Life Transitions: a Fertile Ground to Grow High-Relevance Communities

Significant life transitions are lonely places and a high potential epicenter to better communities. In this article, I weave thoughts from previous posts and chapters of my book to explore why.

Note: part of the contents of this article were published in introductory chapter of my book Hacking Communities: Why Building Communities is Like Coming Home), meshed ideas from recent posts and articles.

Women Looking Outside a Train Window.Photo by Ketut Subiyanto (on Pexels)

Building a Home for Yourself and Others

As a community builder, your role is to make others feel at home. This means creating a space where they feel safe to take off their shoes, be vulnerable, and express themselves authentically. Home is where we find true belonging.

When writing Hacking Communities I stated that creating community about "building safer spaces for us and others to feel at home in a world threatened by loneliness."

Since then, I've experienced highs and lows building a couple of fast-scaling communities for adults - around products and educational and personal growth experiences.

Building a community for adults is challenging. Once speaking with the Director of Online Learning at an Ivy League University, we realized that demographics is a key factor that makes it harder to build great online communities in higher education.

While most in-person students have a formative experience at college in their early 20s, online learning graduates tend to be older and already committed to their jobs, spouses, and families. It takes more work to get the air time of individuals who have their time and energy dedicated to pre-existing communities.

Belonging requires a certain degree of vulnerability: a point where people need one another to thrive, which motivates them to participate and share (anything) - because community is about people sharing (anything), from food to knowledge and resources. 

Transitions are moments of evident vulnerability, when we feel out of place in our lives. We are not one thing or the other yet. We know to be in between one moment and the next.

The "hack" to build great adult communities is to identify key points of significant transitions in people's lives. Big life changes usually bring us that weak spot where we're in between, not in one place or another. Like wanderers, people in transition are more open, curious, and searching for a sense of home. They need meaning and connection - the best of which could be provided by authentic communities. 

TL;DR: Significant life transitions are lonely places and a high potential epicenter to new communities. In this article, I weave thoughts from previous posts and chapters of my book to share the rationale behind this idea.

[Note to busy readers: find "TL;DR" summaries at the end of each section]

The Minister of Health Advises: Loneliness Kills

Have you heard of the so-called epidemic of Loneliness? If you haven't, nor noticed it creeping arounds, you're ironically on your own here.

The matter is old news but more critical in the post-pandemic, with updated data.

A recent national study published by Harvard reported that an alarming number of Americans feel lonely. Titled "Loneliness in America," it says that 36% of Americans surveyed reported feeling lonely "frequently" or "almost all the time or all the time" in the prior four weeks. Participants in the study reported substantial increases in Loneliness since the COVID-19 outbreak. 

I dedicated an entire chapter to the impact of Loneliness on our health in Hacking Communities (titled Eleanor Rigby: From Hymn to Minister of Loneliness) - but in the interest of time, I'll cut to the chase and announce that Loneliness kills. In his book "Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection", John Caccioppo (known as the father of social neuroscience) suggests Loneliness is contagious and increases the chance of early death by 20%.  

Unlike common perception, Loneliness doesn't primarily affect the elderly. A startling 61% of young people aged 18-25 reported miserable degrees of Loneliness in the Harvard study.

Loneliness in Unexpected Places: Early Motherhood

After spending most of my life mothering companies and creative projects, I'm becoming the mother of an actual child. 

Now I understand why this journey screams for community. There are various solutions out there (from social media groups to prenatal yoga classes), but I still fear being ostracized. I can no longer fit in many places where I used to be a regular. And I'm not alone there.

The same Harvard study identified that 51% of mothers with young children feel miserably lonely. Quoting the study: 

"While parents in general were no more likely than other survey respondents to feel lonely in our study (35%), those mothers of young children were significantly more likely to report serious Loneliness (51%). Forty-seven percent of mothers with young children reported an increase in Loneliness since the pandemic."

If Loneliness is a pressing issue requiring major solutions for all of us, there should be priority seats for pregnant and nursing mothers. 

Hello Loneliness, my Old Friend

After studying, writing, and dealing with Loneliness in the process of writing my book, I face it once again.

I recently shared my mom-to-be feelings in a post: "No human was bred to grow a baby by herself within the walls of a big city apartment. No couple, either. While all our bodies are designed to live in community, growing a child makes that need glaring evident. It takes a village, they say. It sure does."

Being pregnant makes you highly vulnerable. It feels like getting to know a whole new person growing within you (not your kid, but yourself). As well translated by Brandi Carlile in "The Mother": "Welcome to the end of being alone inside your mind // you're tethered to another, and you're worried all the time."

My new-to-motherhood experience illustrates that people in transition need community. But this isn't the only community that needs to be rekindled. In my previous article, Create Safe Spaces, I shared other examples of transitions: "starting a new business, becoming a parent, or learning a new language as an adult are just a few examples of situations where people might feel alone and need reassurance from others."

TL;DR: Where people go through significant life transitions, there's usually a need (and an opportunity) for community.

Community is Home. Community Building is the journey.

I started Hacking Communities by sharing that "our individual experiences of home may differ, but most of us can relate to an idealistic idea of home. Home is where your heart is. Home is not a place, but a feeling. There's no place like home". 

Home isn't a place but a symbol. From ancient times, we have cultivated the idea of home as the original place where we feel safe. Our first home is our mother's womb, and our departure from it is our first interaction with pain. Our shared human experience defines that everyone aims to find a place where we belong. That dream of belonging is a dream of home itself—a dream of a place where we are accepted as we are, as our most authentic selves.

The concept of home is a key part of building a community.

Home is where we find true belonging. We crave this place for reasons larger than us—we are wired to belong as a means to survive.

To create this space, your first step is to feel at home with yourself. To do so, you must practice self-love. But this doesn't mean you have to wait until you are fully ready and prepared to build a community—true belonging is not a destination but a lifelong journey. Being yourself, or better put, becoming yourself, is a journey, not a destination. In building communities, the journey matters. While we dream of a home as the end goal, the path is where we find ourselves. We become stronger through the people and the obstacles we encounter on the way. We build our sense of self through the stories we collect. 

Significant transitions are an open door to build lasting communities.

TL;DR: Building community is like paving the road that takes us home - and there's thousands of people out there in search of it.

On The Road Again

Feeling at home is about feeling that you belong in your life. 

In a recent article, I wrote about the 3 myths surrounding significant life transitions. Taking some ideas from it to draw a new reflection (in the light of this article), and connect the dots:

1. Transitions imply reviewing intricate details that define our core identity. They trigger a series of small (or not-so) deaths of things or ideas we are still attached to, from a career and lifestyle to relationships. Letting go is always hard. But detaching from old ideas is the only way to open space for a more updated and authentic version of ourselves.

2. There's no shortcut to big transitions (big-T for close friends). Significant transitions are a long and winding road, not a drive-through. When we become aware that our lives no longer feel authentic, we journey through various experiences before identifying what needs to change to feel whole again. In that journey, we often meet new people who'll play a crucial role in our lives and either strengthen or weaken old relationships.

3. Transitions serve a significant purpose. Through my latest big-T, I made crucial decisions to become closer to who I am today - based on my closest-to-heart desire: building a family. I needed to be groundless, homeless, and open to finding them. By feeling out of place, we search and are more likely to reach important landmarks, making connections and decisions that lead us closer to our authentic versions.

TL;DR: We can leverage transitions to find or build new communities, more attuned to our coming-to-be selves. We can do that for ourselves and others by building meaningful communities.

Big Transitions: The Calling for a New Community

From January 2018 to December 2022, I went from being a nomadic startup founder to becoming an enthusiastic writer and mother-to-be.

My biggest life transition I'd say.

It started in late 2017 when I committed to a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela with my mother. Walking 300km led me to a life-changing insight: I needed to let go of my hard-earned identity (represented by my career in Southeast Asia) in order to feel more whole with myself. That was my journey home. It meant leaving behind strong personal and professional connections which I held dear. The community I'd built there kept me attached to Asia. They were my job and family. But I knew that same lifestyle didn't match my evolving idea of myself. It led me to be single, and a workaholic. I wanted to build a family, and for it to grow closer to my parents (in Brazil). I also wanted to write more and creatively share my learnings. So, my journey started.

And it brings me to the present moment: I'm still in transition, letting go of old attachments, embracing a new identity, open and searching for a new community. 

While I have a loving husband, friends, and family, motherhood requires a larger village - which most of us do not have working from home or in our workplace. 

Many women have different experiences and yet crave community just the same. But not any community - just being a mother-to-be isn't enough to connect with others in a meaningful way. I would likely have deeper conversations with women who match than one criteria that I identify with (e.g. motherhood + creative writing + entrepreneurship + NYC)

TL;DR: We desire high-relevance encounters with people who match a combination of variables that define our identity. The more variables, the more relevant our connections are and the more we belong.

TL;DR: Life Transitions, a Fertile Ground for Community

Transitions are opportunities for substantial breakthroughs and the emergence of new communities. They are moments of more intense change when we feel less in control of what happens to us and less familiar with ourselves. And where we have an excellent opportunity to step into our best versions. 

Drawing from your own experience or the knowledge you have of your business or idea (around which you are building a community), you can probably think of ways the people involved are transitioning. You can devise a plan to connect them from that point.

From my current transition, I identified a clear need for more specific and niche spaces for new mothers to meet. I expect motherhood to be a turning point that pushes me closer to my most important work, but I'm figuring out who I will be after birth. To do that work, I'll need a robust support system different from what I have built so far.

Remember: it's easier to make new friends when traveling because we're more likely to be open to (or in need of) new connections that help us feel safe away from home.

I hope this helps you think of "sweet spots" to build high-relevance adult communities. 

By the Way

If you are building communities for adults, liked what you just read, agree, disagree, or would like to explore more ideas in the "mother space," I'd love to hear from you! Reach out to me at lais@hackingcommunities.com

Originally posted on Linkedin.