If you find yourself swinging Tarzan style from selfish to selfless, wondering if you’re too much take and then too much give, this is my love letter to you, wrapped around an everlasting gobsmacker of wisdom that will help you stop swinging for anything other than glee.
The win-win-win.
Last week I wrote about how not to build community, and how to build it is coming, but for now a tiny shortcut. A mini-mantra to help you consider a community:
The win-win-win.
How can you facilitate a class, a family gathering, a meeting, a coup that truly fosters something wonderful that allows each stakeholder to feel like they’re winning? How do you feel like you’re getting one over on your boss, while they feel like they’ve won the lottery on you, and your clients all feel like they’re getting a steal-of-a-deal?
How does everyone win requires you to know who everyone is. To be curious and kind and inviting. You can’t just decide, you need to ask them and ensure that they have a way to know and articulate the thing that would help them feeling winning about the thing.
More on that next time.
For now, narrow the infinite field of possibility by choosing the path forward that makes everyone feel like they are winning.
This week I’ve spent writing myself into a hole that just keeps getting deeper. It has the foreboding quality of a book emerging from the vast rest and contemplation I’ve steeped in for the past few months, and this is both thrilling and overwhelming.
I’m just trying to write a latte over here, but a latte (the virtual sort) cannot have chapters. Substack says so.
So let me tell you the story behind the story, on the off chance it’s short enough to easily accompany your 5-10 minute latte and won’t require that you cancel your Sunday afternoon plans and locate a power source to keep your screen fed?
Let’s start with how you got here, and why you’re reading this.
First, you probably crossed paths with me somewhere I was teaching something. Yoga? How to teach yoga? How to sail through the choppy seas of pregnancy? Maybe a bit about contextualizing boundaries? I’m ok at these things. I’ve got loads of experience with the content of each of these buckets, and I’m a heck of a storyteller, but a truly baffling thing has happened which the [virtual latte] has made clear.
You’re here for the how.
Do you know how I know?
[first, when I mean you I mean the collective, not the individual, so don’t get weird on me]
In all of the personal and business development courses I’ve taken, I’ve been prompted to check in with my most faithful or dedicated students/readers to create an ‘ideal client avatar’ or two. Niche down, the people say. Find your niche and speak to them. This has never gone well for me, but I’ve watched in awe as others locate that their folks are ‘moms of littles who are also navigating careers and like to shop at Whole Foods’ or ‘recent empty nesters with a penchant for running who need to build muscle and also abhor plastic pants’ or ‘closet gamers who like to read romance and are looking to prep cook more meals at home.’
Weird, but fine. And clear. So irritatingly clear, as mine fall into the following categories:
“Highly-educated/intellectual parents (of human or fur babes) who are in long term partnerships and just fucking overwhelmed by the nonsense of life,”
Or
“Seekers who have located yoga and found that it scratches the itch but not all the way, and are slightly disenfranchised and skeptical, and actually just want to curate meaning and not be required to own pants of a specific size or brand (or at all),”
Or
“Very tall men.”
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