Grow a community of like-minded people to support your dreams.

[00:00:00] Angela: Welcome to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. In this podcast, we’re going to be talking about some amazing things to help you get over overgiving. Hi, and welcome to this episode of the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. I am here to talk to you today about growing your community. You can think about this as your community inside your business. You can consider this your community of friends and family the team inside your business. Community is a very important aspect of our human existence.

Now, we often say we grow a community of like minded individuals to support you in your dreams. That’s a kind of a concept that we talk about and I’m going to challenge a couple things along the way, because. Not always like minded, but we’ll have a bit of a spill on that one, shall we? Okay? It’s important for you to identify what is and who do you want to be part of your community.

It’s important to look at what are your values and interests, goals. That you want to accomplish and who are the people that are going to support you in making those happens now. Sometimes we have goals and dreams about our business that our family or friends don’t get where they don’t understand. And that’s okay because they can be part of that community.

But when you’re looking at the business part of it, and you’re looking for people to support you in your business, you need to create a different community, perhaps then the other community over there. I have multiple communities, I hope you do as well, and they serve different purposes inside my life, and sometimes it’s like a Venn diagram, where some people, you know, might oversee another part of, or another community, might be involved in multiple communities, other times they just fit in their own circles.

But when you’re building that community, it starts out first by finding out the people who you want to spend time with. Now, you’ve been building communities your entire existence from the time you’ve started interacting with other human beings, you’ve been building community. You may not have taken an active role in building that community, but you have built communities, or people have built communities and you’ve been part of those communities, which technically is the same thing because you’ve chosen to stick around, or you stuck around for whatever reason you did.

Now you can take a more active role in these community building moments and you can choose to figure out what to do. You can do that by utilizing social media platforms to choose who you want to spend time with, to create these opportunities to spend time with the people that you’re looking for.

If you’re looking to build new relationships, then looking at outside sources like social media platforms or networking events, those can be ways that you can find new people. Thank you so much. If you’re looking to create new friendships that are outside of business, then you might want to look at joining different groups or even joining maybe a pottery class or a yoga class or something else that also fits into the values of what you want to do in your life.

Different groups can bring different amazing things to your life. So when you’re thinking about the different ways to build community, there are different kinds of communities as well. So we sort of touched on this a little bit. In terms of the community that you have with your family, and it is a community, there’s a bloodline, right?

There’s the people that are there because they happen to be part of the family. Then there’s another type of community that’s still family, but it’s not bloodline family. They’re choose, people you choose to believe or choose to associate to yourself as family members. I have several women in my life who are like sisters to me, and therefore I do say they’re my sisters.

There are lots of different ways that we can identify family. It doesn’t have to always be blood. This was a really hard lesson for me in 2013. I actually was ostracized by my mother. She has not spoken to me. There was a very brief time in 2020 when she reached out. But other than that, there is radio silence.

It’s not a positive and healthy relationship. I have learned to understand that that’s okay. It’s okay not to have the connection to a blood member family. just because they’re blood. In fact, building the other types of family relationships that I have built have been insanely empowering and really great for me as a human being to grow.

Putting stress on yourself in different communities, you can do it because you’re doing it for other people, but if you’re not doing it for yourself, if it isn’t giving back to you, then it’s just draining you. So that whole like minded concept, here’s where I want you to start thinking about this. Like minded can be as broad as, and it is for me, like minded people is as broad as we may not agree on things.

In terms of, we may not agree on politics, or we may not agree on religion, or we may not follow the same religion, or we may have different opinions, however, we do agree that we allow each other to have our own experiences and our own opinions, and we allow each other to influence us. With those opinions, and they allow us to influence them with our opinions.

Sometimes there’s some hearty debates, but we’re never going to judge or condemn somebody for their opinion. So, like minded in the way that we’re willing to grow we’re willing to learn we’re willing to hear other things about the world that maybe we don’t know, I have friends. All over the world. And I have learned things from them that I would never have learned living in my corner of the planet.

Because they see a different reality than I do, I can learn from their experiences and it’s a beautiful, amazing thing. I do not want people in my circle who are not like minded. I do not want people in my circle who believe that what they believe is true. You cannot change their minds. They are disciplined in the way they believe it and they are going to fight tooth and nail and they never want to change their opinion.

Those aren’t my people. They’re not like minded to the people that I like to spend time , with. So those types of people tend to find like minded relationships where they all think the same, where they all believe in the same religion, where they all believe in the same politics, where they have the same opinions.

So like minded doesn’t have to mean you believe the same things, but like minded could mean that you have the same Ideas about the world. So that’s why I wanted to clarify this like minded piece. I love being surrounded by people who do not think like me or who have different experiences in the world.

I am open to having my ideas changed. It can be difficult. It can be unsettling to learn new things and go, Oh, that reality I’ve been carrying for a while. That doesn’t make sense anymore. I remember when they, them pronouns came out and I thought, this doesn’t make any sense to me.

It hurt my brain. I just couldn’t gather and get around the concept that they, them should be a group of people rather than a single human being. And it took a lot of conversations. It took a lot of listening. Oh my gosh, two ears, one mouth. Right. It took a lot. Of working with other people, listening to their experiences for me to understand and for me to digest the English language a little differently.

It was a turning point. When it happened, it happened and it became very easy, for me to understand the they them pronouns in terms of one person rather than they the group. To now, when I look at it, I think, well, of course, they, them, I doesn’t make any, why would you care? Like you want to be called he, she, him, her, they, them.

I, it doesn’t matter to me what you want to be called. Just let me know and I’ll use it. Right. For me. Changing, it wasn’t difficult, but the understanding, when you think one way for a long time, you have to really work at changing your ideas inside your head. The values don’t change. The values, the like mindedness is still, I’m open to understand your expression.

Please tell me what your experiences are. Please help me to see the world the way you see the world. Sometimes people have a different view and I’m open to listening to them and what. I listen to them and I think, still not seeing your side of the story. No problem though. I mean, we can still see, you know, we don’t have to see eye to eye in order to be friends.

In fact, my husband and I do not agree on politics, usually, and religion is not a fantastic topic either in terms of us like totally agreeing on things. But we still love each other. We still care for each other. We still have a fantastic relationship with each other. Being open with people is what my like mindedness means.

So what’s interesting, figure out what your like mindedness is. What is it that you value that you want to have in the communities around you? Then think of that like mindedness and wonder, how can I find people who think like that? Doesn’t have to be think like me, okay? Networking events I talked about.

You can create a TikTok channel or a YouTube channel or a podcast even about your interests, your values, the way you think, the way you see the world and find other people who also have similar ideas to you. That can be another great way for you to create communities of support. You can host meetups or gatherings as well, even virtual, right?

You can say, Hey. I’m going to have a working session today or a networking session today. Who wants to join me on zoom? You can just put it out to the universe and see who comes. See what kind of relationships you can build. Joining groups, I told you, like on Facebook or LinkedIn, there’s different places you can join groups.

There’s lots of different ways that you can find new communities. If the communities you have aren’t working today, then find a way to change them. Not necessarily change the community because you can’t necessarily change what’s happening in the community. However, you can create new communities that serve you so much better than what those other communities have.

Have served you before in the past. And here’s, what’s also important is that just because a community works well for you today does not mean to say that that community is going to continue to work good for you forever. Okay. You may need to change that community. Just because it works today doesn’t mean to say it’s always going to work.

And when something falls apart, don’t go, Oh no, I’m really bad at communities or, Oh, my communities really suck. It’s simply, you might’ve outgrown that community or that community might have gone in a different direction that you’re not comfortable with. And then it’s okay, but know that you have the tools in order to create your own communities, that you have a way to create communities that are going to support you and your dreams.

I hope you have a fantastic week and I look forward to talking to you next week.