Communities are powerful AND forgiving

0:00A community is the single most powerful way to navigate a highly dynamic, rapidly changing world. Unlike just consuming content or just, you know, constantly just trying to figure out what's going on in the world through public feeds, a community gives you the opportunity to build relationships with people who are on the same path.

0:34Hi, I'm Gina Bianchini. This is People Magic. where I show you the absolute easiest way to create a$1 million community and have a fantastic time doing it. With that, let's go ahead and dive in. Hi, Gina. I would really, really love to hear your advice on setbacks because I'm currently going through a bit of a tough time. I didn't really see this setback coming, and it means I have to change a lot of my programming. I don't want to get into all of the logistics, but how do you approach setbacks within a community that already exists? I love this question. So first of all, what I really appreciate about the question is that you didn't just quit.

1:22You didn't just give up. You didn't just basically say, oh, my gosh, I had a setback. I guess this doesn't work. I guess people are too busy for my community. Maybe what I should do is just like go and build a social media audience. Why would I do this versus maybe it's just easier for me to go like build an email newsletter. Here is why I absolutely love community. And the answer to how to navigate setbacks with community is implicit in it. Okay, so number one, a community is the single most powerful way to navigate a highly dynamic, rapidly changing world. Unlike just consuming content or just, you know, constantly just trying to figure out what's going on in the world through public feeds, a community gives you the opportunity to build relationships with people who are on the same path.

2:23People who have raised their hand and said, I want to be in this community because I am navigating this transition. I have this goal in my life, my professional life, as it relates to my health and wellness, in the important interests in the world, or just I need a hobby like reading or woodwork or crocheting or needlepoint where I just need to be able to check out and meet cool people. make cool stuff, learn how to go from not knowing how to do something to knowing how to do something. And that is where I want to spend my time, my energy, my focus. And by the way, as I do that, I will get more perspective from real human beings on where the world is, where it's going, and what I want my contribution and the relationships that I have in this world to mean.

3:22I'm also going to get a heck of a lot smarter with conversations I'm having with people as opposed to just consuming content. The second reason that I love community is that community is the single most powerful way for any of us to build new practices, new habits, and see and understand new insights. We are social animals. We are social beings. We are meant to learn from other people. We're meant to emulate other people. We're meant to understand the way the world works because we're watching what other people do, what time they get up, what time they go to bed, what they eat at lunch or dinner, who you surround yourself.

4:10It's such a cliche, but it's so true. The five people that you surround yourself with every single day, they probably have the most impact on who you are and what you can accomplish than anybody else. Picking your community, curating the people that you are bringing together, and not just you being at the center of that constellation of people, but that you're bringing the group together and seeing what kind of culture that you can build in pursuit of how you want to live your life. and how other people want to live your life and what you want to learn from each other. So that then leads to community being the single most powerful way of building new practices.

4:53If everybody's getting up at 6 a.m. to go running and taking a picture and you're in bed and it's freezing and you're like, I don't want to get up today. If you didn't have those five other photos on your phone of people who got up and actually went running or like are working out in like the freezing cold, You definitely won't get up or it's much lower probability that you're going to get up. If you wake up and you pull out your phone and with one eye are looking at five people who are up and freezing, but they're out doing it, you have just radically increased the probability that you, too, are going to get up, put on some warm clothes, go run so that you can come back and take that photo.

5:31And now it is another day that you have under your belt where you got up at 6 a.m. and you went running. Or if you are a group of people and it's like you're watching what they're doing and it's about not drinking or it's about eating a certain way or it's about meditating at a certain time of day or it is about making something, you too will want to make something. So practices, habits, and insights. We're all just trying to figure out, especially in this dynamic, rapidly changing world, what the hell to do. In a community, you will have knowledge and insights that are unique and differentiated than whatever everybody else is looking at in terms of conventional thinking.

6:18It's not just about who you pay attention to on social media. It is absolutely about who are you building relationships with? Who can you test ideas out on? And how can you do it in a way that those insights are special to you and your group, you and your community, and that you get to try new things out in forgiving spaces, open spaces, spaces that you show up and it's like, okay, I know the cultural norms here. And I know how to do this. And if you have a community that is able to help you and your members or you as a member navigate a dynamic, rapidly changing world, build new practices, new habits, and unlock new insights that nobody else has, then a community is the single most powerful way for you to achieve results and transformation.

7:17that you cannot get on your own. Why do I share those three things as passionately as I do? Because when it comes to setbacks, the first thing you have to do is say, why the hell am I doing this in the first place? I could be on my couch, binging a show. I could be doing something else. I could read a book. You do it because you remember why you are doing it. Someone somewhere just said, oh, so I guess she means finding your why. Sure. Finding our why. But when you think about navigating a dynamic, rapidly changing world, building new practices, habits, and unlocking new insights, getting results and transformation that you can't get on your own, creating a community is the single most powerful business that you can create because if you set up the conditions by which people are providing that to each other and for each other, it will grow itself.

8:26It has extremely high margins. It will not require a lot of time, energy, and effort to manage, time, energy, and effort to grow, it will take care of those things for itself. And the software is only getting easier and easier to make that happen. As you are navigating setbacks, number one, know why a community is so powerful. And number two, and this is something that I just think is so important, which is the world can be kind of a tough place sometimes. Social media is a tough, tough place. People can tune you out real fast. And, you know, investing a ton of time in an email newsletter. Trust me, I love a nice email newsletter.

9:13I read like one out of the 25 I subscribe to, some of which I pay for, some of which I don't. That's a ton of work. There's a ton of work that people can just tune out. In contrast, a community is forgiving. Why is it so much more forgiving? Because there's lots of people. There's lots of interesting things going on. There's lots of things that are going right and could go wrong. So if something goes wrong, it's not that big of a deal. I have found myself on the giving end of some technical problems in a live stream, or I didn't read a question correctly and I answered it wrong, or I tried to set something up and like two people showed up.

10:05All of those things in a community don't ultimately matter because you are coming from such a stronger foundation. And because of that, because a community is so powerful for those three reasons, navigating a dynamic, rapidly changing world, building new practices, habits, getting new insights, people on their own path to achieving results and transformation they can't get on their own, your community can be forgiving. In the same way that a community can be really forgiving, what we tend to find when we have setbacks is that the person who is not forgiving is ourselves. What I have found in being a member of a community, running a community, running big communities, running small communities, is that so often I have found when I have setbacks, it's my community that lifts me up when I am just sitting there beating myself up.

11:05So I just want to offer you grace. I want to offer you grace. Give yourself grace. I want to give you permission to give yourself grace and know that you are creating, even if it doesn't feel like it right now, the most important, nearly perfect business that you can, even if it's modest today, even if it is something you're doing for the first time, even if it is something that you're excited to do, but you're not quite ready. When you get there, you are on your path to building a near perfect business that is ultimately going to become a perfect business. Even with the setbacks that you have today, when you zoom out and you look at where the world is going, the world wants more community.

12:01People are hungry for communities. They are drowning in data. They are drowning in content. They do not want to watch another course video. I love the course videos, but they want human connection. They want that real-time energy that you only get when you're in a group with other people and everybody's talking and you have a purpose for being there. You know why you're there. The reason a community is on the path to becoming a perfect business because we can use software to make the connections between members in increasingly valuable ways that do not require you to do a lot of work, but that rather happens without you.

12:47And what you get to put on top is all the things that make you unique and make your members unique. Those connection points that no software can replace, but software can unlock and enable, that's worth fighting for. And I would argue, don't just take the night off and mindlessly and without intention, let your time get sucked into something. That's just too easy when we, again, have a casino in our pocket. But be intentional about how you're going to relax, how you're going to disconnect, how you're going to give yourself grace, how you're going to give yourself the space and time to just get some energy and get some perspective, whatever that might mean for you.

13:41So that when you wake up in the morning with fresh eyes, you can look around and say, in the full course of what I am doing and how I'm doing this, yes, this was a setback, But the picture of where I am taking my business, my community, my impact, my future is too important and too glorious to stop now. It's going to get easier. It's going to get more fun. And the world will continue to look at and invest in communities to create the most forgiving, most energizing, most interesting, and most valuable asset any individual person on planet Earth can have. I'm Gina Bianchini. This is People Magic.

14:39And thank you for joining me.

14:47Thank you for being a part of People Magic. If you want more of a deep dive in any of these topics, but certainly having the framework of People Magic Profit, head on over to the website. The link is in the show notes. Have your own burning question about creating People Magic. Well, I want to answer it. So here's what you're going to do. You're going to just drop your question in the review section wherever you're listening to this podcast and keep tuning in.