What is a community?
What is a culture?
Can you define them in one paragraph? How about one word?
Chances are, like most business owners, you define community either with a collection of ideas or with the word itself. Neither are acceptable.
Put yourself in the shoes of a prospective client. You are looking for a way to lose weight and get fit. You stumble across a gym on Google and want to learn more about it. So you go to the gym’s website and the first thing you see is a picture of some sweaty person with a pain face, the word “community” emblazoned at the top.
Confused? I’d be surprised if you weren’t. This is what we do to our prospects every day. We shove the idea of community in their faces without defining it.
So what is community?
A community is relationships—a collection of relationships.
A community is made of people who build each other up because they care about each other. And because they care about each other—and they know that you and your coaches care, too—people in your community stick around.
So how do we build community?
You must first be genuine and authentic: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care,” or so goes the saying attributed to former President Theodore Roosevelt. By showing, through action, that you genuinely care about your people and their results, you build strong relationships.
What about your staff?
Your staff should be a genuine extension of you, and therefore just as authentic and caring. If they are not, your community falls apart.
If they don’t take the time to work with a client in class, run a goal-setting session, reach out to a missing member, show up to a social event or comment on a Bright Spot Friday post, your community will fall apart.
Where do we go from here?
Instead of throwing around the word “community,” try removing it from your website and replacing it with client stories and positive images and videos. And instead of trying to define community, host events to help people experience it.
You can’t define a word with the word itself—so stop telling, and start showing.
If you need more help, we are here for you.
Jeff Burlingame
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