Day 26: Community of Support

Today you will learn what creating a community around your purpose means, why having a community of support is important to your purpose, and how to begin building your community from a small group of intimate supporters into a movement.

Summary

What is a Community of Support?

At some point along your journey you will realize that in order to actually solve the problem you have made part of your purpose, you are going to need the help of other people, a community of support.

A community of support are the people who either contribute directly to your cause by working alongside you or indirectly through emotional, mental, financial, or physical support.

Why is a Community of Support important?

A community of support will amplify your purpose, because not only are you going to be putting action and effort towards your goals, you're going to have the support of other people that are also taking action and effort and only multiplying the things that you're doing.

• Having people that support you, collaborators and peers, are a miraculous source of strength.
• Accepting that support isn't a sign of weakness. It's a profound human strength.

How to create a Community of Support

There are three levels you can build for your community of support.

Level One: Immediate Circle

• These are your immediate connections that are gonna support you: your family, your friends, your peers, your networks, and the different people you collaborate with.
• With friends or family, don't tolerate cynicism, even from the people closest to you. Tell them that you've only made room in your life for supporters and cheerleaders and believers in your mission.
• With family, continue executing on your purpose and show them the success from doing so.
• Peers and collaborators are people that are working on the same thing as you or are working in adjacent fields that you can do creative work with.
• Participate and share your ideas, your insights, what you're working on, the things that you've learned from your experiments in the spirit of helping communities of peers and collaborators you join.

Level Two: Your Audience

• These are the people you are producing something for, the people that are either consuming your work or love the mission so much that they're always cheering you on and supporting it.
• The only way that you're gonna get feedback about your work is if you put it in front of other people. You need to get feedback about if your solution is actually going to help these people.
• In your daily practice, take something that you're building, an idea that you're working with, and start sharing it with others.
• If you building a product or service, start with a minimal viable products and get it out as quickly as possible to test in front of the people you're trying to serve, asking them questions to see if it's really working for them or not.
• Some of the best people to sharing with is your immediate circle and expanding from there.
• Engage in a sharing cycle of creating something, then sharing it, promoting what we've created so that more people see it and cultivating a community around what we've created and then as we cultivate that community, they'll give us feedback and we can go back to step one.

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Level Three: A Movement

• Eventually as you build your audience over time, you're gonna start gaining a lot of momentum and this thing might even grow beyond you into a movement. Which is when we reach level three of creating a movement.
• A movement is something that goes beyond you and is usually an idea that people can rally behind, taking it as their own, and producing a legacy that lives on for many years.

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Activity

Begin cultivating your Level 1 community of support:

• Write down a list of the people that are in your immediate circle that can begin supporting you on your path to purpose. These may be family members, friends, mentors, just to anybody that could give you support.
• Write out some communities that you can join that are around your interests, your passions, the skills that you need to learn, and the causes that you're fighting for.
• Then get in touch with these people, reach out to them, tell them your plan and start getting some support.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.