You Are The Company You Keep
Where is your community?
In other words, where are you most connected?
Where do you consistently find yourself when you feel encouraged and challenged? Who is within the group of people that are pushing and driving you to become who you’ve set out to be?
I think it’s easy to settle into the belief that our community must be with a group of people just like us. That in order to be successful we have to surround ourselves with like-minded people or people who are in similar situations as ourselves. In the last two or three years I’ve found that although I love hanging out with people like me, I’m finding I’m most challenged and more likely to grow when I’m surrounded by folks who don’t think like me.
To find a community full of different-than-you can seem counterproductive. I think that’s because we find comfort in those settings. A lot of us have a hive mentality, a tendency to make decisions when the group we surround ourselves with agrees. Which, don’t get me wrong, finding comfort is not bad. We’re used to what’s comfortable. But growth comes when we’re uncomfortable. And I think our community can be the counter to being comfortable that we need. The good kind of uncomfortable.
Community is the place where we are pushed, it’s the place where there are enough underlying values that we share that help hold us together so that when difficult conversations need to be had they are welcomed and accepted. If a connection was the first part of building a life we deeply believe in, then a community is the second part. Where we have found and built upon those initial connections, we must now foster community in a way that is built on accountability.
Now, don’t stop reading there. I know that for many of us accountability can trigger us. It’s often been used as a tool of shame. I wish there was a better word to use here than accountability but I don’t think it’s the word that’s wrong I think it’s the definition and way we’ve used it that’s wrong. Accountability for a long time has been that thing where we had someone or a group in our life consistently ask us about the things we did not want to be doing. And although I understand the intent, I believe the impact of that has been detrimental. It’s the definition we warped, not the word. Accountability, simply, is being reminded of what we want.
To walk it backward, in order to build a community of accountability, we must first build a connection. And in order to build a connection, we must first determine what we want.
So we start with our age-old question, what do you want? Make a list of everything you can think of in every aspect of your life. Then ask yourself, where can you connect with a community? Then consider, where is there a community that you either join or start that’s built around a desire to push and challenge for accountability's sake.
