Intentional community building

It's lonely at the top, the old saying goes. But we create some of our own loneliness, and we have the power to uncreate it. We should, but we first need to dispel the myth that we need to do everything on our own, absent the support of a community.

The thing is, early in your life and career, you are surrounded by communities that in almost all cases, are built for you. School up until college is literally forced community. In college, you get a little more autonomy over community development, but you're still surrounded by hundreds, even thousands, of peers at any given time, who have self-selected a number of interests and activities that school or organizations plan for you. And for many of us who join midsize or large companies after college, we enter internship cohorts, long-term orientation and mentorship programs, and likely work with and amongst peers in or around your age group.

How many of your closest friends, confidants, significant others, etc., come from these examples? Probably many! The relationships you lean on the most, for love, help, support, affection, self-worth, etc., likely come from relationships you developed when community building was done for you.

As you become more senior in your career, fewer and fewer communities are built for you to just show up to. The error that most make in this situation is not intentionally building or joining new communities. That has real psychological impact. Here's a scenario that may resonate with some:

As you and your original friend cohort age, not all of them follow the same career path as you; some get married and have kids; some move away. Not only does that friend core thin, but you relate to fewer of them as your interests and daily lives diverge. That is okay! It's not realistic to expect relationships you developed between the ages of 15 and 25 to consistently retain tightness and relevance when you're 35 to 55. People change, yourself included; you can still love these people (or not).

But suddenly, you can't count any truly deep or impactful friendships developed during your mid-career onward. You have fewer people you can authentically connect to, be vulnerable to, ask for help, break down in front of.

You stay on the grind and get promoted, or take on an exciting new promotion elsewhere. You have a new, tough, stressful challenge…but you're surrounded by less community and less support. Narrator: this is a bad combination.

Without a strong community, you face many problems alone; those you might still talk to, you don't give many details to, either because you don't think they will understand, you don't find the value in sharing, you don't think you have time, or some combination.

Without real relating to other people, without authentic, vulnerable connection, you become a bottle of emotions, some of which are familiar to you and some which are new; new stressors, after all. Because culture starts at the top, your team and your coworkers shape themselves in your image. Whatever you think you're bottling up, your team carries.

It's then a race to what breaks down first: you, or your team, who unwittingly carry your stressors for you. Suddenly, as you face either your own emotions, the emotions of your team, or both, you realize how alone you feel, how in a time of crisis, being cracked open from the inside, you have few people to turn to, to help you pick up the pieces.

This happens a lot. The decrease of "automatic community," along with continued success, creates an interesting story that makes people tell themselves: "I need to prove to them, and to myself, that I can do this. I also am doing this differently than those before me. I don't think many people will understand what I am going through, and I don't have the time to catch them up, anyway. I can do this on my own. I need to do this on my own."

When times are good, the driven trick themselves into thinking they don't need community. It's not until progress halts do they realize the power of a cohort, to beam your best parts back onto you when you doubt, to remind you of your worthiness of help and compassion and affection and love, to sit with and be okay with the fact that you don't know what you're doing, to unwind the anxieties and fears and guilt and shames that remove you from presence and bring you back into your mind and body, and tactically, to simply help you talk through problems and challenges that others have likely faced before in some capacity.

To summarize that whole paragraph: community reminds you that you're not alone, others understand and have been there before, and that you are worthy of help.

Believe it or not, that realization is the hard part. Never before in human history has it been easier to create a community. Fortunately, many, many people have figured that out before you read this post, and now, there are literally endless amounts of communities popping up around all kinds of mid-career and senior-career level professionals.

Thanks to tools like Discord and Slack, these communities now transcend "Huge chaotic Facebook group" and have distinct organization, roles, channels/threads, and more; while something as simple as Slack threads seems like a tech solution in search of a problem in this context, having purposeful conversation "rooms" allows the development of intimacy even in Slack groups of thousands of people, by narrowing conversation points into topics that you care about in that moment.

Seriously, there is a bounty of communities out there available for anyone can join as a starting point. I can speak for the communications industry when I say that many people in these communities are incredibly empathetic to these challenges and in my experience, will likely welcome you with open arms and provide advice, guidance and friendship. Beyond the publicly available communities, there are many industry-specific, smaller invite-communities that you're likely to find as you relate to others.

(If online communities aren't your thing, offline communities exist, too, though with the pandemic, many will probably need to be rebooted.)

But let's remember the point of these communities. Don't join-but-lurk. Building a community requires participation and a degree of vulnerability. You need to engage, share your story, jump into threads, discuss what's on your mind. Sometimes it will stick and sometimes it won't. Sometimes, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the response.

It gets so much harder to be vulnerable as you advance and age. The stories your mind creates, like "no one will understand" and "I don't have time to explain anyway" are 100% false, and in my experience, are mechanisms to protect yourself from guilt, shame, fear of failure, or some combination of those things. The pressure to present well, seem worldly and even invulnerable, can be immense as you progress. The invisible, unconscious, systematic removal of community can at times feel like you're alone atop a tall, guilded tower - but to get out, you need to walk down floors of painful emotions, so better to convince yourself that the trip isn't worth it anyway.

You'll be surprised what you'll find in a community of peers. Senior, successful people, that you respect, who have been laid off or fired; who made huge mistakes and rebounded; who are facing the same problem you are; who might even live in or around your ZIP code; who read articles/books or saw professionals whose insights really helped; all of whom shared, participated, and turned out better.

The idea of community development can seem exhausting, especially post-pandemic and doubly especially for the not naturally extroverted. If this sounds like you, I want you to examine what part of community building seems so draining.

• Is it "finding the right community"? See above; I can't promise that the first community you join will be perfect for you, but fortunately, the price of trying and trying again is quite low.

• Is it developing and creating the persona you want the community to see? If so, remember the goal of joining the community in the first place: vulnerability and openness that leads to real connection and advice and support. All that takes is sharing where you're at. If you've realized you need that kind of connection, remember - that was the hard part. Your self-awareness, vulnerability and your ability to connect through it create valuable, rewarding internal power, not the front you present.

• Is it having to learn the ins-and-outs of the community before you feel "ready" to participate? Many online communities make this easy through guidelines that all new members can read. Many such guidelines are pretty straightforward (don’t be a jerk, SFW content, etc.), and few have strict rules around participation.

• Is it the idea of being vulnerable to strangers? The point of joining a community of like-minded peers is that you can skip a few steps of context development. You understand, in broad strokes, the worlds you occupy, similar problems you face, habits you may have developed, gripes with certain decisions, etc. You might be surprised about the degree to which you preternaturally see eye-to-eye on topics with people you've never met.

• Is it talking to big groups? If so, don't conflate "community" with "State of the Union speeches". The nice part about online communities is that you have the option to DM someone if they made a point that resonated with you. Some of my best conversations have started that way, and even resulted in off-channel Zoom chats and real-world friendships and mentorships.

It's never too early to develop and join communities, either; even for early-career professionals, start now! Don't rely only on the communities developed for you.

Part of your mental health and career development should absolutely include some kind of intentional, online and offline community development. Try it, or talk to me about it if you're not sure.