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Welcome to the Upside podcast where we help you get unstuck in your life, in your business, by elevating your thinking and provoking meaningful change from the inside out. I'm your host, Teresa Flood. Thank you for joining me today for another episode. And today, in the words of Michael Franti, I love him as a musician. People need people, people, people do need people. And we're gonna dive in to the power of community. And I'm gonna say that I think so many times we as adults struggle with really finding our tribe and finding our community. There's a couple quotes that I wanna give you. Number one, show me your friends and I'll show you your future. As parents, we say this to our kids all the time. We understand the importance of who they surround themselves with. Uh, you are the sum of the five people that you hang out with the most, that you spend the most amount of time with. This is a great self audit to do. 95% of your success can be determined by who you are in community with. Look at the people around you. How do they think, how are they acting, how are they showing up? What results are they getting in your life? And we can predict your future. There's a proverb in the bible in Proverbs 13 that says, Walk with the rise and you will grow wise. But a companion of fools suffers harm. And then the last quote, and I heard this, it's by Eugene Peterson, who I'm not familiar with, but this quote has, since I heard it, I've thought about it over and over and over again. And he said, I am not myself by myself. Wow, that is so interesting. Can I really know who I am if I'm just alone? And all because so much of our identity and who we're called to be and the impact that we're supposed to make into the world involves other people. So I want to tell you about this fascinating study that I came across about drug addicted rats. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to talk about drug addicted rats. And I am not in any way insinuating that you are anything like a drug addicted rat. However, I do think this is very fascinating. So what they did is they took drug addicted rats and they were feeding them poison in their water and they had them separated and of course they continued to go to the poison infested water over and over again. Well, then they took these same rats and they put them in a, I don't know, a crate. I don't know what you put rats in a crate, a pen or something, whatever. And Integrated them with healthy rats. And what happened was, was over time, these drug addicted rats actually quit going to the poison water and started going to the healthy water and weaned themselves off of this poison. Whether we like it or not, the people around us really, really do matter. And I'm going to give you some staggering statistics that I found on loneliness. And I do believe in a post Covid world. While in so many ways we feel like life is back to normal and everybody is back engaged, I think there was a real loss that happened in 2020 and 2021 and that was a loss of community. And these statistics for adults are really, really staggering. One in four people have no close confidential. In the age group of 18 to 24, 60% feel lonely on a regular basis. In the age group of 50 to 80, 34% feel isolated. Overall population 21%. One in five people feels lonely. This is an interesting statistic about men. But men without a close friend has increased 5, 5 times since 1990. And 12% of adults get this one. This one is shocking. 12% of adults claim to have no friends at all. Building community though, isn't accidental, it's intentional. So think about your life as a child or if you're a parent, what it's like for your kids. So when you're growing up, you are constantly put into environment of peers, right? So you go into your kindergarten classroom and there's a bunch of other little 5 year olds all in the same stage of life, all nervous about going to their first day of school. And over time you go day after day after day, experiencing the same things, being in the same environment and you make friends. And that happens all throughout childhood. You're on a sports team and you play together. You join the girl scouts or the boy Scouts and you're with a, a literal tribe of people that you go through life and experiences. This happens all the way through college. Our parents organize play dates, right? And my Girls are now 13. I've been instructed to not call it a play date, but they organize get togethers and so you're actually thrust into opportunities to find your people and to find your friendships. And then we get into adulthood and we get into the workforce and we're, we're busy. We have obligations at home, we have obligations at work, we're tired, all of these things. We're not playing organized sports, right? We go to the gym, we do our workout on our own, we go home, we make it happen. We work with people who are maybe not in the same stages of life. With us because of different age groups, that type of thing. And so there doesn't have always a natural rhythm to relationship and friendship. It takes time and intention to build meaningful relationships and to develop community as an adult. It's just not gonna naturally happen. If it does, that's a gift. But most of the time, somebody has to take that step and be intentional to build it. So I heard a study that it takes 50 hours of being with somebody to become casual friends. It takes 90 hours to become friends and takes 200 hours of hanging out with somebody to become close friends in adulthood. 200 hours with somebody doesn't just naturally happen. We have to put intention to it. So what does community look like? So I really love the story in the Bible when I use this, just as a illustration for you, of the man who was paralyzed and he wanted to get to Jesus for healing. And so he couldn't because there was a huge crowd and he couldn't walk. He was being carried on a mat. And so what his group of friends did is they got together. And it's interesting because this doesn't go into these kind of details, but I'm guessing this group of friends probably got together and said, we gotta figure this out. We gotta figure out how to get Joe, I don't know if his name was Joe, but I'm just using some license here. How do we get Joe in the door? And so they got super creative. And what they actually did is they climbed up on the roof, they cut a hole in the roof, and they lowered him down into the center of the room to see Jesus. Now, community is like that because when we are in community, we have the people around us when we need them, and we are the people who are called upon. At that time, these weren't just strangers that grabbed him. They were. These were his friends. These were the people that they had been doing life together. These are the people that said, you know what? I'm willing to pick up your mat when it's going to be heavy. It's going to cause me stress, it's going to be inconvenient, it's maybe going to be a little bit embarrassing because I'm going to be climbing up on a roof and lowering you down. I might get in trouble for this. I don't know what the repercussions are going to be. Right. That's what friendship and community should look like. But it wasn't just a stranger on the side of the road. These are people that were friends, that were doing life together. And the Truth is about community is you don't know when you're gonna need it. You don't know when you're gonna have that moment where you need somebody to lower you down through a roof. And you don't know when somebody else is gonna need you to be that community. Helen Keller says walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light. So I just wanted for those of you who are listening and maybe you feel like you're not in community or you're not in a strong community, you feel a bit lonely, you feel a bit isolated, or maybe you're not plugged into the right community. Maybe it's not a community that's high minded, a community that's causing you to grow, a community that you know would be there for you in times of need. I want to give you three action steps to help you in this. Again, it's not you meaning it's not that people don't want to be friends with you. It's not that you don't fit in. It's that in adulthood. Building community takes intention and it takes deliberate steps. So the first one is get connected. Go be the friend that you want to have. Don't be a victim sitting around wondering why. Nobody is reaching out, nobody's calling, nobody's inviting. Go be that person. Everybody is sitting around wondering the same thing. So go plug in, show up, get involved, Put yourself out of your comfort zone. I know for some that's easier than others. For some it is a huge stretch to walk into a room of new people and to put yourself out there. But go choose your people. Be intentional about who you want to be in relationship with. Go seek them out and say, I'm going to make that person my friend. I'm going to go be a friend to them. I'm going to go get involved in that group or that, that community and put yourself out there. I promise you it'll be even a little awkward at first, it will be worth it in the end. And the second thing is to stay connected, fight for the important relationships in your life and a guard against offense. You know, there's two times where it's easy to slip out of community. Now get this. It's when things are going good and when things are going bad. Both times it is really, really easy to step away from community because when things are going well, we feel maybe like we don't need it, right? We feel like, hey, we're blowing and going, we've got this thing handled. We are good. We are not feeling isolated. We're being successful, like, life is good. We're busy, all of the things. And it's easy to step out of community when things are going great. It's also easy to step out of community when things are going badly. Why? Because we get embarrassed. We're ashamed. We're feeling sorry for ourselves. Right? We just. We feel like everybody else has it all together, and so we start to slip away and to pull back from community when that is the time that it's the most important to press in to the people that care about us. It's the most important time to still show up at that office meeting. It's the most important time to still show up at church. It's the most important time to not hide away and retreat. People need people. You need people, and people need you. People need you. And that's the third thing, is invite somebody. Be the one who engages. Be the one who looks for the person sitting on the outskirts. Look for the person who feels awkward walking into the room for the first time. Open up your circle and bring others into your community. I tell my. My agents at Keller Williams, Dallas Preston Road all the time, they've heard me say this one gazillion times. And that is, you don't just show up for you. You show up for everybody else in the room. When you show up in the morning for a huddle at Dallas Preston Road, you're not doing that just so that you can get mindset for the day. You're doing that because by you showing up, you're modeling, you're bringing energy. By sharing on an open mic Friday, you're saying something that's going to be a blessing and beneficial to somebody else. You don't just show it for you, you show it for everybody else in the room. I told my girls they were going to their youth camp this past February, and it was their first time to go. So they knew a couple friends, but not a lot of friends, and they had a little bit of nerves around that. And I said, girls, remember, you're not just going to camp for you. You're going for every other camper that's there. You're going for your leaders. Because it's not just about us. It's about the impact that we get to make. Sometimes we're on the receiving end of community, and sometimes we're on the giving end of community. And both are so crucially important. That's what makes it community. So remember, you don't just show up for you. You show up for everybody else. So today I might just encourage you to. To either get connected, to stay connected, or to invite somebody else and bring somebody else into community. People need people. I need you, you need me. We're better together. And so thank you for listening to this episode of the Upside podcast. And I believe that when you invest in your life and your business, it's going to yield you amazing returns. Please share this episode with a friend, like or subscribe and we will see you next week.