November 2019 Community Update: A Return to Community
I will be writing a series of monthly posts titled Community Update throughout this year and into 2020. This is the first in the series.
When we first started 7 Cups, we were primarily focused on our community. All we cared about was building a tribe of people that deliberately cared for one another. We were able to maintain this focus from 2013-2016. Then we started running out of money and had to find ways to sustain ourselves. We were successful in that, but it also caused us to lose sight of the importance of our community. We are now, finally, in a spot where we can return to community.
There have been a number of recent changes. I know that it has been difficult. The opportunity in going through change is that it allows you to re-set - or start again - in a new direction that ultimately ends up impacting the trajectory of where you go. Think about this like raising a child. The right teacher or mentor, at the right time, can make a big impact and change the future life of that child as a teen and adult. Knowing that change is an opportunity to re-set does not make it easier, but it does provide a frame to better understand the picture of what is happening.
The first thing we want to do is conduct a deep assessment of our community strengths and weaknesses. What are the things that come natural to us? Where do we excel? What are we uniquely good at? We need answers from all of you on these questions so we can better amplify our strengths.
You typically make much more progress in life by building on your strengths. For example - if you are just okay at playing an instrument, but you are great at writing, then it makes a lot of sense to build up your writing skill, because that will help them get a lot further in life.
We also want to assess our weaknesses. Where are we not performing as well as we need to perform? What are our biggest limitations? What are we unaware of ? The key point of asking these questions is so that we can better understand them so we can then deliberately address them.
How do we address them?
We do it through a system called OKRs or Objectives and Key Results. For example, lets say we want to increase the quality of our emotional support chats. Wed create the following OKR:
Objective: Significantly increase the quality of emotional support chats.
Key Result 1: Increase helpful chats by 5% each month
Key Result 2: Decrease dropped chats - chats where the member or listener stops engaging - by 5% each month.
We have used an OKR system for the last several years. We, by working more closely with the community and community leadership, have an opportunity to align on our objectives to make more progress and better help people. Ill be thinking on how we can best do that in the coming weeks.
In the past times of transition, and in this recent transition, there have been several of you that have been encouraging. You have said things like: I know this has been tough. I appreciate the hard work and know that you and the team are trying. We are getting there one step at a time :). This means a lot to me and to everyone on the team. It fills up our love tank and gives us fuel to keep moving ahead. Thank you!
Throughout 7 Cups history, particularly during transitions, there have also been smaller groups of people that provide feedback in less helpful ways. I believe that they have good intentions, but the style makes it difficult to hear the feedback. I want to step back and provide guidance here on how to best provide feedback so it can be better heard, understood, and acted upon. This is called the sandwich approach:
-Bread - say something positive
-Meat - address the negative issue/item
-Bread - say something positive
When difficult feedback is provided in this way, it makes it much more easier to metabolize (pun intended).
Think of a time when someone has given you feedback. When it comes off as judgemental or angry it is much harder to hear; when it comes off as - I am here to help you, we are on the same team, here are some things you are doing good and here are some items you can do better - then it is much more effective.
Here are a number of things you can do to immediately help:
1. Complete this survey on our strengths and weaknesses. Please take your time and answer thoughtfully.
2. Commit to telling community leaders (community managers, ambassadors, mentors, mentor leaders, peer support, mods etc.) that you appreciate them and the hard work they are doing. I am committing to doing this several times a week and am going to work to make it a habit. We have hundreds of volunteer leaders in our community that work very hard to make 7 Cups a supportive environment. It would be great for them to hear how much they matter to all of us. (and though I'm mentioning different community leaders here; please also be sure to also express appreciation to our kind-hearted listeners. They are also showing a tremendous amount of compassion and service to provide care to all of us.)
3. Post in the 3 key things thread - many of you are doing a tremendous amount of work on 7 Cups and very little people can see it. If you post in this thread, then you can begin to see all the work that is being done AND you can find people to better support in their efforts. This can be 3 key things you did in a day, week, or month. It is meant as a simple way to share what you are doing. For example, today I posted:
-met with community leadership team
-drafted a return to community post
-created survey to better understand community strengths and weaknesses
We will be releasing details on badges soon that will be related to 3 key things.
4. 7 Cups is not going anywhere AND we welcome your beams! Leading 7 Cups all these years has been extraordinarily rewarding. It has also been really tough. There have been a lot of painful bumps in the road. The past is the best predictor of the future, so my guess is that it will continue to be rewarding and, at times, it will also continue to be painful. This has been true for me, for my wife, for our team, for our community leaders, and for our community. If you think, meditate, send good vibes, pray, send beams, and/or well wishes, then we will gladly take any and all of them! I believe this helps and we would collectively welcome the support!
To close this November update, community is a top priority for the remainder of this year and all of 2020. We are focused. We need your help to build on our strengths and shore up our weaknesses. We have come very far since we launched in 2013. We have a long ways to go!
Thank you for being on this journey with me!
@GretasRebel
"Jesus Christ do you expect anyomne [sic] to read all that?? is there a too long didn't read?"
Yeah, you're definitely right that I do like to write a lot. That's pretty indisputable, lol.
As far as whether I expect people to read it... I don't. I certainly *like* it when people read and understand what I'm saying. But when they don't, there isn't really anything I can do to compel them to do what I want. :) I don't have control over other people's thoughts, actions, or feelings. And that's probably a good thing. Like, I'm happy that you're free to be able to decide not to read my post if that doesn't feel like something you want to do. It means that I have the same freedom to ignore or not respond to your posts if I so choose. (In this situation, I'm choosing to respond because I want to.)
To mirror what you have been saying, the world does not revolve around me. In this situation, I completely agree with the values you're expressing that are disavowing entitlement. (Though of course there is an alternative/competing set of values that respects compassion, sensitivity, empathy, and the fact that people sometimes feel unhappy and are helped by people being willing to make sacrifices or give things... but I'm bracketing those feelings off to the side for the purposes of the present interaction.)
My own version of the "anti-entitlement" set of values in their application to this situation would be:
"I am not entitled to have other people read my posts or understand them or respond to me in a particular way, other than respecting me relative to the expectations and rules of this forum. If other people read what I have to say and respond positively or find it meaningful, then that is wonderful. But, I don't have a natural right to that. If other people decide they want to ignore my posts, they have a right to do that, and they aren't doing anything wrong if they do that. I might feel a bit sad or unhappy about that, but it is understandable from their side, and the only options I have are to either accept it, strategically write my posts differently in a way that is more likely to receive positive attention, or remove myself from the situation if it feels like wasted effort."
So yes--if I ignore all of the feelings/perspectives that I am bracketing off, the part of me that I am choosing to pay attention to and embody right now agrees with your values re: entitlement. Something that I could have done a better job of expressing in my original post is that... I really don't think we're that far away from one another in terms of our thinking.
That being said... part of my post was that I also wanted to express that I wasn't happy with what you were doing. I didn't want to respond in a way that made it seem like I was completely placating or appeasing you or bowing down to what you were doing. That felt to me like it would come across as disrespectful to all of the people who your posts have wounded or offended. (And since this isn't a private/one-on-one interaction between the two of us, I feel like I want to be mindful of the fact that other people apart from you might be reading my words and might be affected by them. Perhaps if I were your listener, I would be a bit more focused on trying to value your perspective to the exclusion of other people's perspectives.)
I really did think that some of your actions on here have been improper. And I really wanted to point that out and bring attention to the specific issues I had with your posts, and express my critique in a targeted/specific way (i.e. please don't call people "snowflake").
In general, I really felt a strong desire to intervene, whatever the reason might have been... whether it was to protect other people, to "put you in your place", exact vengeance (hehe), or express support for people who have been affected by your actions. Some of those motivations are much more benign or lead to better results than others. In any event, I acted upon some/all of those feelings.
I felt like it was appropriate for me to be a bit forceful. But at the same time, I also felt like I was able to justify and provide adequate support for all of my complaints about what you were doing. I wanted to express myself in a careful way where a reasonable but skeptical person who isn't predisposed to agree with me might be able to read my post and come around to understanding and finding some solidarity with my perspective.
It's debatable whether any of that expression was worthwhile. It's not what I normally do. Like you said, the alternative is to ignore you, give up on interacting with you, assume that you are hopeless/beyond saving, and just go on my way and live my own life happily. I don't know whether writing that post was the right choice, or if it was wasted effort. But I felt like it was a worthwhile thing to experiment with. If nothing else, it is more data for me to absorb.
My goal is to grow into becoming a sort of prolific listener on this site who does dozens/hundreds of chats and able to do that efficiently/effectively. Right now, I'm not doing that because... stuff like this happens and it's challenging to deal with. In the course of doing listening, I expect that I am going to interact with many people like you. I want to be able to handle those situations effectively with minimal stress. I currently don't know how to. I consider my interactions with you right now to be experimentation that will feed into those future endeavors. I'm just curious to see what happens.
(And if this all goes horribly and I am just wasting my time, then that is just more data that I can learn from, and over the long-term things will self-correct and progressively become more optimal. If it turns out that it isn't worth my time, then at some point in the future I'll have absorbed that lesson through direct experience and will adapt so that I don't waste my time in a similar way if this type of situation happens again. I expect I'll have many more opportunities in the future to try other options.)
"You sure are upset. Have a warm tea and rest."
If I'm being honest, yes I was somewhat upset. Though, I'm not sure if I was as upset as you might imagine me to have been.
There were certainly earlier drafts of that post I wrote that were much more vitriolic or venomous and were frankly much more hell-bent on trying to eviscerate you. But what ended up happening was that as I wrote, after I got a lot of my feelings out of my system, I started feeling like I wanted to lean more and more toward understanding your side. It was like my original feelings had been processed and I felt "understood" just by virtue of the awareness I had toward myself in the act of writing them.
So I started softening a lot of what I had originally written. I started moving toward the other pole of feeling like I was potentially being unfair to you, misunderstanding where you were coming from, and wanting to make sure that I wasn't hurting you in the course of pursuing my own emotional agenda. Ultimately, I ended up adding an entire section where I started trying to understand where you were coming from.
I'd say that as far as the end product is concerned... I felt pretty good/peaceful at the time that I posted it. I felt satisfied that I had expressed all of my thoughts and feelings as well as I could. And I felt satisfied that I had done something pretty impressive by managing to somewhat successfully bridge all of the different perspectives that I had decided I wanted to be sensitive to:
* Respecting site management
* Respecting you
* Respecting people attacked by you
* Respecting my own feelings
The fact that I was trying to juggle all of these different voices and accommodate so many different people simultaneously also partly (but not completely) accounts for the length. It is hard to do that in a concise way. The bigger and more complicated the picture, the more words that are needed to capture it without "slighting" or being uncharitable to one of the many sides or stakeholders in the situation. Maybe it is not worth the effort, but I felt like it was worth attempting.
I expect for you to laugh at me or mock me if I share that I spent a fair amount of time/care rewriting and trying to craft that post. If I'm honest, I actually wrote about 3x as much text as what I actually posted. I spent a few hours culling it down and refining it until I was happy with it. You can criticize that decision and say that it was worthless or a waste of my time. But ultimately in the end, that was my choice and I take responsibility for it. Whether it made me happier or less happy, whether it helped other people or made things worse, it was something I decided to do and I bear the consequences of having done it.
You can say that I am thinking too much about something that wasn't a big deal or doesn't matter, but I always learn a lot from thinking about things like this. (Sometimes when I examine small/microcosmic situations like this, I end up learning things that are generalizable/universalizable to other situations or that can feed into a broader/macrocosmic worldview.)
I don't feel distressed right now. I feel energized by all of the intricacies and complexities of this situation, as if I were solving a puzzle. And I feel empowered to be able to take something so complicated and describe all of those facets.
Re: your concern for me being upset... I will say that if you are a person who values my mental health and cares about easing my feelings of upset, something you could do to help me would be to express that it is okay/acceptable for me to write a lot if that is what I want to do. (And that wouldn't in any way obligate you to *read* anything that I write.) I will write regardless of whether you think well of it, and I can live with a situation where other people disapprove of what I'm doing. (I just won't share writing with them or expect anything from them if it's unrealistic.) But, if other people are okay with what I'm doing, it makes things so much easier and more comfortable and probably makes me much happier in the long run. I don't have a *right* to other people's approval and nobody owes it to me, but I certainly *benefit* from it if other people do happen to feel inclined to do that.
Writing is something I usually enjoy doing. (When I don't enjoy doing it, I don't do it.) In this case, I had feelings I wanted to express. I didn't like seeing the way that you were treating other people in this thread. And I felt like I might have a specific perspective that I could offer that might be helpful. Or maybe it would help me expand/develop my perspective further. So, it felt like a win-win (i.e. immediate emotional catharsis + personal growth + possible benefit to others).
I took a risk and I'm satisfied with having done that. My self-care rituals are adequate enough that I feel I'm able to sufficiently "tank" whatever stress these interactions with you might be causing. So yeah, I dig it... I feel like I know what I'm doing. :p
