Lessons and Reflections from Building Professional and Personal Communities

Groove’s Head of Community Taylor Harrington discusses what she’s learned so far and favorite community leader resources with Portfolio Career Podcast

Our Head of Community, Taylor Harrington, joins her friend David Nebinski on his podcast, Portfolio Career Podcast, to discuss what it’s like working in community.

As David says, “We both started our professional community roles right around the same time of summer of 2021. In this episode, we share our lessons learned and reflections from our professional roles. We also talk about how we have been hosting events personally to help build community as well. You will also hear what our day-to-day roles look like and some ideas about how to break into the community professional field as well.”

You can listen to the podcast below, find other links on the Portfolio Career website.

David:

Hey friend, it’s David Nebinski here in Brooklyn, here at the Portfolio Career Podcast. We help you take ownership of your portfolio career and design the life that you want to live.

Today’s conversation is with Taylor Harrington, the Head of Community at Groove, a community-centric startup helping people get work done. I’ve known Taylor for a few years, initially through the Akimbo workshops community, founded by Seth Godin, where Taylor used to work. In the last year particularly and in New York City, we’ve become closer friends and peers, and I hope this conversation reflects that for you.

In this episode, you’ll learn about both of us reflecting on our roles as community professionals for a little bit more than a year. We talk about what our roles look like for her at Groove and me at the Chief of Staff Network, and questions to ask yourself when looking at and into community professional roles, throwing events, building personal communities, and so much more.

So excited for you to build and grow your portfolio career. Here we go with Taylor. Taylor, welcome to the show.

Taylor:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m honored. I’ve listened to so many episodes and I know so many people that have been on. This is like my moment I’ve been waiting for, so thank you.

David:

Ooh. Okay, now there’s a lot more pressure.

Taylor:

Let’s take it away. We’re gonna have fun.

David:

Cool. Did you Groove today, by the way?

Taylor:

Multiple times. It was really energizing. I had so much sh*t to get done. It’s a Monday, so of course I had to Groove and get a couple of sessions in.

David:

I wanna talk about, I remember we Grooved together in August of 2021, which is right around the time I started a new job. I thought that’d be an interesting place to start because we wanted to talk about reflecting on one year (ish) in our roles. Do you remember that Groove?

Taylor:

I actually very vividly remember it because I moved to New York City right around August of 2021 and I was trying to find a space outside of my tiny apartment to work in. I know we’ve talked quite a bit about co-working spaces and getting out of your normal realm of being in your bedroom while you work. As a young person in New York, my apartment isn’t very big, and I remember I was testing out these different WeWorks in the area because my company offered to pay for a WeWork pass so I could have that space to walk to.

I needed that separation, especially as a community leader and bringing all these people into my day. I need a place to go to so that they can live there, and I can live in my separate space when I come home at night. And so I was testing out all these WeWorks and I remember this WeWork that I was in when we were there, and, well, that’s a whole other story of why I didn’t like that WeWork.

But I very vividly remember getting into our first Groove together while I was mad at my community experience at this new WeWork.

David:

I don’t know the details as much, but I think during a Groove there’s a little bit of a quick check-in. And I feel like during that check-in, I said, I’m working on trying to get speakers to a conference.

I think that goal might have caught you off guard a little bit since I hadn’t announced my new job yet.

Anyways, I wanted to get your perspective on being over a year in this new role. You have really helped build the product, helped build the company, and really been at the intersection of co-creating a new community.

How do you think about that role and how do you compare it to all the other community roles that you may have seen or your friends may do?

Taylor:

I think there’s a couple of pieces to this. I think we are both similar in this way, that we’re community people at our core, and I do think among the world of community professionals, there are folks who somehow stumbled into this space and they love community.

They also are, say, more analytically focused or they are like, oh, I’m gonna like shut it off at the end of the day. I think some of the roles within community, for example, if you’re maybe in partnerships, like you’re really amped up about community partnerships that might not be so identity focused.

And so that’s what I’m trying to get to is, I feel like the role that I have is very identity focused and I think that yours might be as well. I’m sure we’ll talk about it more, but I feel this personal enrollment in making this come to life and really seeing it through. As you said, it’s been just over a year now. I started in June of 2021, so now it’s around 16 months. That’s hard math.

Now it’s really interesting to see, it really has gone from like zero, a really small community of just a few friends, investors, whatever, to this group of hundreds of people that are gathering. It’s really special and people are connected around the world.

As we’ve talked about, I’m just so invested in it as a human because it’s so in line with who I am and the mission of what I want to bring in the world, the change I wanna make in the world. So I think that’s the biggest piece for me.

And what was the question again? (Laughs)

David:

How do you compare it to other community roles. I guess the better question is, knowing what you know now a year into this, what kind of questions would you ask or have other people think about if they were interested in being a community manager or head of community?

Taylor:

So I know where I was going with this — is Groove is an early stage startup. I was the first full-time hire. So, when I joined with two co-founders that are based on the other side of the world, and I was like, all right, here we go, I was so nervous about joining this role, but I was also so amped up about it.

It was this really difficult decision in some ways because I was like, I’m going to be fully remote in a country without any coworkers as of right now. I was really riding on possibility when I said yes to this, of this is what it is right now and this is what it could be. And this is what I could see feeling once this thing really gets going.

Because even though I wouldn’t have coworkers with me physically, part of the whole thing of Groove is that I would feel connected to this wider world by co-working with people on the app. And so it was a lot of leaning into what could be. I think for a lot of community roles, you’re not looking at them at that early of a stage.

For so many of them, they’ve developed it further and the community isn’t the product. There are a lot of factors at play here for why my experience is unique in the way that it is. But I think if I were to look back, for someone who wants to get into this role, there’s a few questions that I would think about, and one of them was when I was looking for a community role, one of the hardest learnings that I figured out pretty much through doing a bunch of interviews was — who did I want to spend my time with?

Who did I want my community members to be? If you’re looking for a community role, that would be the biggest question I would answer right off the bat, because it took me a few months. I would have really figured out who that was and if I could have sped up that process. I mean, I guess that’s the thing. If I could have sped up that process, I wouldn’t have ended up at Groove.

But I think that finding that clarity is what I needed in order to find Groove. And if I hadn’t found that, I wouldn’t be where I am today. So it took some really hard saying nos to opportunities earlier on — things that I could have said yes to.

So that’s a question I would be thinking about if you want to go into this space. Who do you really want to spend your time with? Because those community members are really going to dictate that.

How about for you?

David:

I think that I looked at this role similar to the way that you shared there in terms of, okay, is there possibility here? For me it was like, this is an existing community. I’ve had three Chief of Staff roles. So it felt like I had role experience to be able to connect with and relate to the people in the community.

But also, I didn’t really know what it was like, so similarly to you, of building the product, building the company, building the startup. To me it also felt like there’s an element of possibility as well. Then once I learned more and stepped into it — and I didn’t really know this as much in the beginning — but then I was like, okay, here’s an opportunity to take this to another level or take it to another chapter, so to speak. That’s been really fun.

I know that you really like the term “community architect.” I had a friend that was like, David, I see you as a “community catalyst.”

I know the stories we tell ourselves are so powerful. I think he said that when I was in the beginning of the role, and he was like, ”Dude, this is perfect for you. You’re a community catalyst.” And I was like, wait, so I can post memes? And, and he was like yeah, you can do that.

But anyways, he said “I think that’s a sweet spot of yours — taking something that’s going and adding a little bit of different energy flare, helping it get to the next version.” I really liked that. I don’t know if there are job titles like that out there like community catalyst, but when I heard that it was empowering because then it helped me understand more and more of what I like to do, and what people reflect back to me of how I show up and how I bring that to the role.

Taylor:

It’s funny because we kind of just hit record and this is a conversation we would’ve had anyway while walking home from a community event. I think that the piece here of what you’re describing around what stage is this community in is what I was trying to get to with my first point here — I didn’t adopt the house, I helped architect it.

Sometimes you’re going to come into a community where it’s at a specific stage. So not only was I learning through my process of finding this role around these are the people I want to be around. “Oh wait, this is me too. I’m also lonely working from home. I’m also craving connection.” — a lot of the words I would use to describe who Groove is for, I identify with as well.

That’s when it feels like you’re really invested in this mission of where this goes. And when you come in early stages like this, it is different because you really are building that foundation the way that I talk about with the community architects.

It’s funny because I actually heard this term for the first time a couple of years ago from Carly Valancy, who I know has been on your podcast before and is a mutual friend.

David:

Shout out to Carly.

Taylor:

Yeah, shout out to Carly. So, really a community architect is the idea that my role is to really build the blueprints and work with the product team since we have a community-led product, or actually, it’s not even a community-led product, it’s a product that is community.

To co-work together to build something that’s really, really special. I like thinking about it with the house analogy because if we had the blueprints and the product team and I walk in and we’re like, all right, you guys are gonna start building these walls, I’m gonna grab the door frame, we’re gonna start building this together. I don’t want the product team to be hanging out in the shed building this thing without me. No, they’ve gotta be right in the house with me.

So that’s why this analogy works really well. And then once we’ve got the bare bones of the house, we can open up that door and have community members start to come in and build the rest with us so we can have someone say, I’d love if this wall was painted purple and for someone else to say, why don’t we bring in a green velvet couch?

That sounds like a lot of fun. And so you start to really build this together. I didn’t show up and the house was already built and up for sale. I showed up when it was just a plot of land.

David:

This ties into some of the reflections I had about one year so far.

And I know you want to challenge me on one of mine, but for me it was getting to be me as soon as possible. It feels like in your case, that was like day zero or that there was no other kind of existing state, so to speak. So you automatically had to do that.

For me, I think getting more and more comfortable and being more like me as soon as possible, helped me hopefully add value, but also move things forward.

What’s interesting is that a lot of how I was feeling or operating was some of the stuff that I had either learned or practiced or developed through some of the Akimbo workshops, so pretty cool for this whole to come full circle.

Taylor:

Well, and to really bring it full circle. I think the piece of that that I would say I experienced in that early stage regarding that identity is really, what do I keep just for myself? I kept coming back to that — that lesson. Not even that question, but that lesson.

The reason I bring it up here is I think that Seth Godin, who we know from Akimbo and altMBA, he does a great job of that in his blog where he keeps his personal life and his family life quite private. You don’t see a blog post that’s about his sons too often, if ever, or his wife.

There are those boundaries that you put in place. As someone who is available in a lot of different ways, as a community leader, you’re often very available. As someone who’s Grooving from my apartment, sometimes it’s a very interesting thing to be like, “Hello, everyone. This is my living room, just tuning in here.” And people ask, oh, what did you do this weekend? You get the opportunity to choose, what do you share with them? In order to keep those boundaries and to still feel like you have things that are just for yourself. That’s a lesson that I’ve continued to learn.

One of the ways I also learned this was trying to start a newsletter last year. I wrote it twice. And then I had paused because something wasn’t feeling right for me. I called it The Giving Plate. The reason was, a giving plate is this thing I saw on Etsy. I used to be an Etsy store owner, so I spent a lot of time on there.

On the plate, people would take a plate and they’d write in paint or use a Sharpie, and they’d write down these instructions of like, this is what you should do with the giving plate. So if I went to David’s house and I brought brownies. Then now David, you would have the plate and you could bring it over to another person’s house and the plate would keep on moving.

The idea was you’d keep on making memories with this plate and keep on passing it around. So I started this newsletter out of like, I don’t wanna hoard the plate. I want to keep giving the plate. I thought, I have all these ideas or all these things that are happening in my life — moving to New York and events that I’m going to and people I’m meeting.

I just want to give it all and generously share it with everyone, but as I wrote it, I started to realize, what am I doing? I need to keep some things just for myself. I can’t always be giving up all these different pieces of me. Of course, if someone asks me something, I’ll share it.

But there’s this interesting thing as a community leader that I’m still learning, of what is just for me and what is for my private life and what is for Taylor, the community builder to show up, and share all the time? We’ve talked about this before too, I’ve been trying to be more of a participant of life and go to some different events, where I’m not leading and I’m not bringing five people I know to them because I need to refuel as a participant sometimes and not as a leader or not as someone always bringing people together.

For those events, I don’t tell a lot of people where I’m going or that I’ve done them because I need that space that’s private. That’s just for me to keep sacred for the purpose that it has in my life. So that’s something that I’m continuing to learn — how much of myself to share with the community and the wider world.

David:

And has that evolved?

Taylor:

Yeah, definitely.

I think that I’m more aware of it now in the last few months, especially. I didn’t have the words for why I stopped the newsletter last year. It’s this interesting line of like, well, I’m not an open book, but I sort of am. If people ask me, oh, what are you up to? I’m always sharing funny stories and I’m always telling them, this is what I’m thinking about and things like that.

But I think that there’s also a piece of me that’s realizing I just need to protect like a little piece of Taylor that doesn’t need to always be sharing everything with everyone.

David:

Yeah, I like that. You mentioned one thing that I think has been really cool to see also — you talked a lot about the identity of the work that you’re doing, creating space, but then also creating professional communities and event. It seems like that’s fueling you and it seems like that is also probably helping you in your existing work too.

I would love to hear about that — I’ve been doing live podcast events. That’s been a whirl.

Taylor:

Which are great. For all of the listeners who may want to come to one , I highly recommend them. They’re awesome.

David:

That’s been a really fun way to experiment and try something new, test things. Have a great event and time and bring people together. But it seems like you’ve been doing the same as well. I don’t know. Maybe it’s like after a little while you got up to speed in the role and then you were like, okay, now I also want to do other things and create other events and bring other people together.

Is that fair?

Taylor:

Yeah, totally fair. And I think that part of it too is getting comfortable in a new city. When I moved, when I started my job, it was June of 2021, and then I moved to New York in August of 2021. So, I think I just got settled in the role, but also in the city and realizing that the type of connection that I wanted to have isn’t easy to come by.

My coworker Brandy and I talk a lot about third places, and I just think that this idea of there being a place to gather that’s not as quick and as unintentional as like, let’s go and grab drinks at happy hour, and it’s so loud and that type of thing.

How can you really curate a space for really meaningful connection, which I think is what we’ve bonded about a lot. I realized maybe I just need to take it into my own hands and do it myself. I think that the key is being really intentional about it.

So I’ve very much done this, similar to how I do work, where I’ve run things as experiments. What happens if I test x and what if I test y next time? What if I invite these people, but what if I add in this person? What if I took inspiration from one of your events, which I think actually was also a tip from Nick Gray and his book Two Hour Cocktail Party, but, to put a post-it in the elevator. So I put a post-it in the elevator and I was like, “Have a great night” and put a little smiley face. There’s three elevators in my building. So I had to put it in all three, which is sort of funny, waiting for all of them to sync up to come to my floor. But that helped everyone feel welcomed.

I test different things each time as I host things, whether it’s in my apartment with gatherings that I have with some of my girlfriends in the city, or professional events, where I’ve tested different things like these community picnics, going to a brewery… What is it like if I try something new? And constantly learning from that.

Like you said, I do think the piece of it that keeps me fueled and it not feel like work is, I’m just having fun with it. I don’t have to do it and I think that’s the key is I’m doing it because I want to and because I love it. If someone said you had to schedule six of these events in the year, boom, it automatically changes my entire intentionality around the entire thing. Now it feels like work. And right now it doesn’t feel like work.

I think I need to continue to play with that because I know that the moment I change that, if I were to charge for something to make money off of it, if I were to, put myself on the line for when, how many events need to happen, it just changes it, and it makes it more stressful and it adds another element to it.

How are you doing that? Because I feel like you’ve been hosting a lot of events in quite a short period of time.

David:

I think that I’ve been trying to continue a once a month experiment. I started that actually in March of 2020. It was right around the time I published episode 100. Then at that time I brought some people together to celebrate that. And then I was like, wow, this was fun. People came and then I tried to keep doing some experiments like that virtually and then continued it a little bit in 2021.

I continued it once a month. The experiments looked different, but generally it was around some type of personal community building effort. It just kind of feels like I’ve found a little bit of something with this live podcast social event.

It feels like prior experiments were really helpful and fun, but now it feels like I’ve found something that I want to keep doing. Similar to what it seems like with your community builders in New York City event series is like you found something and you want to keep doing it, and you want people to know that you’ll keep doing it, because there are benefits from being consistent.

So that’s where I’m at with this. It’s almost like it is still an experiment, but I also want to be consistent.

Taylor:

That makes sense. And I think that’s a generous way of framing it. It is nice for the other people to know it’s consistent. Like, oh, this is something I can hang on to, this is something I want to come back to, or if I want to invite someone the next time, instead of me, I’m going to tell them to go to this. It’s a nice thing where they can start to plan that out. Super interesting.

David:

Yeah. And it’s a little bit harder to describe too, so that’s another reason why I think there’s benefits to being consistent, because then slowly, hopefully the word gets out a little bit of what it’s like and what to expect.

Taylor:

It’s funny, even hearing you talk about March of 2020, I’m like, oh yeah, I forgot about certain things that happened during the pandemic. I hosted virtual events that I just did for fun. So I did my virtual version of what I’m doing now, when I was at home in my parents’ house in Connecticut in 2020. I was bringing people together and then similarly, iterating on that.

One of the things that I really found to be interesting is the question around books: “What is one book that has made a difference for you, or made a profound difference for you?”

I started to center events just around that. That was really interesting because people came back, even though they had been before, they came with a different book because they were like, oh, well other books have also made a profound impact on me. I found that question to be so fascinating because people could really tell their story with it, or part of their story that maybe they don’t talk about that often.

It’s interesting because as you’re sharing, I’m like, actually, I have been doing this for longer than I thought, and it’s just been in different ways. It’s all been up to now in the lessons that I’ve been learning now, to say, make the flower party that I had with my girlfriends last week as great as it was because I’ve been learning these lessons along the way, and it does take time in practice.

David:

They blend together, which is really cool too. I think like that. There’s been this really cool thing with this role where I’m like, wow, I’m doing the stuff that I would do anyways. That’s been just a general “aha” of community roles that the right community role can feel like that.

Roles like this didn’t really exist as much pre-pandemic. Do you feel similarly?

Taylor:

Yeah, I would agree. Or if they did, I didn’t know about them. When I was looking for my next role in 2021, I felt like there was this point where I was connected to a couple of folks who’ve had community in their title, after expressing what I wanted to do.

I could probably go back through the email chains of figuring out who was the first person to say, you should connect with this person and this person. But Yuval Yarden was someone who was maybe the first Head of Community that I had talked to. I think that’s her title.

I felt like after that call, I was in a theater and someone had just peeled back the curtain and I turned my head around and I was like, oh my god, all my people are right back here. I had no idea they were behind this curtain this entire time. These people who value the work that I do and value being a people person and that that’s something that could be a part of a job full-time.

It was like I peeled back this curtain and there were all these people back there, and I thought, what a shame that I had to peel back a curtain and I had to go through all these different conversations in order to get there. In the last year and a half, the industry as a whole has done a lot to make it more accessible for people who are curious about community roles to find each other.

Community Twitter is so fascinating because it’s quite public, what people are working on and what they’re curious about. I think that you do a great job on Twitter, or even LinkedIn, even more, where you list the takeaways from after hosting an event. That’s such a valuable way to, even just for yourself, go back to your Twitter so that when a year and a half from now, I say, oh, remember, in October when you were hosting those events, I wonder what your first takeaways were from the first two podcast events that you did. There’s a public record out there for you to go back to, but also for others to learn from.

I think community roles existed for sure, but they are different. I don’t think they were being built from day one as much as they are now, that’s for sure.

Community manager roles, my first thought around them was the folks that are the community managers at a WeWork. That’s the first experience I ever had with that title. I remember actually being in college and hearing about that. I always thought that WeWork was such an interesting concept because you put all these people in one space together who in theory on paper aren’t really meant to all be in one space, because they’re all on different paths. They’re suddenly all in the same building and whatever. That’s where I first remember hearing about it. I think that role is different than what we’re talking about right now.

David:

Yeah. And community Twitter, is that just like a hashtag or that’s different people that tweet about community, role learnings and experiences?

Taylor:

Yeah. #Community #CMGR Those are the two big ones, I would say.

David:

What other resources have been helpful for you?

You mentioned talking to Yuval was an “aha.” What else would you say to someone that’s looking to break in, in terms of other resources?

Taylor:

I have a whole Medium article about this. It’s hard when you’re looking into this for the first time and you’re like, oh my gosh, there’s buzz around this and I’m not a part of it yet.

So one of them would be following some of these folks on Twitter. I would also say Community Club and CMX. I’m in their Slack channels. I know that they have different parts to them as well. I think FeverBee also has a community platform that folks can connect with other community leaders.

I find that to be really helpful because you can kind of be a lurker and a fly on the wall in these Slack channels, where you see what other people are talking about, what they’re struggling with, what they are giving advice on. There’s a section of the Community Club Slack that’s called #community-questions. That’s where I get the most value out of it, is hearing what other people are thinking about, and being able to contribute as I can to people’s questions. Sometimes they’ll be like, oh, does anyone have an example of a product roadmap? And I’m like, yep, here it is. I can share a little bit about the thinking behind how we landed on ours at Groove.

That’s one place. And then, there’s a lot to be said about figuring out your section of community. One of the things that we’ve actually been playing with in the last few days, and maybe you’ve seen my tweets, is that I’m really loving this idea of “social health” and what does it mean to be socially healthy, similar to how we talk about physical health and mental health and how important those are.

What does it mean to be socially healthy and to fill your buckets with different types of connections? There’s this huge loneliness epidemic that we know about. There’s folks that are talking about missing their coworkers, people talking about weak ties. There’s always different research out there for why it is important to talk to strangers or weak ties, meaning folks that you know, but don’t know everything about them or, you’re not quite friends yet.

Those conversations are just so interesting to me in this community space and how that ties into my work. There are many other topics like that. When you talk about community leaders, I’m talking about like, Kat Vellos, someone who I admire, Priya Parker, some of these people that are really talking about loneliness, or as Priya would say, the art of gathering.

I’m really excited about more the data side of how do we take these incredible insights we’re learning about people and help them have better connections and that’s the piece of it that I get amped up about.

A lot of people get amped up about different things. There’s a whole part about NFTs and how there’s a community world around all of that.

There’s all these different sections, so I would look for who are the people talking about the bigger topics that you’re curious about in the community space because you can’t listen to everyone. It’s such a big space.

What is it that you really care about?

How about you? What would you say, from your perspective, are the steps you would take as a new community leader?

David:

I think that that’s a really good point about who are the leaders and the general topics that you’re really interested in.

There are different types of the role that are really interesting, whether that’s community growth, community operations or member experience.I think you and I both probably focus on member experience a lot more, but also community growth from what I can gather, is a big piece of what you do in terms of really getting the word out.

It’s about knowing where you veer a little bit more and then thinking about what does a really high quality member experience look like? Or what does a really high quality growth vehicle look like where people are just coming to you because the word is out?

Taylor:

I think, like you were saying before too, it is interesting because you can test out a lot of those member experience assertions and thoughts on smaller scale things. So if you’re like, oh, what is it like to get a warm welcome into an event or into a space?

Well, David here was my welcomer at my community leader event a couple of weeks ago. He offered to go stand by the door and welcome folks in as they came in. That was not a piece that I was even thinking about yet inside Groove, but that’s a huge piece of it. We offer a few different ways for you to get a warm welcome.

It’s interesting because even if you don’t have that role, and you’re in some other role or you’d want to start to play and experiment with things, see what it looks like to host a gathering of sorts. Invite 12 people and six of them get a warm welcome and six of them don’t and see what you learn from that. I’m comparing a little bit apples to oranges.

But I do think that as community leaders, you can start to test out those things in smaller groups, even in person that aren’t your role quite yet. The experimenting is a huge part of the role, is what I’m trying to say. At least for me.

David:

That was one of your main takeaways in this one blog post around one year reflections. The other two were lead with your heart and then listen to your community.

Is there anything else that you wanna talk about as a reflection on like kind of one year in the role?

Taylor:

Well, I definitely want to challenge you on your part too, if we could go back to that.

David:

So to be clear, one of my reflections on a LinkedIn post that I quickly put out there said make yourself as available as you can.

Taylor:

I think it connects to what I was going to share around building this with your community members. That’s a big thing that a lot of community leaders talk about is, build this with your community members, not just for them.

So it doesn’t look like having this shiny silver platter and being like, “Here, community members, this is what we built for you. What do you think?”

Instead, it’s figuring out, what is the UX research that goes into that, especially as a product, having an app. We have a lot of UX research that goes into us making decisions about new changes to make into the app because it does take a lot of labor on the team and a lot of energy and thought. We are very, very much building this with our community.

It connects to your point here because it’s a lot of gathering insights all the time. I wanted to hear a little bit more about how you do that, because on Groove, it’s funny because I get to do a lot of that just by Grooving, as you mentioned. Like, oh, how many times did I Groove today? I Grooved four or five times today. I don’t even remember at this point.

It was great because each time I had a different experience and I was able to learn different things. There were two people that have only Grooved less than five times. I wrote to my team a couple of insights that I got from Grooving together. So we can now act on those or take them into consideration the next time we do our full-on research.

So I want to hear a little bit about why you make yourself as available as you can and what have you learned from doing that?

David:

I think it ties into the first point, at the end of the day, what I was saying there was around relationship building. I’ve shared my Calendly link. And it’s possible to say like, hey, schedule only 24 hours in advance, but I found that when they want to talk to me in the same day, to me, there’s something going on and they want to chat with me. And so those calls I think are the most interesting — there’s something going on and they want to talk.

So I think if I was to say no, here’s my calendar, I only talk to people on Friday, they would’ve been like, I’ve already moved on. Those calls I really like because I’m like, oh, you wanted to talk to me in an hour, what’s up? So granted I work nine to five, so there’s some boundaries I’m setting obviously.

Taylor:

Right, right. So someone can literally schedule a call with you for an hour from now in theory?

David:

Yeah. And it happens.

Taylor:

That’s fascinating. That is not how I operate. I have a very colorful Google calendar that is very much planned out. I don’t leave a lot of room for serendipity in my days or even, I don’t have a Calendly, I don’t have a one-on-one way for community members to meet up with me.

But it is interesting because when I hop into a Groove, those folks are all getting notifications so that they can go ahead and join me there.

But it’s very probable two other people will join us as well. So it’ll fill up as a four person Groove, in which case you no longer get that private time with me. So it is really interesting just to hear how much you emphasize that, because that is not something that I’ve emphasized.

I’m in a unique position, with such an easy way to meet up with Groovers. I click the button and it’s like, oh, I’m getting sh*t done over the next 50 minutes and I’m also connecting with you and going through this shared experience. So we do get to stay in touch quite a bit, but as you mentioned, it’s not the one-on-ones, like if someone is actually going through something.

I also think it points out that there are differences in what our community needs and the spaces that they need. For me, support might look more like cheering them on on a really tough day. And so I’ve had that where a Groover will hop on, where they’ll message me and say, “Hey, I’m having a really tough day. Would you like to go on a hop on a Groove with me?”

And I’ll say, sure. And we go on and we have a really fun, productive 50 minutes and they say, “Thank you so much for doing that. I needed that today.” And you might get a similar sentiment at the end of the one hour that you have with folks, where they needed that type of support and you were able to provide that for them.

It’s just interesting. I am glad that I don’t have to be that available because it would actually make my mind go bonkers if my calendar was up to the community members to decide what happens in the next hour.

David:

Yeah. Well, maybe I’ll change.

Taylor:

I’m not saying one’s better than the other. I’m just saying it sounds like there are different needs. And if that works for you, that works for you!

Does it work for you? That’s what I really want to know. Does that work for you?

David:

I don’t think it’s really gotten in the way, and I will likely adapt it to maybe say there’s only certain days. But I kind of like the spontaneity of it.

Is there anything else that you think that we missed?

Taylor:

We could do this all day long. What do you want to hear about?

David:

What’s a recent book that’s changed your life?

Taylor:

I would say The Power of Ritual by Casper ter Kuile, have you read it?

David:

No.

Taylor:

I had the pleasure of going to listen to him speak a few weeks later at a Creative Mornings event, which was really special and not planned at all.

I had just read his book and then I actually wrote a Medium article where wrote my favorite takeaways, and then I saw like two days later him tweet that he was gonna be at this thing, and I was like, oh, I get to meet him and tell him how much of an impact this book left on me.

The high level is that ritual is something that’s been a part of people’s lives for hundreds and hundreds of years, and some of the structures where we experience some of the most powerful rituals are no longer as normal to be a part of or as regular or accessible, or they don’t even exist. It’s a challenge of how to create powerful rituals in our daily lives, or on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis with people that we care about. It’s something that just lights me up. So I would highly recommend if you’re as fascinated by rituals as I am.

Looking for more Groovy Content? Check these out:

1. Groove’s Year in Review
2. You Don’t Need Coworking, You Need Camaraderie
3. Or, if you’re ready to get sh*t done the fun way cruise on over to groove.ooo