It's about this greater commitment that we're continuing.
And then another part that I like to include in the structure that I provided was to give participants a moment where they could participate.
So they're not just looking and listening and waiting for the ritual to end.
We can invite participants to say something to offer something, to build something, to plant something, to wash something, color something, to post something, something that invites them into that ritual so they that it isn't simply about it watching elders say the things and make it important.
Ricules can change over time.
They can evolve and sometimes they evolve slowly, uh, but also, you know, I think, for example, of the pandemic when all of a sudden, we had to change a lot of things very quickly, uh, and yet we wanted to keep those rituals in place.
Um, as we said in the outset, the idea behind these rituals is that it connects you to things in the past, uh, and it also connects you to the hopes for the future, what are the important things to think about as rituals change or if you are in charge of a community and you are seeing rituals involve? You know, what's important to keep in mind there? Yeah.
Well, rituals are always created by someone, and they're not necessarily magic, which is to say that we can, uh, modify them as our participants change.
For example, there are a lot of, uh, communities, social communities, athletic communities that were all men for many, many years.
And they're no longer all men.
Well, it will be silly to continue the exact rituals that those communities had while they were all men, uh, when they're no longer all men.
So we can recognize uh, weave chains, memberships chains, the values have chains, the times have changed, and it's okay to change rituals.
In fact, if the rituals don't change, that's a sign of stagnation.
That's a sign of not recognizing that the world has changed, numbers have changed, the technology has changed, and there's a way to do it differently.
Now that doesn't mean that we can't recognize what the strengths of the rituals we have, be the initiations or graduations or, um, honoring but then we can notice that it can be done differently.
I was talking to a head of school once that, um, had a senior tradition where the seniors of that school would dress up in bathing suits and, like, run chaotically through a school event, uh, creating chaos as their senior day prank.
And there may have been a time where that was fun and irreverent and considered an exuberance of youth.
But it had, uh, distilled into a event that was simply just obnoxious and distracting.
And because it had no meaning to it, it was just also a name.
And the students who were aspiring to do it weren't doing it because it had grade meeting, they were just doing it because that's what had been done.
And so that head of school, uh, made an effort to reflect, well, what is an appropriate senior day event Now that the seniors can do something that is fun, but has meaning to it and contributes to school as opposed to just being obnoxious and distracting.
And I was really proud that there was someone willing to look at what the attrition was and ask, is this appropriate for us anymore? Yeah.
So I'm sensing a theme throughout all our conversations, which is that it it's really about the meaning.
And and it's not so much about the external stuff or the details of it as as long as the meaning is conveyed and the meaning is received and the meaning connects people to each other or to the future or to the past in the way that it, it needs to do so.
Is that right? I mean, will relationships live within meaning, Seth? Because if there's no meaning, then it's largely transactional.
And if it's transactional, then we're calculating, well, how does my investment, my time, my attention delivered to me the value that I want.
And that's going along with all the other people participating, whereas when we have a relationship and community that's non transactional, as I say relational, then we don't have to calculate all the time.
There may be a time where a particular group of athletes, uh, is too exhausting for me to keep committing to, but I'm not calculating every time someone asks for a favor or they wanna borrow equipment or they need a pickup that, you know, I'm thinking, well, gee, what's what's my return on my investment on this.
And when we're working in a non transactional relationship, in this case, network of relationships, the meaning of the actions we take together, uh, are really powerful and really important.
So let's say I am a community leader and I'm in charge of a ritual or certain rituals within my community.
How can I screw it up? Like, what are the mistakes that you sometimes see and how can we avoid those mistakes? Yeah.
A big mistake that I see is that, uh, leaders don't recognize the profound meaning of seemingly silly actions.
They don't understand that otherwise silly activities that look inefficient can be part of profound rituals.
A example that comes to my mind is I was leading a workshop and someone said how she remembered a ritual that was really powerful, but it was so silly She was in school, and she was an all girls school.
And at one point, when she was a school girl, the alumni came to the school, and at a certain part of graduation from one grade to another, but not a big graduation like high school, the alumni would give a big yellow ribbon to the current school girls.
And she talked about how meaningful that was to her as a little girl to get this big yellow ribbon from an alumni.
And I remember being sad when she shared this with me because she had just decided that it was silly that she thought it was wonderful to get this big yellow ribbon from an alumna, which what I saw in that ritual was that a student was getting a token of membership and maturity from an elder in this community, and that's why it was meaningful.
And yet as an adult, she dismissed it as being silly.
So she couldn't recognize that while it looks silly people didn't understand its meaning, it could be, in fact, was profoundly important to someone in the community and in the ritual.
You know, in the book, I talk about how, for example, even as adults, um, there are people who go into stadiums and watch rituals where laundry, literal laundry is raised up in the stadium to be hung high up.
And they call that a Jersey retirement, right, when a Jersey is retired for a stellar athlete.
Most of the world thinks it's pretty silly to take clothes and hoist it up while people are watching and just hang it in large room.
But it's not silly to the people who wanna honor the athlete who wore that number and recognize that that Jersey is being retired.
So the mistake is is to look at the activity and just dismiss this silly without first asking and inquiring is and how is this important no matter how silly the action may look to an outsider.
I'm trying to think about my own life and what I do that's silly.
And the first thing that comes to mind is Halloween.
Because I'm the house on the block that goes all out with just all the animatronics stuff.
And I'd love to take the time to set up the fog machines and have the spooky sound effects and music going and have all the things, and I I love it when the kids come up and they're scared by by it.
And it's it's become something in my family where, like, that's just it for us, is to sit there for four hours and pass out candy to all the kids that come up and and I I don't know.
It's silly, but it means something to me.
Well, my guess, Seth, is you consider that commitment a contribution to the neighborhood? Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know? Uh, I I do.
And and I I don't have a lot of connection to my neighborhood.
You know, it's not necessarily like it was when we were growing up and and everybody knew all their neighbors, but this is a way that I can connect with my neighbors.
And, yeah, I absolutely, uh, love it.
Yeah.
So it sounds like for you, it's a way of you expressing to your neighbors that I care that there is joy and camaraderie and some kind of commitment to the fun.
In this neighborhood and that you're willing to make it, you want them to see that.
No.
I think that's exactly right.
So there's my Playberry tool.
My job's done.
For your neighborhood.
Yeah.
For my neighborhood.
I I I guess I need to have some more in, you know, other parts of my life.
But look, Charles, thank you so much.
I am loving these conversations.
Uh, we've got more to go because there are seven principles, uh, in the book, The Art of Community.
Congratulations again on the second edition coming out, and we'll be back for more of these.
So thank you for joining me.
It was it's wonderful to have these conversations set
