Where Do We Belong? Finding Our Place, in Wine and Beyond
This week, I’d like to ask you to make a few lists. (Indulge me!)
First, make a list of the communities you belong to. You might generate a list of your professional communities, like networking groups, co-workers, and friends at co-working spaces. And then you might write a list of your “home” communities, like your nuclear family, neighborhood, exercise partners, and places of worship.
Don’t think too much about it. Just list the people and the groups that you spend time with on a regular basis.
Good.
Now go back through the list and note what the people in those communities add to your life. Maybe some people in your networking groups are part of your mastermind circle, and they help you brainstorm and execute big ideas. Maybe your exercise partners keep you accountable and on-track with your fitness goals. Maybe the people you see at your regular coffee shop keep you up-to-date on new restaurant openings and local festivals.
Take your time with this. Give yourself a minute to think it through.
Finally, when you’re ready, go back one more time through the list and note what YOU contribute to these people and communities. Maybe you prepare a home-cooked meal for your nuclear family two or three times a week. Maybe you’re a facilitator for the book club at your church. Maybe you’re the go-to contact for wine donations at your networking group’s IRL meetings.
The important thing I’m asking you to do at the moment is to actually take the time and make these lists. With pen and paper. In the Notes app of your phone. In a blank Word doc on your computer. Wherever. Please take the time to make the list, what the groups and the people add to your life, and also what you add to theirs.
My request will echo for those of you who joined last week’s ABG Happi-er Hour, whose theme was “where we belong” and the ask-and-give momentum that keeps the wheels turning. At the start of the hour, I asked our group the same thing, that is, to take a moment to list the groups and communities we belong to. Beck’s list of communities and mine had a lot of overlap – the wine industry, ABG, meditators, spouses, entrepreneurs – and also a fair amount of differentiation, like parents, immigrants, and pet owners.
That’s as it should be. We are similar, and we are different, all at the same time. We contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman and so many others have said.
The next step is to notice that we belong here, to these communities. We also belong there, in those other communities. They, too, contain multitudes, partly because of their dynamic nature of being the locus of so many efforts and intersections of that ebb and flow. Sometimes we give to them and they get from us. Sometimes we get from them and they give to us. Sometimes we ask, and sometimes we offer.
Every so often, it’s both interesting and useful to take the time to assess that dynamic for ourselves. To do the math on it, so to speak, so that we can see what’s out of balance and maybe where we need to steer our own ebb and flow, our own ask and give.
What can we give to the communities that we belong to, and what can we get from them?
It turns out that when both sides of the equation are robust and vibrant, our sense of belonging is all the more palpable and healthy.
Palpable belonging, at this specific moment in time?
Sign. Me. Up.
Please do the exercise. Run the numbers, so to speak, for yourself. And recalibrate as needed. Maybe plan a monthly check-in with the communities that matter to you most. Maybe make it a point to invite a friend or colleague to join you in a community. Take a few actions like that, and I strongly suspect that you’ll feel a sense of expansion.
And even more palpable belonging.
Let us know how it goes, and what we can do to ensure that the ABG community is a helpful resource for you.
On that note, please save the date for our next ABG Happi-er Hour, on June 12 at 4pm PST / 7 pm EST. I’m excited to see you there, and invite you into ask-and-give circulation too.
Namaste,
Cathy
