Turn your Values into Verbs: Adventure and Community

In this NEW blog series,?Turn your Values into Verbs,?I will review my top 10 values and how I use them in my business as I begin a new coaching service in 2023.?This year what I learned about myself was the kind of clients I serve well, and that is someone with a team, but what I kept discovering is that the people who were finding me didn’t have a team; they were individuals who wanted to build something amazing to support their existing business. Or they want to start a new business with a community-led approach. This is where my new offerings will begin to shine well, and what I learned was that so many people need support in mindset and motivation and want to find calm but struggle with endless opportunities.?

In my life, values are the way I want to feel, experience, and express myself. I see them as a way to guide me into making decisions about clients and services and also a way to remind myself of what it is I stand for or believe in. So I want to have these on my website, on my landing pages, and on my services pages. They are going to help guide me in the direction of my business.??

As a travel writer, I’m the first one to jump on a plane and travel to an unknown place. This was true as a kid, taking “adventures” with my sister, following the creek behind our home as it wound its way through our small Pennsylvania town. With an adventurous spirit,?I see the world as a place to journey, discover, learn, connect with others, and wander with purpose, intention, respect, and a desire to make the world a better place for generations to come.?

The work I have done in the past two years was the very definition of adventure because a business isn’t a straight line, it’s more of a squiggle. The framing of seeing my life as an “adventure” reminds me of another friend who I’d met in a travel community, his name is Heath Armstrong and he’s the founder of?RageCreate?. He shared with me during a conversation while sitting on a porch in Denver, Colorado, that he’s been on a lot of adventures and that life is the biggest adventure we will ever have.?His lighthearted approach to life, allowed me to feel a sense of freedom in knowing that I didn’t have to have it “all figured out” and that I can see my life as an adventure, in each moment, just like being curious, I can find that path leads me somewhere unknown.?

What this looks like when I work with clients is to try to see each phase of a project as an adventure to explore.?When I’m working on business development, we create a series of “explorations” which is another way of saying that we analyze?what we know to be true. For example, if we know based on research that a target audience is a good fit, then let’s Explore that, and ask different kinds of questions.?

My improv practice comes to mind here, so bare with me. Another way I see adventure being used in my daily life is by looking at each day, month, and year as their own adventures. There are a lot of different possibilities, and?choosing one doesn’t mean saying “no” forever, it just means saying “yes, and…”?meaning how can we choose a path and dig deeper into that groove to find purpose, meaning, and intention??

To me, the community is a shared experience; a sense of gathering together with others who have a shared interest, purpose, mission, or vision. This is one of my top values because I believe in the importance of establishing, developing, or designing your own “community” for yourself.?For me, that’s the individuals whom I connect with the most, who have my “back” and who share some similar values, including kindness, curiosity, compassion, adventure, growth, and/or other values that we discuss together.?

The photo I've shared in the graphic at the top of this article is a photo of an online community I was a member of for several years that met in person in Queretaro, Mexico, in 2019. Location Indie is an online community for those who want to be location independent and work while they travel. This community helped me reach my goal of quitting my corporate job in 2019 and inspired me to travel now instead of waiting for "some day."

A community could be 3 or more people, but there’s no limit to how many people make up a community, and there’s no “right number” of people who define a community. It’s simply the group of people whom I can most be myself with and feel safe, valued, and heard. What this looks like with clients is when I’m helping inside a community they lead, which is usually a facilitator role, in which I offer a space for others to be seen.?Since I’m a community consultant, this will not come as a surprise to most, but I value communities of practice the most because I believe it is the combination of education, implementation, and accountability that offer transformation.?

What it looks like for my life as a business owner is the communities that I choose to spend time in for networking and meeting fellow business owners. This could include the chamber of commerce, but in my case, after joining a lot of the local chambers, I have met a bunch of women in a networking group an hour from where I live, which has really been a meaningful place for me to spend my time building relationships.?A caution about community as a value, I do spend time evaluating my presence in an online or in-person space to see if that community is a good fit for me.?I think many of us are invited to a Facebook group, networking session, or some sort of mixer in hopes of building relationships with potential clients. That does happen, but I’d like to take a new approach in 2023 for my business and really only spend time in a community where I can?develop intentional relationships that aren’t based on transactions.?This is something new for me, so it will be a practice to ask difficult questions about the community, and how I decide to join or not will depend on my answers.

Questions to consider when designing your community experiences:

Does this fit my current needs?

Do I need this group right now?

Why is this group important to me besides potential clients?

What do I bring to this group??

How will I show up and participate??

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