Mar 4, 2026 | Episode Transcripts
[Speaker 1]
If you’re a community owner and it feels stuck, if it feels noisy but yet shallow, or if it looks like engagement is high but you’re not getting a good sense of connection, your issue may not be one of growth. It actually might be one of design. Most communities don’t fail due to a bad platform, bad people, bad content, even a bad concept.
They fail because they have insecure leaders. Connection and belonging aren’t the same thing, but connection is required in order to foster belonging. And belonging is something that is within me as an individual.
You can do all the right things to facilitate my connection, you can do all the right things to make me feel welcome, but it’s on me to feel like I belong or not. Belonging, it’s not the proximity, it’s the interdependence. It’s the mutual reliance in a community that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tanya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras. Because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. There is a structural flaw in most communities, and it’s not a lack of engagement, although that is the number one complaint I oftentimes hear when I’m talking to people about community.
It’s also not bad content or even a bad concept, and usually it’s not even bad people, right? I mean, every now and then rotten apples spoil the bunch, but very rarely is bad people the structural flaw that you find in the community. It’s this.
Most communities are designed to keep their leader at the center, and communities that are dependent on their leaders to function, unfortunately, are quite fragile. Now, if you don’t agree, I want you to think about it for a moment. How many communities have you seen continue to thrive after leadership changes hands or when the leader needs an extended absence?
And I want you to think about the communities that you’re a part of, right? Because there are some like larger communities that are run by, say, you know, an officer team of some sort, or there’s a team of representatives and there’s some succession planning in place. So those tend to do a little bit better than communities that got started more organically or are ad hoc.
The fact is, is that communities that can sustain leadership changes are few and far between, and it doesn’t typically happen on purpose, right? I mean, most leaders who build communities aren’t trying to build dependency, but they end up designing everything in the community, the conversations, the solutions, the resources, the recognition, the authority to flow directly through that. Most of the time, it’s because they don’t know any better.
Sometimes they think it’s the only way that they can make sure the community meets their needs or their business objectives. But when a community is designed around any one individual, a few things very quickly will happen. Most commonly, that individual at some point ends up being the bottleneck, right?
It might be through a period of rapid growth or just maybe something going on in that individual’s life or in their business or whatever that forces them to direct their attention elsewhere. But they become the bottleneck, and the community’s growth and health ends up being constrained by their capacity or their level of interest. And believe it or not, that is oftentimes a best-case scenario, because when you see the problem, you can solve it.
So when you recognize, oh my gosh, the problem that we have here is that our leader is the bottleneck, then you can go, okay, how do we clear that, right? How do we start pulling things off of the leader’s shoulders in order to get them to unclog the neck of the bottle so that things can start flowing through again? But what I see happen more often is actually a bit more difficult to solve, because most groups that revolve around their leader end up looking stronger than they really are.
You see members showing up. You see members participating in conversation threads, maybe responding to questions, and sometimes they’ll even be helping each other out. The problem is what you don’t see, right?
Because when everybody is showing up for the leader, you see their presence, but what you don’t see is the lack of connection. And without connection, belonging never takes root. And something that we are recognizing, you know, here in 2026 as I record this, is that connection and belonging aren’t the same thing, but connection is required in order to foster belonging.
And belonging is something that is within me as an individual, right? You can do all the right things to facilitate my connection. You can do all the right things to make me feel welcome, but it’s on me to feel like I belong or not.
And it’s entirely possible that no matter what you do, I may have my own internal hangups that never allow me to feel like I belong in the space that you have created. And that can sound discouraging, but stick with me, because the thing is, is if you don’t have connection, you’re not going to have belonging anyway. So let’s just start with what we can control, which is the connection piece.
Now, in our last episode, I interviewed Gwen Bortner, who is both a client and longtime friend. In fact, I first met Gwen when I was pregnant with Lily, even though we didn’t start working together until 2022. So I’ve known Gwen since 2009, and we started working together in 2022.
And we co-host another podcast together. It’s called The Business You Really Want. It’s on all the players.
So you’re welcome to look at that. And it is very much a business podcast. And it’s designed specifically for women in business, because that is Gwen’s target market.
And if you listen to the last episode, you know that Gwen doesn’t feel like she has a community. So if you asked her, said, hey, tell me about your community, she’d be like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have one.
She doesn’t run a membership. She doesn’t host a Facebook group. She doesn’t have a LinkedIn group.
LinkedIn is her favorite playground. But I would actually disagree, because I define community as a space where people can connect with you as a leader, with the content you produce, and with each other in response or around you and the content you produce, right? So they should be able to have side conversations independent of you.
And that’s how we have true community. That’s the three-legged stool. And based on that definition, I would say even though she doesn’t have a community in the traditional sense in terms of a membership or an in-person, online or offline group of sorts, she is one of the greatest community leaders I know.
Vocabulary aside, what she has built with her clients is one of the clearest examples I have seen of intentional belonging design. So today what I want to do is I want to unpack two things, right? So these solo episodes are meant to really like take some of the interviews, because the interviews run a variety of topics, you know, all around that conversation about fighting your freaks, right?
Like, like attracts like. And then these solo episodes take threads from those interviews, and we like to pull them and really paint like a much deeper picture. And so if you are somebody who runs a community or find yourself interested in what makes people feel like they connect with one another, that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
So the first thing I want to talk about is the specific design decisions that make belonging possible in Gwen’s model. And the second thing I want to talk about is the unpleasant truth about power that determines whether your community becomes deep or ends up becoming dependent. Because I think most of us want interdependence, we don’t want dependency, but we don’t know how to design for that.
So let’s get into it. So first, let’s talk about the decisions of design that create belonging. So the design decisions that create belonging.
Most people think belonging is a byproduct of proximity. If we are near each other, right, then we’ll feel like we belong. And sometimes this is true, right?
Like if you have your child in a sport, you will find very quickly that you develop friendships with other parents of kids in that sport. One kid changes teams and you lose touch with that parent because you no longer have that proximity. But the fact that you lose touch when that person, you know, when the kid changes teams, that lets you know that there wasn’t true belonging there.
So it’s not enough to just put aligned people in a room and they’ll feel like they belong, right? That’s just not how it works. Because belonging doesn’t come from sharing space, it comes from shared stakes and shared responsibilities.
So part of why you end up becoming friends with the other parents of your child’s teammates is because oftentimes you have shared stakes and shared responsibility, right? Maybe you trade off volunteering to bring snacks during practice or for the games. You’re all invested in the kids having a winning season.
You’re all invested in whether the kids make it to the playoffs or whatever that could be. And then when little Johnny’s teammate goes to a different team, you no longer share that responsibility or those stakes with those parents. And that’s why you fall apart.
It’s not because you’re not seeing them at practice every Tuesday and Thursday. It’s because you no longer have shared responsibility and shared stakes, right? So belonging, you know, to kind of sum it up, it’s not the proximity, it’s the interdependence.
It’s the mutual reliance in a community that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. So using Gwen’s group of clients as the example, her client base is small, right? She pretty much never works with more than 25 to 30 clients at any given time.
And these women only get together once a quarter. And because they only get together once a quarter, it’s rare for all 25 to 30 of them to be there at the same time. I mean, somebody’s on vacation, somebody’s got a prior commitment, right?
So, you know, you figure 16 to 20 of them are present at any one of their quarterly gatherings. And their gatherings are online, right? So it’s not even like they see each other face to face.
But the magic of her client community isn’t in the numbers, right? It’s not that, oh, they’re so small, they just can’t help but be closely connected. It’s not the frequency of meetups.
Oh, because they only meet quarterly, everybody makes sure to be there, or it’s easier to be there because it’s a scheduled time. It’s how she builds relational density into every touchpoint with her clients. So the first design decision that Gwen has made, and honestly, like, I wouldn’t even say that she knows she’s making them in terms of like, oh, I’m going to do this to build community.
They are just how Gwen designs her client containers, because it makes sense to her that her clients would be more successful under these circumstances. And as a community expert who works closely in her business, I see the community design principles that underlie the success that her clients have had. So the first design decision that she makes is she curates her client community for values, not for stage of business or even industry.
Now, this is particularly interesting because in this day and age, you would think, you know, most people can’t sell enough, right? Most business owners want more business. But Gwen is someone who is very careful because she knows her clients get together every quarter.
She is very careful to make sure that every new client is a good fit with the whole. And what she has realized is what makes people a good fit and what doesn’t. And so on paper, if you were to look at her client list, you would think that they are very different.
They come from different industries, different revenue levels. You know, she’s got some clients who are just barely breaking $100K, and she’s got other clients that are on track for eight figures. There are different levels of experience.
Most of them are seasoned business owners, but some of them, this may be, you know, they may be starting their fifth business. Others may be 15 years in business. They have different business models.
She’s got some independent retailers. She’s got service providers. She’s got agency owners, and she has solopreneurs.
And you would think like there is no way you could get all those people together in a room, and especially if the group is only as small as like 25-ish, right? Because probably there’s going to be a couple people who are the only person in the group that do what they do or that have the business model they have. You think there’s no way you could put this many different people together and have it work.
But the cohesion works because she filters for shared values, right? When she is talking to people about whether or not they would be a good fit for her program, whether her program is a good fit for them, any of her programs, you know, she is looking for them to demonstrate a generosity of spirit, right? That’s a value that she knows all of her clients share.
She always looks for creativity. She knows that she does really well working with creative entrepreneurs. Now, they don’t have to be the creative arts, but the creative entrepreneur is somebody who just has a lot of ideas, right?
Usually their issue is not a shortage of ideas. It is a shortage of time to implement their ideas. So those shared values that she’s filtering for is generosity, creativity, mission-driven.
All of her clients are in mission-driven businesses. They all have a deep desire to build something meaningful, to build something meaningful right here, right now, to the people that they serve, but also for the long haul, right? They’re looking to build some sort of a legacy, not that they think that the business is going to necessarily expand and take over the world, but they want the work they do to leave some sort of legacy, to leave its mark on the world.
And that is intentional, right? That’s because Gwen pays attention to who she does her best work with, but also she pays attention to how her clients connect with each other. And she has seen that those shared values, as long as she brings somebody in that shares those values, they will instantly fit in with everybody else, regardless of what their business model is, regardless of what their industry is, regardless of what their revenue level is.
So the point here to note is that shared circumstances oftentimes will create comparison, but shared values will cultivate cohesion. When a community groups individuals by stage alone, competition naturally creeps in. And if you have been part of business communities, you know, a lot of times business communities will want to break people into either stage of business or revenue level, right?
So they’ll say, okay, you’re here, group A is pre-revenue, group B is for those who are under six figures, group C is for those who are up to half a million, and group D is for those who are a million and beyond, right? And so what ends up happening is people who are pre-revenue, they’re being given information that they need, but all they can think about is getting to the next level, because their mind, they’ll be more successful if they can hang out with the six figure people, or if they can hang out with the half million dollar people. So there invariably ends up developing this level of competition, the spirit of competition with each other.
But when everybody is grouped together by values, collaboration starts to increase, right? They realize that rising tides raise all ships. They realize that going back to not just the values, right, but especially with that value of generosity, there’s this mutual giving nature that they have.
They’re not so much worried about what they get as much as wanting to make sure that they give their best, and so you get some stability that comes from that level of collaboration. So the thing to remember here, you know, this idea of curating for values versus stage or industry, is that if you want belonging first, you have to be aware you’re not going to be able to let everybody in, okay? True belonging is usually not felt in places where it’s come one, come all, right?
So if you are looking to cultivate like strong belonging, a lot of times the questions you ask people before they come in, those intake questions, matter more than any of the marketing copy that you are using to sell the community experience. Now the second design decision is to protect the container early on. Now this is something Gwen talked a lot about, is she’s careful in choosing who she works with, not because she has a problem with refunds or she has a problem in who she can individually help, but because it’s important to her that she protects the community of clients for their quarterly get-togethers.
So she doesn’t let people just join automatically. She wants to have a conversation with them. She wants them to carefully discern whether the container makes sense for them.
She carefully discerns whether they make sense for the container and also her own thoughts on whether the container makes sense for them. She spends a lot of time in that fit assessment and it’s not because she’s trying to be exclusionary. It’s not this elitism.
It is actually part of the infrastructure of what she has built into her client community. So in her case, she’s not maintaining culture among her clients through moderation. She maintains it through selection.
Now that’s not to say that you can’t maintain your culture by moderation. As somebody who runs a lot of online communities, I mean that is how I cultivate culture and maintain it. It’s through the moderation process, but that’s not the only way to maintain a culture, right?
You can take Gwen’s approach and maintain it by selection. Because the thing is, is you have to filter at some point, right? And for Gwen, filtering early on totally absolves her of a need to police things later on.
And because her client list is so small and the group gets together only, you know, four times a year, it’s important to her that she filters it early rather than policing it later. So just to recap really quickly, that first design decision is curating for values, not stage or industry. The second is protecting the container early on, which now brings us to the third decision, which is engineering member-to-member reliance.
Now that sounds scary, right? Because if they rely on each other, what do they need you for? But the private connection moments, they matter.
Gwen talked about how when they’re having their quarterly planning retreats, she found out several months, maybe even years later, that throughout the retreat, members have conversations privately in the chat there on Zoom. They’ll help each other out with questions. You know, somebody will be like, hey, you know, when she asked this question, are we supposed to say this or are we supposed to say that?
They’re not doing it in the open chat. And she realized that they were kind of sheepish about it. You know, they were like, yeah, we couldn’t do this thing.
We don’t want to get in trouble. And she was like, I love it. I love that they help each other in real time.
I love that they feel comfortable seeking answers from each other. And they don’t feel like I am the only person who has the right answer for them, or I am the only person they can ask a question of. For Gwen, she has seen the belonging in her client community get deeper when her members are resources to one another.
And so, again, it may seem accidental, but the intentional design piece here, right, is that she models trust. She normalizes vulnerability. And as a result, she’s been able to distribute leadership.
She has no fear of saying, you know what, you have a yarn shop and Susie over here has a quilt shop. Though you guys sell different things, Susie could probably tell you better than I am what is going on in the craft industry right now, where the crafters buying behaviors. So what, you know, you and Susie should get together and just talk about that and compare notes and see if Susie’s experiencing similar things in her shop as you are.
Because maybe it’s just the yarn industry, or maybe it’s the craft industry as a whole. If it’s the craft industry as a whole, maybe you and Susie can team up and figure out, like, a good solution for this or how to get over the hump. So if belonging is designed, and if Gwen’s model, you know, that she says is not a community, but we disagree, works because she curates values, she protects culture, and she creates conditions for member to member trust, then we have to talk about the less pleasant variable of things, which is that most communities don’t fail due to a bad platform, bad people, bad content, even a bad concept.
They fail because they have insecure leaders. I know, ouch, right? But specifically, you need to ask yourself, if you’re somebody who’s thinking about having a community, or maybe who has one, is do you need to be the center in order to feel valuable?
Because if you do, you will unintentionally design dependency in your community. And dependency looks like engagement until it doesn’t, and it never ever becomes belonging. So let’s talk a little bit about power.
I have been in a lot of communities, I’ve run a lot of communities over the years where I have seen the leaders’ need for power or belief in the need for power and their ego, like, ruin the community or get in the way of the community being the best that it could be. Because these kinds of leaders will interpret private chats, side partnerships, and collaborations or off-platform conversations as a threat. And so they have a tendency to over-centralize, right?
Like, you aren’t allowed to have separate conversations outside of this group without my permission. I mean, they don’t typically say it quite like that, but they’ll shut down any group conversations that could lead to relationships outside the group. They’ll over-moderate, they’ll over-control, they will insist that everything flows through them.
And while what they build can look active, right? There’s lots of questions and stuff because they’re controlling how those questions go through, they’re controlling how the answers are delivered. The activity is not resilient, and the community will collapse the moment they step away because they didn’t build belonging, they just built dependence.
I’m going to give you an example of this. There was a very, very large community that I supported for several years. And it was not run in a way that I agree with, mainly because the owner’s belief was a little bit archaic.
So the owner came from kind of a traditional marketing and advertising background where they believe that you only let people say positive things about your brand. If you’re going to host a space for people to have conversations, then you get to control what they’re allowed to talk about and how they’re allowed to talk. So you were only allowed to talk about their product.
You were only allowed to say positive things about their product. You were not allowed to say anything critical about their product. If you wanted to share information related to the use of their product, it had to be centered around the product.
So a very off-topic conversation, let’s pretend it was a gardening group. It wasn’t, but let’s pretend it was a gardening group and they sold soil amendments. You couldn’t say, a natural way to acidify your soil is to add coffee grounds.
You would have to say, well, I’m sure there’s a lot of ways to acidify your soil, but the only way that I believe in acidifying my soil is using Acme Widget Company’s soil acidifier. That is how controlling they were in how the conversations went. Now, despite their best efforts, people still connected outside of the community because it didn’t feel very safe to have real, honest conversations inside the community.
Like, hey, I want to like this product, but it’s got this weird aftertaste. Like, what do you use to hide the aftertaste? Or what do you use to prevent the side effect?
Right? Because you couldn’t say anything critical about it. And so people developed really strong relationships outside of the group, no matter what this leader was trying to do.
They also created some of their own groups, which is like, you know, people who love this product, but want to be able to honestly talk about some of the lesser qualities of the product. Or people who love this product, but maybe don’t love everything in the line, and they want to be able to trade the items they don’t like for items they do like. Right?
So there’s all these little subsidiary communities that pop up. And, you know, the business owner got to a place where she wanted to sell her business. And this community of, you know, over 200,000 people was a core piece of that sale, right?
This is our customer community, and look at how big it is, and look at how thriving it is, and da-da-da-da-da. But once it changed hands, and she wasn’t there controlling every little thing, the community very quickly descended into being a gripe fest about the quality of the product. And of course, the buyer is very confused, because the buyer was like, whoa, whoa, we bought this brand, we bought the product, we bought everything.
And part of why we bought it is because there’s like these 200,000 people who like love it. And this is like amazing to have this kind of customer retention and all of these things. But because they didn’t have the control over the group as the prior owner did, it all fell apart.
And people, you know, had all this like pent-up rage and criticism for the product that they now felt free to say. And the community just completely devolved. And, you know, that’s a very extreme example.
And the reason I share the extreme example is because that’s never going to happen to you. You’re probably never going to see that happen in any community that you’re ever in. But that is a sign or an eventual consequence of a community that is built on the leaders over reliance on controlling and centralizing every little thing.
So the most important thing I think kind of to take away here as we start to close is that a large group is not the end-all be-all, right? A large group can be loud and lonely. A small group can be quiet and introverted, but it can also be quiet and deeply connected.
You know, belonging isn’t about the visibility piece. That is one thing that I think is really important as we talk about communities and we talk about finding our freaks. You know, we think visibility is where the value is.
We think like, oh, if everybody knows and likes and wants to be a part of this type of group over here, then this type of group has a higher value than this very tiny, maybe somewhat ostracized group over here. But that’s not always the case because belonging is less about being seen and more about being necessary. Because, you know, if you’ve listened to any of the other episodes in this show, you will have seen that most of the really small communities, super niche communities, are the ones that people have been most desperate to have found and most grateful to be a part of.
So you think about early on in the series we talked about Kathy Lipp’s Clutter-Free Academy. Part of why that worked is because even though half of the nation’s population identifies as having a problem with clutter, almost everybody in Kathy’s community joined thinking they were the only person who had a clutter problem. And then they joined the group and they’re like, holy cow, there’s like 5, 10, 15,000 people in here just like me.
They were like, oh my gosh, I have found my people. Like, what would I do without them? And her community, people joined for life.
And part of why they joined for life is because clutter is an ongoing battle, but part of why they joined for life is because they feel so deeply connected with each other over that shared problem. You know, we talked to Rachel Allen who developed deep community with the spouses of incarcerated individuals when her husband was in prison. And it was the same, none of them wanted to be in that club, okay?
None of them was like lining up, wanting to be part of the, you know, wives of prisoners fan club. Like, that wasn’t their thing. They became connected with each other out of necessity, but then they became a lifeline to one another, right?
Connecting each other with resources, resources for themselves, for their children, for their spouses. So visibility is not the same as value. And belonging doesn’t come from popularity.
It doesn’t come from being noticed. Where belonging comes, and I think the episode with Rachel Allen, the episode with Nikki James Zellner is another good one that draws this example, belonging comes from knowing that something real would be missing without you. In Rachel’s case, those women knew that they would not be able to advocate appropriately for their loved ones without her help.
In Nikki’s case, schools would not have carbon monoxide detectors protecting their students were it not for her advocacy and her influence. In Kathy’s case, the women of clutter-free academy would still be going around thinking they had a housekeeping problem. And going back to our last episode with Gwen Bortner, right?
Her model reflects all of that. Her tiny little community of clients only, right? Reflects the fact that belonging doesn’t come from being noticed.
It just comes from knowing that something real would be missing without you. Because even when she has, you know, a few people missing those quarterly get togethers, her clients all reach out to that person to let them know how much they’re missed. They have a good time at their quarterly planning and retreats.
They get a lot done. But they always comment on how it isn’t the same without the person who’s missing. Again, they’re not like, oh, it’s not good because that person’s not here.
But they’re like, it’s not the same. Right? They bring something positive to the experience that we are all missing out on because they’re not here.
So what I would love for you to really think about as we close is the line between stewardship and control. Okay? Because if you don’t ever want to be the bottleneck in any community you lead, whether that’s a board, a club, a business community, or an online membership, you have to be willing to give up control.
Which means you need to be willing to not be the hub, to not be the end-all-be-all solution, to not be the singular authority. You want to instead turn your attention toward stewardship. Be the person who puts themselves responsible for protecting the culture.
Designing a container, designing a space where people feel free and welcome to contribute. Design for shared ownership so that everybody feels like they have a piece of the pie. And if they aren’t participating, they recognize that something valuable is missing.
If somebody else steps away, they miss that person’s presence and they reach out to them. As a steward, make it easier for members to matter to each other. Because managing the container is not the same as owning the relationships.
And that’s the distinction that makes belonging in communities more sustainable. That’s how you prevent burnout when you are in charge of a group of any sort, is understanding that if you manage the container, the members can own the relationships and it’s a less pressure for you. So here’s where we’re going to leave us today.
If your community feels stuck, if your community feels stuck, if it feels noisy but yet shallow, or if it looks like engagement is high but you’re not getting a good sense of connection, your issue may not be one of growth. It actually might be one of design. So ask yourself, are you curating for shared values?
Are you protecting the culture early on? From the moment somebody comes in, are you protective of the culture that they walk into, that they experience? Are you creating pathways for members to rely on each other?
Or are you quietly routing everything through yourself? Because again, belonging doesn’t scale through head count. When it scales is when trust transfers.
And when trust transfers, leadership gets distributed, members become necessary to one another. And sometimes the most powerful decision you can make toward that scalability is to stop needing to be the center. That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks.
To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird, makes you wonderful.
Normal was never the point.
Feb 18, 2026 | Episode Transcripts
We found out one time that there were all of these private chats going on during the day. Someone, you know, kind of just mentioned that there was these whole conversations going on in private chats. And it was like, oh, I love that.
But because I knew it was, it was about them supporting each other, sharing an additional idea, because I wasn’t in your small group, but you just mentioned this thing. And oh, by the way, I have this additional resource for this additional idea that you need to know about that too. Whatever it was, it was all about, we are kind people, we support one another.
And like I said, for me, that’s a win. It really can be about the power of really amazing women. If I was in a community and was trying to figure out who were my people, I would start asking them, what do you love about what you do? When you ask that question, you start hearing what they actually value as opposed to what they do.
We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tanya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras.
Because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. We love to talk about community, how to build it, grow it, sustain it.
But today we’re talking about what does it look like when you opt out of the usual models and just create connection your way. Maybe no platform, definitely no hype, and a healthy level of skepticism when it comes to this word funnel. So I’m here today with Gwen Bortner.
Gwen Bortner goes by a lot of titles. Some people refer to her as a business strategist. She’s a trusted advisor.
She is somebody I am lucky enough to co-host a podcast with. Shameless plug for The Business You Really Want. Find it at thebusinessyoureallywant.com. Here’s what I know about Gwen.
Gwen has done a little bit about everything and a lot of most things. She has spent more than 40 years across dozens of industries. And really where she has landed is she has decided that her personal playground is helping women figure out what they really want and how to build a life that reflects it regardless of what all the gurus like to say about what we should want.
So Gwen isn’t your traditional community leader, right? She prefers tight-knit in-person relationships and yet she is one of the most naturally connective and connected people I know. And so what I want to do today, Gwen, is I want you to help us see what happens or what it looks like when you pull back the curtain and talk about how connection can work off the grid. So here is how we start every episode.
Gwen, I want you to tell us who are your freaks and why do you love them? So my freaks, my freaks are kind of all of the freaks. And I will say part of my freaks, particularly these days, are the ones who don’t fit quite in the room, whatever room that we’re in. Because I’m not fitting in a lot of the rooms I’m in because I am not a typical entrepreneur, because I am not what I would call a true visionary.
I am an operations person, right? But I own my own business. So I’m an entrepreneur. Look at you already defying stereotypes.
Right? But I’m not a typical visionary. And so my current freaks that I’m working with are all other women entrepreneurs. Now, most of them are actually supervisionary because they don’t need another visionary.
They need an operations-minded person. Another visionary, which is, it would be bad. It would be like throwing gas on the fire.
It sounds like the last thing they need are more ideas. Yeah, no, more ideas is not what they need. So those are my freaks.
But when I’m in other environments, like those are the people that I’m serving. But when I’m in other environments, the people that I tend to resonate with are the ones that I’m also seeing that are feeling uncomfortable being in the environment, whatever the environment is. Yeah.
And so, you know, I have all my guests fill out a little intake form just so I can come prepared to the interview. And one of the things you said is that your people are super smart women who don’t feel smart. Where do you think that disconnect comes from? Oh, well, part of it is because I’m old, right? And that was one of the things we were still fighting that as I was coming up through, you know, the career ladder and through school and college, girls were still not well received if we were smart on the whole.
Yeah. Sometimes we were well received by a small group, but usually not a huge group. That was usually, you know, was a problem or it was OK.
But you were just, you know, you were the smart one. Right. And yeah, everyone knows when you’re the smart one, that is code for you’re ugly.
True. Right. Yeah.
Oh, well, maybe they’ll be smart. You know, I mean, like, you know, you see, you know, an ugly baby or something. It’s like, like that’s code for for they’re going to they’re ugly.
Right. And so all of it, you know, all of that played in. And what I find is most of the women are feeling like that there’s areas that they’re stupid and that they shouldn’t be stupid there, that if we’re going to be smart, we have to be smart at absolutely everything, which, of course, is also silly that we believe.
But but somehow that’s the other that’s the other side of the smart coin is if you’re smart, you can’t be smart at a few things and not amazing at everything else. Right. Right.
And so if you’re not amazing at anything else, then that means you must be dumb. Right. Can’t can’t play both, but that’s what we do.
Yeah. Well, I imagine those who you work with who are smart know they’re smart. They just think everybody is as smart as them, like they don’t realize how much smarter than the average person they might be.
Oh, yeah. I’ve had those conversations as well, because I do know that I’m smart. And they’re like, well, you know, but you’re smart.
It’s like, yeah, I’m smart, but you’re a different kind of smart. You know, because they’re smart, and then they’re super smart. And then there’s like crazy smart.
And then there’s super fast smart. And I mean, like, you know, there’s different kinds of smart. And and that’s the thing I think is most women don’t realize how many different kinds of smart there are.
And it’s okay not to be all the kinds of smart. Yeah. Well, and, you know, with that in mind, right, it’s okay to not be all the kinds of smart.
Something that I know about you, right, is you don’t run a community. You don’t spend your days online, if you can help it. And I should qualify that you do spend your days online, because most of your work with clients is virtual.
So you love marathon days of zoom call after zoom call after zoom call. But part of it is because you love that you’re not spending every waking moment on LinkedIn, on Facebook, you don’t run a membership, you don’t spend a bunch of time on online memberships that you’re even in. But at the same time, you have a highly connected network.
And connection seems to be at the core of just kind of how you move about the world. So when you’re thinking of the term community, like, how do you define that for yourself? So for me, community is, I have a I have a really huge community, but it’s a much looser community than a lot of other folks, where where there’s where a lot of the folks I know have a number of pretty close relationships in a variety of in a variety of ways, you’d be one of those those people, quite honestly, that I would, you know, put into that category. I find it difficult to create those kinds of relationships.
I have very, very few really close, tight relationships, but I have a ton of beyond casual, but not tight relationships. And, you know, and there’s, there’s all sorts of research where they talk about, you know, how many people can you actually know how many people you have relationship with, and they, you know, it always looks like a target, you know, smaller, bigger, bigger, bigger, right? Well, my target, you know, that is really, really tiny, but that next group is actually a pretty big circle. It’s not in that kind of concentric circle, evenly dispersed, you know, kind of way.
And then the next ring out is also really, really huge, which is very loosely connected that I know you exist, we’ve talked, we’ve had some, you know, thing and I can usually it’s like, Oh, wait, I know I’ve got a person I know I’ve got a person and I can usually, you know, pull up in my mind who that person is. And so my community is a much looser community than what we I think what we typically think of as community, but if you get the right small number of people, and I’m thinking about, you know, we do a quarterly planning process as part of everyday effectiveness that you obviously know well, because you’re like in the middle of that is a community. And the first time I pulled it together, which was before you and I were working together, it bonded as a community almost instantly, which I didn’t quite get the uniqueness of because I do that consistently with small communities.
It wasn’t until you got on board and started talking to me, it was like, people don’t do that. That’s not the way this works. And it was like, Oh, really? But I wouldn’t necessarily be able to do it with 200 people.
But I can do it with 15 or 20. Pretty, pretty fast. Yeah, well, okay.
So since you brought up the quarterly planning process you do, we call it the quarterly tune up. And just for the benefit of the listeners, right? I help with the virtual facilitation of that online planning retreat. Because I really like this as a great example of community that doesn’t look like community and yet checks all the boxes of what true community is.
So my definition of true community is, it is an environment where people gather together around a shared purpose or shared interest. In your case, these are all female business owners who want to be more effective in their business, even if it’s not necessarily efficient. And ultimately, what they’re looking for is sustainable success.
They’re looking for success that they can see themselves doing day in, day out. They’re not interested in constantly being on the roller coaster of sprinting and then collapsing from exhaustion, so on, so forth. So that’s their shared purpose, right? Sustainable success.
They’re all women. And they are happy to meet together quarterly. The second thing you need to have true community is you need to have the ability to connect with content and usually your content provider.
So the quarterly tune up is great because you’re on the mic, you’re the emcee. Having me do the facilitation means you don’t have to worry about finding links and all the tech and making sure the Zoom is doing what Zoom is supposed to do. You get to be there really present for them.
They get to ask questions. When they share things, you mirror what you’ve heard. And so even though it is a group environment, and I think we’ve had as many as 25 people on it at one time, they feel directly connected to you because you are able to really be in the moment, eyeball to eyeball with them on the call.
So that piece is there. They get to connect with the content because as you present the content, you break them out into breakouts to help them further process and distill the information that’s being delivered. And then in the process of those breakout rooms, they’re connecting with each other, which I think is the third component that you need.
That’s the third leg of every community stool is the ability to connect with other members of the community around the content and also around the content creator of the content facilitator. So you check all those boxes. So more than most memberships that I see out there, you fit the definition of community and community leader, right? Because there’s a lot of memberships out there where you never see the owner.
Nobody has any opportunity to really talk to each other and connect, but you have facilitated that for these women. So that’s what you have done intentionally or unintentionally 100% right when it comes to community building. But the thing that always flabbergasts me when I am with you and I see this right where I’m like, this should not work.
And yet it does, right? Is they are not the same type of businesses. These are not all service providers, right? Because we’ve been a lot of spaces where it’s like female entrepreneurs, but they’re all service providers. They’re all coaches, consultants.
So they’re not all service providers. They’re not all product-based businesses, but even among the product-based businesses, they’re not all retailers. Some of them have just very different products that they have.
Right. They’re manufacturing. Yeah.
Yeah. They’re manufacturers. So all different industries, all different revenue levels as well.
I’ve heard from a lot of people that you can’t put the seven fig business owners with the six figs and with the five figs, and yet you managed to do it just fine. And nobody in those rooms ever acts like they’re too good to be there. Nobody in that room ever acts like they’re not good enough to be there.
Although some of them secretly believe that they’re not good enough to be there because they’re sitting there going, what did I do to be surrounded by all this coolness? And it’s beautiful. And I think one of the things that you do so well, and I want you to talk about this. So this is my, this is me.
Hey, you have some thinking time here. Is you do such a great job of first of all, reinforcing the belief that everybody has a right to be there. Like if for no other reason than the fact that you invited them and you don’t invite bad people to places.
The second thing is you do such a great job of getting the heck out of their way. You don’t try to micromanage every aspect of their experience with the community. And so they actually get the freedom to build these relationships outside of you, because we now know that we now know that these women get together more than once a quarter.
Sometimes, you know, most of the groups, sometimes just little pockets, and they’re building these beautiful partnerships and relationships independent of you. And yet they credit you as if you orchestrated it. All right.
Now talk, tell me your thoughts on what my thoughts are. Well, you know, it’s interesting because one of the things that I have decided as part of it is owning that I am the center of this and saying the reason that they’re all here is because of their relationship with me. Right.
And so I think your point, which is a really interesting one I hadn’t thought about before, although you and I have talked about it in other places, is I do show up. I am not the person who even advocates the whole be the CEO of your business and never show up in it ever again. I don’t actually believe that for the types of businesses that we’re working with.
And so I also mirror that I don’t say I’m going to build this really amazing business advisory firm that no one knows me at all. Right. So I curate you’re not you can’t sign up for this on the web by itself.
You have to talk to me first. And it doesn’t happen often. But occasionally, I have encouraged someone to think about another option instead of joining us because I could tell it was not it was not gonna be a good fit personality wise.
So that’s one of the pieces is that there is enough shared values within this group back to it’s a small group. This is not 500 people. You know, this is 2025 people.
And so you can curate a group that size having shared values that are, you know, kind of real core values. And that’s the thing is their real core values are shared, even though I’m sure we have at least one or two atheists in there. And we also have people who are highly involved in the church, you know, in traditional religion in there and kind of everything in between.
But the core values of valuing people, valuing creativity, there’s there’s some core values that I’m not even sure I can quite pull them out. But they’re there, you can feel them. And I think that that allows me to not feel like I need to micromanage the space.
Okay, I’m gonna put a pin in that because I have a different take on the whole micromanaging the space piece. But so it’s interesting you bring up the shared values because a few years ago, during the height of the pandemic, I was responsible for creating a community environment for virtual events. So remember how in 2020, every in person event, like on the turn of a dime, had to become a virtual event, and nobody knew what to do.
And, you know, in the world of online business, you know, there’s a lot of online business owners that believe, you know, with these six, six figure high ticket programs, five, five to six figure high ticket programs, and they believe that the only way you could sell those is if you got everybody together in a room in the same physical location, they had to invest time, the plane ticket, all the things, right. But we had a pandemic shut down the world, we couldn’t get people together in the same room, we had to figure out a way to make this happen. And so that’s when, you know, in my role as a community leader, people went from I don’t really think that’s like a viable business idea to, oh my gosh, we desperately need you come and help us and we’ll pay you any amount of money to do it.
And so in this one community was on Slack, and you know, Slack, like I know Slack, well, maybe not as well as I know Slack these days. But Slack had not been known for a great place to connect outside of the workplace. It’s a hard to organize and all those things.
And so we developed this idea of creating like little like tables, right, using the Slack platform to create these private tables as you would in a in a room. And we did this event three times in 2020. The first time we did it, we gave them a survey to pair them up or to match them up.
And we went by revenue level stage of business, industry, ideal client. And we tried to get them together in that. And it was a train wreck, Gwen, an absolute train wreck.
Never so many complaints in my life. And we’re talking about like 1200 people. The second time we did it, we brought together some grad students from a university who were studying online relationships and such.
And what they said is that in all their research, what they found is it was all down to values that you could bring people from no any kind. And they had piloted this on college campuses for student retention and time to graduation. And so we brought them in.
I got to work with this team. It was amazing. But they came down to they had a list of I don’t remember if it was eight to twelve values.
And what they wanted to do is they wanted to get to each participant’s top five values. And they were if we can get them in a group that aligns with one or two, they’ll stick it out, they’ll stay for the whole event, they’ll do all these things. And they were 100 percent right, Gwen.
Yeah. 100 percent right. And so we and we were able by the third time we were able to really narrow down that matching.
But you were the first person who I have ever heard say that. Like I’ve ever heard who’s not in community building, in community facilitation, who actually recognizes that the values matter way more than the circumstances, the revenue, the business focus. So now I just have to ask, like, where did you come to that information? Because we’ve never talked to this before, so you didn’t get it from me.
It’s instinctual. And having done enough of this for as long as I have, you mentioned, you know, in the intro, I’ve been doing this for nearly 40 years. I also formed my first networking group from scratch about 40 years ago.
Way back when, when the way you found a networking group is you got a mailing list in snail mail to invite people to come to a thing. You know, I mean, seriously, this was a very different world, people. And if you’re not, you know, old enough, you can’t even imagine what what that was like.
But I was doing that back, back when I was in my very early 20s, because I could see the importance of gathering people together. And back then, that was also a women’s in business group, because there weren’t tons of us. And this was part of the whole thing.
And then I did all sorts of other things. I did what was way before BNI, you know, all sorts of different versions of this kind of thing. And you’re right, we’ve never talked about it.
I hadn’t thought about it until it came up. Because you know, good extrovert me, sometimes I don’t know what’s in my brain until we start talking. And it’s like, Oh, that was kind of smart.
But I could tell it is about values. And like I said, like you said, and like I instinctively know, it’s not like all of the values have to line up, because we have some folks that are probably at really opposite ends of the spectrum. But there is a commonality of some level of creativity, and really caring about people.
I mean, you know, you know, all of our people, they all care about people in true ways, not, not the Oh, I love people, you know, when, and then they go do nasty things to yeah, no, they do. Well, they care about people. I mean, like, they’re all truly nice people.
Yeah, people kind. Yeah, they’re kind. They want to do good things in the world.
They it’s not just like, Oh, I want to take care of my clients, or Oh, I want to take care of my customers. I want everybody who walks into my shop to feel good. No, they really want to leave the world a better place than they found it.
They raise their kids to do that. They incentivize their staff to do that, like they they really are. And I was gonna say the whole like, you don’t feel like you have to micromanage the space because of how good those your people are.
I think that is why you don’t for sure, right? Because I mean, your people just come to the table with such great intentions, and they understand how to clearly articulate their great intentions. But I would argue, if I’m comparing you from a lot of other community leaders, and even like coaches and consultants who run group programs, what I see set you apart from them is that you have the confidence and the intrinsic belief that them getting together independent of you doesn’t dim your shine. Which sounds so cliche.
I know it’s like such like a cereal box. It does. But it’s even more than that.
I think I actually find them getting together independent of me as a giant win. Right? I mean, like, it’s not that it just doesn’t dim my shine. But it’s like, oh, my God, that’s exactly what I wanted.
Like, you know, we found out one time that there were all of these private chats going on, you know, during the day, you know, because our session is two, three hour Zoom sessions, two days of three hour Zoom sessions. These are not a little 30 minute planning thing. I mean, these are intense.
And we found there was these whole conversations going on. Someone, you know, kind of just mentioned that there was this whole conversations going on in private chats. And it was like, oh, I love that.
I love that. That makes me really happy. Because I don’t assume that the private chat is talking bad about me.
Because I think some people go there immediately. They immediately go into that negative space. It never even occurred to me until just now when I said it was like, yeah, that’s that’s not what it was.
But it was a but because I knew what it was. It was about them supporting each other, sharing an additional idea because I wasn’t in your small group, but you just mentioned this thing. And oh, by the by the way, I have this additional resource, or, you know, this additional idea, you need to know about that too.
You know, whatever it was, it was all about, we are kind people, we support one another. And like I said, for me, that’s a win. So when I’m talking with one of my clients, it’s been at this I can say, remember, so and so said, don’t forget, it ends up being that it doesn’t have to be all about me all the time.
It really can be about the power of really amazing women. Yes. And I will say to me, that is how you know, you have built a successful community is because the community should be able to both sustain and police itself independent of you.
If you’ve done your work to lay a strong foundation, set up appropriate guardrails, and really invest in the culture, they shouldn’t need you to behave themselves, they shouldn’t need you to play nicely with each other. And I think this is one of those things that you do instinctively without knowing you do it simply because it feeds in to that core belief you have that if whatever you’re doing to be successful isn’t something you can do all the time, then it’s not sustainable. Right? Yeah.
Okay, I want to move from this. And I want to talk about something that you said earlier on, because you keep emphasizing how it’s a small group, it’s a small group, right? It’s like 25 people are. And I know that you operate in big rooms.
But I feel like when you operate in big rooms, you naturally collect or curate a smaller group within the big room. Is that true? That is true. It is true.
And so if I walk into a big room, where I don’t know very many people or anybody, because I’m a natural extrovert, and pretty high on the real extrovert scale, that doesn’t freak me out, because I can do meaningless small talk for hours. I mean, I used to say when I was young, I was really good at a cocktail party, because I knew, you know, a tiny bit about almost everything. So so I can, you know, someone can mention a thing, and I can like, say something back to them, and they look at me like, how do you know about that? Because they think like, I’ve got this great knowledge.
And it’s like, I’ve pretty much just given all of it away, you know, and then I tell them how I know about that, which they find interesting. And then they tell me, you know, I don’t have to actually say that much. So I really am good at a cocktail party.
And so that whole small talk thing doesn’t doesn’t bother me. So I’m okay in that scenario. But I’m not necessarily comfortable or happy in that scenario.
So so it’s not like I’m uncomfortable, and I’ve got to get out of here, got to get out of here. But I don’t actually feel like I’m a part of the community until I have curated my, my small group. Okay, so I’m just gonna say what listeners are thinking, even if they don’t know they’re thinking it.
And I’m speaking specifically to the business owners, right? Because everybody who listens to the show is a business owner. Some people are just listening to the show because they like people and they like people’s stories. But it’s 2025 as we record this.
And, you know, we’re still hearing from a lot of people bigger is better. You can’t have a successful business if you’re not constantly talking to rooms of 100 plus. You can’t have a successful business if your email list isn’t at least 1000 if not 5000 depends on who you talk to there.
You can’t have a successful business if you haven’t gone viral on social media. So with all this messaging of you got to be bigger, bigger, bigger, because this is who you were before I met you. So I know that I’m not the person who educated you on the fact that you didn’t need that.
But I need to know two things here. I need to know one, how did you get comfortable with your affinity towards smallness, especially in rooms where I know you’re hearing that bigger is better? And number two, how are you successful in business today, in spite of what everybody else says you need to do? Or maybe because you’re doing something that different than what everybody else says you need to do? So I think the answer to both questions is, I have gotten very clear on what my definition of success for me is. And that’s not going to line up with a generic definition of success, which is what we’re seeing from the gurus, social media, all of those things.
That’s a generic definition of success. Because that’s, well, because that’s what it is. It’s something that most people can agree on that if that thing is happening, you probably are successful.
But by the same token, you know, whether we, you know, regardless of what we pick, we can pick, it’s a seven figure business, we can pick, it’s, you know, 5000 people on your mailing list, we can, you know, we can pick any of those things. And I am confident between you and I, we can come up with a handful of people who have achieved any or all of those things, and are not actually successful. Right? Not by what their, you know, that individual’s definition of success is.
And so I really think that’s the answer to both questions, is I’m really comfortable knowing what my definition of success is. Although I am competitive, I have never had to be first. And I never have been first.
I’ve never, I’ve never been the best. It’s not ever been my driver, where a lot of entrepreneurs being the best has been their driver. Was I an A student? I absolutely was an A student.
But I wasn’t a straight A student. There were a few Bs in there, which, you know, didn’t make me happy at the time. Because, you know, I was, I was a good student.
But that was also my reality. And that continued on through a whole, a whole lot of things. And so understanding that I don’t actually have to be the best, but I can still be very, very good is okay.
Because there’s only one person who can stand at the top of the podium on any given day. And if you watch any of those kinds of competitions, who’s on the top of the podium changes day to day to day. Rarely does one person stand on top of the podium every single solitary time.
Yeah. Right. And so I have way less pressure on myself, knowing what I want, and saying, I want to be good.
I want to be consistently good. But I don’t have to be on the top every single solitary time. Okay, so one more question on this thread.
How? Gwen, how? Because I know that there are people who are listening who are like, I want to be comfortable with that, too. But I’m not. So how did you get comfortable? Were you always comfortable? Were you born comfortable with this? Or is this something that you came to terms with over time? I don’t ever remember not being confident.
Got me in trouble in grade school. Because in grade school, kids don’t know what to do with a confident kid. Because most people are not.
And so I was banished from the class. I got a really nasty letter signed by everybody in the class, that basically was mad at me for being confident. And, you know, terribly hurtful, terribly hurtful.
And I also got over it. I still ended up, you know, hanging out and being friends with a whole lot of the people who signed that letter throughout my, you know, throughout my high school years. Because that’s part of also being confident is knowing that’s about them and not about you.
Right. So I don’t ever remember not being confident. I give a lot of credit to my parents for that.
They would allow me to go into situations that were challenging situations, but where they knew I would be supported. My church environment allowed for me for that when I was young, I was allowed to try and do things that were adult things, and was able to be successful at that. And so that gave me gave me confidence.
So for the most part, I mean, there are there are obviously a few areas in my life that I have never been confident. And you know, that’s a that’s a whole, we don’t have enough time for all that. But for the most part, I have always been confident.
And the confidence piece builds on itself, it is a self fulfilling prophecy. If you can start being confident in one thing, then you can be confident a little bit more. And then when you’re confident more than you can become a little bit more, and it just grows, grows, grows, grows, grows, grows.
And as someone once said, Yeah, your confidence is actual confidence. It’s not a fake it till you make it confidence. It’s just like, nope, I can do that.
I can be okay with it. And I’m also okay that not everyone’s gonna like me, not everyone’s gonna be, you know, not everyone’s gonna bow down at my feet, not everyone’s gonna hire me, not everyone, not everyone, not everyone. Okay, because the right people will.
Well, and like, you know, something that I always say is right is it’s not for everybody. Like you’re not for everybody. But for certain people, you are their exact somebody.
I am their exact somebody. Yeah, exactly. So, Gwen, for people who are listening right now, and they want a deeper connection, but they just like a deeper connection, like you’ve described, but they don’t know where to start.
What do you think would be like one small but meaningful way that they could begin to find their people, especially if they like to find people offline? So I think it’s really being open to hearing their values, right? Because I do think the values piece is the easiest place to line up with, with folks. And so it’s asking deeper questions, it’s asking more interesting questions. And you know, we’ve talked about it before this, this question comes from Chris Voss, who wrote Never Split the Difference.
But instead of saying, what do you do ask, what do you love about what you do? When you ask that question, you start hearing what they actually value, as opposed to what they do. Oh, that’s good. Right.
And so if I was in a community and was trying to figure out who are my people, I would start asking them, what do you love about what you do? And not even asking what they do, because that’s also part of the fun is to figure out like, do you know what they do based on what they describe what they love? Yeah, what they do? Right. But they will tell you way more, they’ll tell you stuff that they never thought they’d ever tell any, you know, like, two minute stranger. Well, I think sometimes probably because they, nobody’s ever asked them that.
And you actually get the unfiltered answer. I love that. Yeah.
Okay, so we’re gonna put all the information on where to find you in the show notes. But you know, for the for the benefit of those who are more listeners than readers, they can find out more at everyday effectiveness.com. Secondary shameless plug for the business you really want.com, which is a great podcast, if I do say so myself. We are super awesome together.
And Gwen, you actually the one place you do love to connect with strangers and friends is over on LinkedIn. So we will go and put your LinkedIn information. Now for the end of this, we have a little rapid fire segment, which I did not prepare you for, because I know that you like this sort of thing.
I love this sort of thing. So it’s a quick round of five questions. We’re going to go fast.
There’s no wrong answers, just whatever comes to mind. Are you ready? As ready as I’m going to be. Okay, so finish this sentence for me.
You’re my kind of freak if you’re willing to do hard things because you love them. What’s something you love that your friends just don’t get my very eclectic mix of loving indoor hobbies like knitting and quilting and outdoor hobbies like paddleboarding, skiing and hiking. Yeah, okay, that doesn’t make sense to me either.
So well, we’re just gonna let that one sit. What community would you infiltrate just to understand it better? I don’t know, because I think every time I come across one, I just do it. I yeah, no lies detected on that one.
We’ll just go with that. Okay, what tool ritual or practice helps you stay connected to your people? For me, one of the things is I do have a what I’m going to call a private networking group that I’ve established that it’s also curated. And it allows me to stay in touch with a smaller group of people.
And we meet once a quarter, they get a newsletter, but it allows me to stay in touch. Okay, last one is who’s someone doing freakishly good work, who you think deserves a bigger stage? It’s so hard because there’s so many names. So the what I what I think I’m going to actually say is pretty much every one of my clients.
And they’re all of course, doing very, very different kinds of work. Yeah, but the work that they’re doing in in their area is always freakishly good. And there’s only one of my clients that really has a giant stage.
Okay, okay, true to this entire interview, you are like your clients biggest fan. So, Quinn, thank you for showing up. Thank you for showing us that not everybody has to do what everybody else says they have to do in order to be happy, to be successful.
You definitely don’t have to build a massive group to fill a sense of belonging. And sometimes the most powerful communities start really close and really insulated. So for everybody listening, if you ever feel like you don’t fit the mold of what community is supposed to look like, I hope that this episode reminds you that there’s nothing wrong with the way you connect.
It just might mean that you haven’t found your people yet. That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate and leave a review.
And if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
Feb 3, 2026 | Episode Transcripts
Belonging doesn’t require sameness, it requires responsibility. The problem when you treat visibility as value is that a community can be very, very active. There can be multiple posts a day, multiple comments a day, multiple reactions a day, right? There can be all this activity without actually making anybody feel like they’re any better today than they were yesterday.
I can do my best, you can do your best, I can work my hardest, you can work your hardest, and one of us is still going to walk away not making as much of an impact as the other. So, you know, belonging doesn’t come from being noticed, it comes from knowing that if you weren’t there, something real would be missing. We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in.
I’m Tanya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras, because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
There’s a moment in my interview with Jeff Yoshimi that I keep coming back to. It’s not about cancer. It’s not about gaming.
It’s not even about the science. Although, trust me, that episode, plenty of science in there. But what keeps bubbling up for me is actually a little bit more uncomfortable.
And I would say that instead of like boiling like front of my brain, it’s really much more quiet, like simmering kind of in the background of my head. But I keep chewing on it. In fact, it’s taken me quite some time to be able to process it well enough to even sit down here and talk to you about it on the mic.
So in my episode with Jeff, you know, Jeff is a researcher, and he is a researcher whose wife battled cancer not too long ago. And so episode 16 is really about how her battle with cancer merged his professional, academic, and personal interests. And so in our episode, Jeff talks a lot about why games work, right? He had written a book called Gaming Cancer, specific to, you know, how video games and video gamers could actually be the next people to find a highly effective treatment or cure to cancers.
And so he talks about why games work. And a lot of the conversation is why people will spend hours solving impossibly complex problems inside a game, and yet completely ignore the problems that matter deeply in the real world, right? They’re like so focused in this gaming world, and they tune out everything else around them. And what he says, and it’s almost in passing, is that people stay engaged when their effort actually changes something.
And that has been keeping me up at night. Because I talk a lot about belonging on the show. I talk a lot about belonging professionally.
I talk a lot about belonging personally. I talk about inclusion. I talk about engagement and participation and showing up.
I talk so much about that with our guests. Our guests talk about, you know, what they’re doing on that front. They talk about how they’ve seen, you know, belonging and participation change and show up over the years.
But very rarely do we answer the really hard question of does anything you do here actually matter? Especially for those of us who spend a lot of our time in online communities. That’s a really hard question, right? Does anything you do here actually matter? That question oftentimes never gets asked while we’re busy asking questions like, oh, you know, are you welcome? Do you feel welcome here? What makes you feel welcome here? Are you feeling seen? A lot of times we’re, especially in the online space, we can get a little bit preoccupied with who likes our posts in an online community. You know, how many likes our posts get? But the deeper question that I want to talk about today is, does your presence change the system in any meaningful way? And for the basis of this conversation, I mean, we can talk about your presence in any space, in any system that comes to mind.
Because sort of what I want to put on the table right now and what I love about podcasts, is we can talk about right now. That’s a snapshot in time. And we can all feel differently today than we did a year ago.
And we can feel differently right now than we will a year from now. But what I want to put on the table is my belief that belonging doesn’t scale when people are invited to participate. Belonging scales when people are invited to matter.
When people feel like their presence and contributions make a difference, make an impact, can change things for the better, whether that’s in a Facebook group, an online membership, or, you know, an in-person community, social club, activist organization. When they feel like they can make a difference and what they are doing actually makes an impact on the outcome, that, that’s when they feel like they truly belong. That’s where belonging comes into play.
And so today I want to unpack this in two parts for this episode. The first part is applicable. Like if you are interested in the title, Find Your Freaks, of this show, the first part’s definitely going to apply to you.
We’re going to talk about what it really means and what it costs when communities confuse participation with contribution. Second part. The second part’s a little bit more, I’ll say, insider speak for those of us who are professional community managers, right? So the second part of this episode, I want to talk about what that distinction, the distinction between participation and contribution, what that distinction demands of the people who are paid to design and steward communities, especially those who are not part of the groups that they’ve been hired to serve.
Because I’ve been in that position myself, and it’s delicate. And there’s a lot of differing opinions on whether you should even do that or not, right? So let’s start with the first half though, right? The divide between participation versus contribution. So in many communities, there’s some mistake, and we’ll just say, you know, many communities in the general terms.
And so we say many communities, we mean both the owners, the admins, the moderators, and even the members will mistake activity for agency. So, you know, kind of participation has, I would say in, you know, 2026 when I’m recording this episode, become the default definition of belonging. We have engagement metrics that reward your presence, but they don’t necessarily reward your impact because impact’s harder to measure, right? We can track whether you view a post, depending on the platform, we can track whether you view a post, whether you react to that post, you know, drop in the hearts, whether you comment on the post, whether you share it, you know, whether you send a direct message to the post creator, like all of that can be tracked and measured.
What we can’t necessarily track, at least not in a numerical sense, we can’t track the impact that participation has. Okay, we can’t draw a line directly to that heart you left affecting change, whether that’s changing people’s minds, changing people’s behavior, or even changing the fabric of the community. And what ends up happening because those engagement metrics, right, the likes, the comments, the shares, that sort of stuff in a community, because those can be tracked, we end up treating visibility as value, right? Because the more engagement a post gets on any platform, the more visible it is to other members.
So this is true if you run an off-social media community in Circle, Mighty Networks, what are the latest? Heartbeat School, right? The more people who react and comment, the more that post gets surfaced into other members’ notifications. That’s just how it works. A little bit different on social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn, right, that also have an algorithm that feeds who sees what.
But we know across the board, the more engagement, the more comments, likes, and shares a post gets, the more people see it. And the problem when you treat visibility as value is that a community can be very, very active. There can be posts, multiple posts a day, multiple comments a day, multiple reactions a day, right? There can be all this activity without actually making anybody feel like they’re any better today than they were yesterday, or feel any more empowered to create a different and better tomorrow than they do today.
And, you know, what Jeff points out based on his research, right, his academic research, in addition to what he experienced as the spouse of somebody battling cancer, is that games have a high retention, right, of interest, of participation. Games retain people because their effort, the person’s effort, the player’s effort actually produces consequence, right? If a gamer sits out of a game, right, they don’t log into their game for weeks, months, years. When they go back, nothing has changed, right? They have, it’s frozen in the last time they put down their controllers.
But every time they come back to the game, they move forward. They have a chance to make a different outcome. And in a lot of games nowadays, you know, they are written so well.
I mean, most of them are, you know, better than a big screen movie. They’re written, and then even better than those old school choose-your-own-adventure books, right? They’re like a combination of the two, right? The gamer does this today, and it makes something happen tomorrow, whereas if they would have done something entirely different, they would have changed the whole outcome. And so games retain people because their effort, you know, produces consequence, but most communities don’t.
Most communities aren’t retaining their members because they’re not necessarily tying what the members do to any obvious outcomes in the group. And part of that just happens to be because a lot of people who are running communities aren’t professionals, right? They’re just like interested in biodiversity, and so they start a native plant gardening group for people who live in their county. They’re interested in food security, right? So they start a Facebook group that is focused on food distribution and public food pantries and the like.
Or they’re interested in a school issue, right? And so they’re starting a community maybe in person that is focused on how to get a particular issue in front of the school board, how to maybe, you know, get a proposed policy change, how to get backers for that change. They’re not focused on getting people to come back meeting after meeting, session after session by showing how everybody’s participation made a difference. And so, you know, I think the first thing we need to do is we need to address what the difference between participation and contribution is.
Because I think we know it, but we don’t know it, right? Because we use the words interchangeably. But participation is presence. And in many times, presence doesn’t have to have any consequence, right? Because we’re talking about, I mean, think about the participation trophy, right? People like to make fun of participation trophies nowadays, like everybody gets a trophy, right? All the kids on the team get a trophy whether they won the championship game or they didn’t.
And because, you know, participation just says, were you here, you know, were you on the team and did you show up? Okay, here’s your trophy. Now, you know, this, if we’re going to translate that into an online community space or community space, right? It’s examples look like liking, commenting on posts, voting in polls, attending events, right? That works in online communities and offline communities, right? Did you show up to the meeting at the Elks Lodge? Did you not show up to the meeting at the Elks Lodge? Did you log in to Zoom? You know, if the meeting was hybrid or entirely online or did you not? You know, are you showing up in approved ways? That’s participation. And though showing up is not easy, especially in in-person environments, you know, talk to anybody who doesn’t have a driver’s license, talk to anybody who lives in a town that doesn’t have public transportation, doesn’t own a car, maybe has, you know, fewer cars than driving adults in their household.
Showing up in and of itself takes effort. But, you know, when it comes to participation, you’re showing up in very defined, specific ways. You show up online, you show up in person.
And beyond the effort it takes to get there, participation is really safe, right? You just have to show up. You don’t even have to talk, just have to show up. And it’s inclusive, right? Because anybody who can get there gets to be there, right? Gets to participate, right? You can have a room full of people.
I went to a meeting not too long ago and it was in, it was not an Elks Lodge, but it was in that type of environment. And there were probably 30 chairs set up in the room and 25 of them were taken. But you know what? During Q&A, only three people spoke, right? So participation, it’s safe, it’s inclusive, it’s low risk.
Nobody is going to make you do anything more than sit in your chair, whether we’re talking sit in your virtual chair or sit in your in-person chair. And participation is pretty easy to scale if you think about it, right? All you need to do is have enough chairs in the room. You know, participation in an in-person event, it’s the size of the venue that affects how many people can participate.
In an online space, it’s unlimited, unless the owner or the builder chooses to limit it. But contribution, contribution is a whole other ballgame, isn’t it? Contribution is action that changes the system, even slightly, even incrementally. It answers the question, not were you here, but did what you did matter, right? Did you shape decisions? Did you help to solve a shared or collective problem brought up in the space? Are you or did you mentor other members? Did you help moderate or facilitate conversations between fellow members or between, you know, the leadership team? I’m thinking in a like civic club or organization, that hierarchy, you know, between the leadership team and the general membership.
Are you helping to build by growing the group or by ensuring that all members of the group know when the meetings are taking place and have every opportunity possible to show up and to offer their contribution? Are you the person who grabs the mic and says, you know, I saw several hands in the back of the room, would one of you like to speak up, right? Are you inviting additional contributions from other people who maybe aren’t always called on or aren’t always noticed? Do you carry responsibility for your part of the whole? And what I mean by that, you know, there’s an Aristotle quote that I always mix up, but right, it’s like the sum, like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, right? Are you taking ownership and responsibility for your part in the collective? Or are you saying, well, I’m part of the collective and if somebody else in the collective does a thing, you know, I’ll support that, right? Like somebody else can do it, right? We’ve all heard that, right? You know, the anybody, somebody, nobody thing. When we think that somebody else is going to do it or anybody could do it, very often nobody does it. And so the difference between the two here is that participation is about inclusion.
Inclusion is very important. We want to invite as many people to the table as we can, right? That’s important, right? We are better together. We want to invite as many people to the table, but contribution is about trust because you got to stick your neck out when you contribute and trust is where belonging actually forms.
So we think belonging comes from, I paid my membership dues, I signed a membership card, I added my name to a list, but it’s really when we trust either the people or the process enough to make real contributions, to stick our neck out, to be vulnerable, to put forth some additional effort in affecting change. That is when undeniably we feel like we belong. So if that’s where belonging lies, right? If belonging is really about contribution more than it is about participation and people are so hungry for belonging.
I mean, we hear that all the time. People talk about the loneliness crisis. I actually believe that we don’t have a crisis of loneliness so much as we have a crisis of belonging.
We have people who are in crowded rooms feeling like they don’t belong more. And if people really want to belong, like, you know, it’s like, why don’t they? Why is contribution rarer and harder than participation? And I think it’s because first, contribution introduces uneven impact. Okay, you and me can be side by side and we can be working our hardest to make a difference.
Let’s just say, just to make things simple, right? We’re having a discussion of signs and I want the signs to be blue and you want the signs to be yellow. And so I’m going to work really hard to make a case for the signs to be blue and you’re going to work really hard to make the signs yellow. And one of us is going to get our way.
One of us is going to influence the whole to where we either end up with blue signs or we end up with yellow signs. Now, maybe it’s because blue signs are cheaper than yellow signs. Or maybe it’s because yellow signs align with, you know, a color scheme that’s already in existence and so it wins.
But in general, what contribution does, right, by both of us doing everything we can to get the signs ordered in our chosen color, it shows everybody, including us, that equal contribution does not equal even impact. I can do my best. You can do your best.
I can work my hardest. You can work your hardest. And one of us is still going to walk away not making as much of an impact as the other.
And that’s hard. It is hard to acknowledge that you gave it your best and your best wasn’t good enough in this specific scenario. So contribution introduces uneven impact, which is tough.
Contribution also creates accountability. How many times have you been in an organization that if like you bring up the idea, guess what? Guess what? You’re now in charge of implementing that idea. You know, there are a lot of people who like to have a lot of ideas and a lot of thoughts, but they don’t actually want to do anything when it comes to bringing those ideas and those thoughts into a reality.
So, you know, contribution makes that accountability. It’s like, are you going to do that? You know, do you think that that’s an important enough thing that you are willing to lead the charge? The other thing, as I mentioned in my blue sign versus yellow sign hypothetical example, it allows failure, right? We win some, we lose some. And sometimes it’s not sustainable.
Sometimes contribution means that something will break if the lead contributor leaves. So, you know, I think about this in the case of like longstanding groups. So I used to be part of a mom’s group.
And before I was the leader of the mom’s group, we had some amazing like arts and crafts meetups. They were great. They were so nice.
I am not a crafty person at all, but they were incredible. But when the person who led those arts and crafts meetups, you know, transitioned out of the organization, which she had every reason to do, right? You’re allowed to, you’re allowed to come in, you’re allowed to leave. And I became in charge.
We did not have in-person craft meetups because I don’t have a crafty bone in my body. So I was not capable of leading them. And I wasn’t capable of getting anybody else to lead them.
I just didn’t have the skill set to like help somebody else see how that could be possible because the other person was so good, they left big shoes to fill. So, you know, the arts and crafts component of the organization, those great meetup groups that were so wonderful and so valuable, both for, you know, membership growth and retention, those went by the wayside. Now they were replaced by meetups and, you know, subgroup, sub interest-based subgroups that I am a little bit more akin to, you know, we had a freezer meal group and we had recipe exchange groups and we had coffee chats and play dates and things like that.
Those were things I could, you know, wrap my brain around. And then when I exited the organization, some of those things did not continue, right? Not, I don’t think anybody else was as excited about freezer meals as I was excited about. So that group went by the wayside, but other groups took its place, right? Other interest-based subgroups took the place.
But it doesn’t change the fact that people who really enjoyed the freezer meal group or really enjoyed the arts and crafts group felt like something they valued deeply was missing when it disappeared. So, you know, contribution can mean that something will break when the lead contributor leaves. And I think that’s why we all love to focus on participation, because participation protects our comfort, right? We just, can we get, you know, we had 15 people last month, can we get 15 people this month again? And because contribution changes outcomes, it’s risky, right? Change is risky.
Back to what Jeff said, you know, the issue with Jeff’s wife having cancer wasn’t so much the fact that she had an illness or a disease, it was how helpless he felt, right? And, you know, in many ways, and this is what he recognized with the games, right, is people will disengage when nothing they do can alter the trajectory of the inevitable, right? Of what’s going to happen. And so when we’re looking at communities, and we see this all the time, right? Somebody comes into a community and maybe the community is shifting and they hang out a bit, and they say, hey, you know, maybe we should do this, or maybe we should do that, and nothing happens, and then they leave, right? They leave because nothing they did or said changed the trajectory of the community in the place they wanted it to go. And if they feel helpless, right, if members feel helpless, if people feel helpless, that ends up oftentimes being a design failure of the community space than it is a motivation failure.
Now, this is something that happens a lot, right? We start to think like, oh, well, nobody is coming to the meetings because they don’t want to leave their house. Nobody wants to leave their house when it rains. Nobody wants to leave their house on a Monday night after dinner.
You know, it’s hard to compete with television. It’s hard to compete with kids sports games or, you know, whatever, maybe, if we’re talking about an in-person event. But it’s very rarely a lack of motivation that gets people to stop participating, to stop contributing.
It’s usually just the feeling of helplessness. Whether I’m there or not, nothing will change, right? The meeting is going to have the same five people talking, and they’re going to be voting on the same stuff, doing the same stuff that they would be doing if I wasn’t there, you know? So my presence is irrelevant. And I do think that those of us who build communities, we can design communities that control for that helpless feeling, right? It’s like we have to design spaces where people feel like their presence matters, and they see that their presence matters.
So if belonging isn’t about showing up, if it’s not about engagement metrics or attendance or visibility, maybe, if it’s actually about being trusted with something that matters, whatever that something is, then the harder question we have to ask relates to the fact that contribution doesn’t just happen on its own. Like I was just saying, someone has to design the container. They have to write the rules.
They have to enforce the rules, which I think most people dislike more than they dislike writing rules or following rules. Enforcing the rules is the least fun part of community in many cases. Someone needs to decide what counts as help, right? What contributions make the biggest difference? Which contributions do we listen to, do we absorb and honor versus which ones do we ignore? And this brings us to the second half of the topic, because this is a question I get a lot as a community strategist.
And there tends to be two very distinct camps, right? And the question is, can you ethically manage or even effectively manage a community that’s built around a market identity or lived experience that you’re not part of, right? And this question can make some people defensive, especially if they’re professional community managers. And I totally get this, right, because underneath it isn’t really a question about your credentials or your qualifications. It’s a question about power.
And let’s talk about that. And then we’ll wrap up and I’ll let you on your merry little way. So when we’re talking about stewardship, power and community management, right, that stewardship piece, that power piece all kind of fall under these discussions about ethical community management.
You have to first acknowledge the real concerns, you know, the real concerns are that the manager can get centered over the members, right? If the manager is not part of the community, then they may design something that’s based on their convenience, their comfort over what the members really need, right? Like I, I’m just going to use an example here. If I feel like, okay, I don’t actually know enough on this topic to be able to tell people, you know, is it better one or better two, then I’m just not going to answer any questions on this topic. Or I may just say, you know what, this topic is outside the scope of this group.
And then I can avoid that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing the answers, right? And so I’m creating rules and policies and practices around my comfort so that I don’t have to deal with what I don’t know. I don’t have to learn things that are foreign to me. Sometimes you’ll see like almost a performative inclusion where, you know, you’re like, well, you know, not part of this group, but I know enough about them, I can pretend.
And pretending only gets you so far. Also, when you’re not part of the group, you may not be quite in touch with how people talk, their jargon, their tones. And so sometimes you can be a little bit overly controlling in how you moderate behaviors and comments and such, because you’re just not familiar with that tone.
And, you know, the tone policing, the performative inclusion, centering the manager over the members, these are all risks that if you are a professional community manager, you can’t ignore. And if your inclination is to ignore risks like that, you probably should ask yourself whether you should be managing these spaces at all, because it indicates that you don’t quite have an understanding of what makes people tick and why people gather together in online spaces. So first, you know, I think it’s important to recognize that members and community managers, or we call them stewards, if you will, have different roles and responsibilities within the community, right? The community members are expected to hold their lived experience.
They are expected to be there with the sum total of their life experiences and share them as it relates to the topic of the community. So I love to use the example of recovery communities, because most people understand at some level that there is communities built around people who are addicted to a thing and no longer want to be addicted to that thing, but that that’s really hard and it can be like a lifetime, lifelong challenge for them, right? So they come into a recovery community, they have their entire life experience, and a complete awareness that their life experience is not the same as somebody else’s, right? Maybe they drank or did drugs because of a traumatic childhood, while somebody else partied hard in college, and while they graduated from college, they never graduated from college-level partying, right? It could be that simple. So everybody brings their lived experience into the situation, and they hold space for their lived experience and use that lived experience to support others in the group to help them to mentor them.
The community members define the meaning of the group. You know, as a professional community manager, I would love to tell you that I call all the shots in all the communities, but honestly, it is so much easier to get the right people in a community and let them help you to define the scope of the group and the boundaries of the group, and to work together collectively as they define what the group means for them, than it is for you to try to beat them in over the head with what you want the community to mean for them. The community members actually decide what mattering feels like, right? They know when they feel like they matter, and if you can help them put language around what that looks like and what that feels like to them, then you can help other people feel that way as well, but ultimately they decide what mattering feels like for them.
And then on the stewardship side, right, those of us who are community managers, we design the conditions for the contributions, right? We’re there to facilitate the conversations and create the conditions under which they feel safe to participate. We’re the ones who protect the pathways for agency. We’re the ones who ensure that the power dynamic flows toward members, not against members.
Something that I say very often when I’m talking to other community leaders, when I’m talking to business owners especially, is that belonging doesn’t require sameness, it requires responsibility. So let me give you a couple of examples of what that looks like in communities I’ve been in, right? So especially when we’re talking about conditions for contribution, protecting pathways for agency, ensuring power flows toward members. So there’s a community that I used to lead for several years, almost a decade, and one thing that we found is it was truly a community that never slept.
It was global, so somebody was online all the time. And it was a community that was emotionally vulnerable and that sometimes manifested as the looking a little bit like neediness. They weren’t really needy, they’re just emotionally vulnerable, right? They feel very sensitive about the stuff that they would share.
It took a lot of trust building to get them to share. And so they would post all hours, but members would get offended if their post went a certain amount of time with no response, but then they saw somebody else’s post get what they perceived to be instant response. And so one of the ways that we controlled for that, a condition that I designed for that specific community is we had all posts held for admin approval.
Now, we had to, you know, this like was a risk benefit negotiation, because on one hand, you want people to write a post and immediately see it go up, right? And there’s satisfaction, like, oh, my post went through, it was seen, okay, I’ll wait for somebody to respond. And sometimes people can respond immediately. But if that post gets put up, and at the same time as six other people post, that post can get lost as well.
But if all the posts are held for admin approval, then an admin can go in, approve the post, respond to it, approve another post, respond to it, approve another post, respond to it, right? No post gets lost. So that’s an example of designing conditions for contribution, right? We were able to, as we approved each post, we could respond to it, we could tag other members who might have something to contribute. And we really did enrichen the experience by controlling the flow of new posts.
Now, not everybody loved that. Some people felt like we were censoring because, of course, they can’t see which posts we reject versus approve. So their assumption is that we must reject posts if we approve posts.
We never rejected posts unless they broke the rules, and almost nobody in that community ever broke the rules. That’s an example of designing conditions for contribution. And it’s also an example of the conversation you have to have with yourself and your team to decide whether that makes sense.
Protecting pathways for agency, this comes up a lot in communities that are around some kind of self-improvement. So if it’s a weight loss community, if it’s a clutter organization community, if it’s a fitness community, if it’s a parenting community, somebody may say that their child is really like struggling at play dates and they’re looking for solutions, but maybe they add in there that they don’t make their child share because in the real world, as an adult, you’re not obligated to share your stuff, right? So they don’t want to make their child share. And then somebody else comes in and talks about how you’re going to raise a self-centered child because you haven’t taught them to share.
As a community steward or community manager, to protect the pathways for agency is to come in and say, you know, we don’t all parent the same here, which is perfectly okay. Part of what makes this group amazing is that all of us want the best for our children and are trying to raise the best humans possible, and we’re all doing it in different ways. So while you don’t have to agree with the fact that Susie doesn’t make her child share, you do have to respect the fact that Susie has a right to parent her child however she wants.
So let’s just bring this back to Susie’s real question here, which is probably not about should I let my child share or not because she’d already made up her mind. And then ensuring the power flows toward members is really about, you know, top-down versus bottom-up communication. There was a community that I used to be involved in.
I did not lead this community, and everything was very top-down. It was like, nope, like I am deleting this comment because I don’t like it, and you can’t do anything about that because I said so. There was never any time or I would even go so far as respect to say respect given to members to explain why admin team made the decisions that they made to explain why this post stayed up but this post went down because the owner of the community was very much like, you are a guest in my space.
This is not our space. This is not your space. This is my space.
You are a guest here, and if you don’t like it, leave. And people left, right? As they would. But, you know, a different approach is to say, you know, to create an environment where even if your members, you know, even if it’s not a true democracy, right, and your members can’t vote on everything, there is at least a power dynamic in place where they feel like they can contribute, make a difference, affect change, even if it’s as simple as, you know, help us decide our theme for the upcoming month.
That can be that easy. So, again, you know, to reiterate, right, like, belonging doesn’t require sameness. We don’t have to all do the same thing at the same time in the same way, but it does require responsibility, taking responsibility for the container that you build, the way you are facilitating conversations to support or to not support contribution, and the consequences that come from that, right? You know, going back to Jeff Yoshimi in episode 16, right, he didn’t claim to be the end-all be-all authority on cancer, on gaming, or on using video games to potentially come up with treatments or cures for cancer.
He just set out to build a bridge. He set out, you know, the whole purpose of the book is to present the idea that, hey, gamers are creative and they are relentless when it comes to pursuing the goal of winning their game. What if we built a bridge between medical science and gaming and gave gamers the opportunity to see how doing what they do best, solve complex problems within a game atmosphere, how that could actually influence and change modern medicine or medical science? He also built the bridge by explaining that intelligence is not a monolith, right? Every intelligent person doesn’t think the same way, doesn’t have the same expert level of knowledge, that you can be a medical science expert and you can be a gaming expert, and using your expertise in gaming, even if you don’t have a ton of knowledge on the medical science front, could lead you to contributing to a cure or a treatment.
Just like if you have knowledge of medical science, maybe you don’t understand a lot about gaming, you can work with a game designer, however, to come up with a game that is both entertaining and useful. So what you want to be thinking about in terms of ethically managing communities or leading communities of which you’re not a part of the target population, what you really just want to be thinking about is what is your role as the community manager, right? Like if you are there to be the voice of the community, that might be really, really hard if you’re not part of it. But if you’re there to lift up the voices of the community, right, if you’re there to help the members who are part of the target population get a seat at the table and get their voices heard, then by all means, you don’t have to be a part of the group, right? You just have to be able to elevate others and be able to make room for others.
If you get the freedom and the power to make changes to the community to shape the outcomes of the community without consent of its members, that can be tricky, that can be dangerous territory. But if your job is to design the space where others can matter, well then really what you are is a steward, right? So it’s different managing a community that you’re not directly part of versus one that you are. Several years back, I was asked to manage a community for a business association that was focused on a specific ethnic group that I am not part of.
That was tricky. The whole time, I wasn’t sure that I should do it. In fact, I was like, you know, I could make some recommendations for people who are part of the same ethnic group and, you know, I think maybe it would be better if they ran it.
And the thought process was is because I wasn’t, you know, the person who hired me believed that since I wasn’t supposed to at any point in time talk about what I thought or what I believed and I wasn’t supposed to directly answer people’s questions, I was just supposed to default to the association’s leadership team, that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t part of the ethnic group because all I needed to be able to do was ask clarifying questions and point people in the right direction to get the answers that they needed or point them to resources that were already created. And I will say that person, you know, the person who made that decision wasn’t wrong, right? That made total sense, but what became very tricky in it is figuring out how to do that dance when I look like I look and anybody who saw me who saw my profile picture could see that I was not part of that ethnic population. It is something, you know, after I wrapped up that engagement, I was like, yeah, I’m never doing this again.
And it’s not because it was hard. It’s not because it was outside of my skill set in terms of what was being asked of me from a stewardship perspective. It was just it didn’t make sense.
It was like with as much as this association focuses on this one ethnic population, they really need to, like, invest fully soup to nuts in having all community touch points, all membership touch points be with people who are part of that ethnic population. Okay, so to sum up, managing a community you don’t belong to isn’t necessarily a problem. The problem comes if you forget who it belongs to, right? So in this case of the business association that was focused on specific ethnic group, I never forgot who that community belonged to.
So I didn’t have a problem managing it. I just would agree and would say that they would have been better served by somebody who was a little bit more in line with what the focus is of the group. But when it comes to a fitness group, you know, when it comes to a school group, I mean, this happens a lot of times, right? You’re hired to run an alumni group and you’re not an alumni of the school or you are hired to, you know, host a or run a community for, like, association members and you’re not part of the association or you’re not part of the profession that association, you know, supports or represents.
That’s okay because all you need to do is learn about the association, learn enough about what matters to its members to effectively steward the community. Where you get in trouble is when you forget that it is their community and not your community, right? You’re a steward. You are not the owner.
You cannot supersede the members and their needs for the community to truly serve them. So here’s where I want to leave you, because this one’s kind of long, right? Where I want to leave you is this, is that belonging, I’ll keep saying this, is not sameness, right? Belonging does not mean we all look the same, do the same, feel the same. Belonging is in consensus.
It’s not that we all agree and it’s not always comfort, although comfort’s nice, right? The communities that change people, change our real lives, right? Sometimes change the world are not the ones where everyone feels included all the time. They’re the ones where people are trusted with something that matters and people trust that what they do matters. So if you’re part of a community right now and you feel yourself drifting, I would bet it’s not because you don’t care, but ask yourself, right? But I would bet it’s not because you don’t care, it’s because you feel like nothing you do seems to change anything.
And what I want you to hear is that that is not your personal failure, that’s a design problem, right? The people who design the community have designed it in a way where it’s hard for you to see that you matter. And sometimes the answer to that for you is to simply go to whoever’s in charge and say, help me understand how I matter to this organization. Help me understand how I can support change here.
Like I’ve heard a lot of descriptions of the problem. Can you point me to a solution that I can participate and contribute to solving or to carrying out? And if you’re somebody who stewards communities, right, like I do, whether it’s formally or informally, here’s the harder question for you, right? Are you inviting people to participate or are you inviting them to contribute in ways that actually make a difference, in ways that shape the outcomes? Are you focused on protecting comfort, your comfort, maybe the community owner’s comfort, maybe the comfort of the curmudgeoning members, every group has a curmudgeoning member here or there, or are you protecting the meaning of your community, what it really stands for, what it was designed to do, designed to be? And, you know, maybe the most important question of all for you is who in your community is still being treated as an audience member, as a passive bystander, when they could actually be a co-creator, lighten the load for you, lighten the load for other people in charge and actually move the needle in getting all of the members to combine forces around what really matters most to them. So, you know, belonging doesn’t come from being noticed, it comes from knowing that if you weren’t there, something real would be missing.
That’s what I want to leave you with today. I would love to hear your thoughts on this and if this is the sort of episode that has you going, yes, yes, this is the kind of conversations I want to have, I would invite you to become a supporting listener, right? This is a listener-supported show, at least for this time, and you can make a one-time or ongoing monthly contribution at tonya.link slash coffee, that’s t-o-n-y-a dot link slash coffee c-o-f-f-e-e, and, you know, just ten five-dollar-a-month sponsors or supporters actually offset the cost of editing an entire episode. They take care of Anita’s full work and if that means a lot to you, it means a lot to Anita for sure, she would say thank you, and it means a lot to me.
So with that, I will leave you until next time. If there are topics or communities that you think we should be covering in the future, if there are people you want me to interview, now’s the time to let me know. I’m planning the next six months of recording and you can check the show notes for contact information or simply go to findyourfreaks.com and there will be contact information there.
Fill out a form, let us know who we should be down the line. Have a great one, I’ll see you next time. That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks.
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Jan 21, 2026 | Episode Transcripts
Cancer is a fact of life, we all face it. It’s this terrible random thing that kind of strikes out of nowhere and it’s just so tragic. I had kids and I would watch my kids game and I was always just impressed.
They’re not that excited about their homework but they are doing the most complicated and intricate things in these games. The motivation is the game itself. We are problem-solving creatures.
Our ancestors did better when they solved problems. You could take scientific problems and embed them into the mechanics of a game and get everyday citizens to try and use that open loop game, that struggling and striving how can I solve this problem energy we have and apply it to a scientific problem. Coronavirus vaccines that are stable at room temperatures were developed in part with player input from that game Eterna.
That’s a real scientific achievement that had a meaningful impact that originates in part from the efforts of game players. People collectively contribute to public goods and make an actual difference all the time. We’re wired for connection but most of us are faking it to fit in.
I’m Tonya Kubo and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras because around here what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
We love to talk about community, how to build it, grow it, sustain it but today we’re talking about what happens when the communities you belong in don’t really overlap but then something maybe forces them to. So when the academic and the researcher and the grieving loved one all find themselves in the same room something new may emerge and in this case we’ve got today’s guest Jeff Yoshimi, a professor at UC Merced whose work spans philosophy cognitive science and neural networks and he is a researcher and a systems thinker I would say and someone who found himself deeply impacted by cancer. So Jeff I don’t want to give away everything yet but I do want to kick us off with you telling us who your freaks are and why you love them.
So yeah my freaks are game designers and game players and people interested in using competitions and challenges and again video games to do good things you know. We think that these are not just tools for having fun or which is fine you know but it’s more about stealing a car in Grand Theft Auto. These are actually like works of art that could elevate and empower people and lead to things like cures to diseases.
So the freaks are the people who think of games in that way. Yeah which I find fascinating because you know before we started recording you said that you don’t really consider yourself a gamer but you’ve written a book that really is targeting gamers and game designers as your audience. So do you want to tell us a little bit about what got you to there because that might be a bit of a leap for some people.
Yeah so I mean I was a gamer way back in the early days of coin-op video games so back in the 80s and 90s I was pretty into games and they were so expensive at first a quarter a piece and it wouldn’t last long and then you know once I had personal computers I was very much into it and I always thought about I always liked things where I could approach them graphically and visually and so that really stayed with me and then as I got older and got into philosophy and cognitive science I was always trying to find ways to visualize things. I worked in the 1990s on this giant project mapping out all the debates in AI with this guy Bob Horn who wrote a book called Visual Language. He was a very interesting guy he stills active at 91.
I’m about to post about him and the work we did together and so that’s been a current through my whole life but I got busy with grad school and with my research and everything so actual gaming kind of fell off but then I had kids and I would watch my kids game and I was curious about it and I was always just impressed like you know they’re not that excited about their homework but they are doing the most complicated and intricate things in these games without needing the motivation is the game itself it’s just so beautifully designed so you know I was a gamer and then I’ve been an interested onlooker kind of thinking about them and their potential since then okay so what you observed is that the design can drive their interest more than whatever incentive there is in the game is that what you were saying yeah I think and I think at one point I say they the game designers are the heroes of the book you know they’re the ones who design these things that take what’s essentially a problem-solving situation you know how do I kill the boss monster how do I get to the next level how do I get the next level after that and they arrange it all in a way that is just intrinsically motivating and it’s a combination of art of mechanics of design of programming of technology that just taps into this thing we have in us I mean we are problem-solving creatures our ancestors did better when they solve problems you know if you had two groups groups of people on savannah and one of them was like how do I you know evade that predator how do I catch more fish how do I how do I you know make sure that my kids are safe you know and they’re coming up with gadgets and contraptions and stuff to do that and strategies and then you got another group over on the other side of the hill it’s like yeah whatever I’m just not going to try it we’re fine well the group that is trying to solve problems does better and after many generations of that we have these brains that like to solve problems and so I’m just very interested in how do we how do we tap into that yeah and you know what it’s funny is in marketing you know we always talk about open loops like a lot of marketing language is based around leaving an open loop in somebody’s mind because the brain like you said it wants to solve a problem it wants to close the loop and so a lot of marketing language is engineered to getting a person to want to close that loop and close it fast and a lot of your book so your book is called gaming cancer which I love the title by the way and I mean it really seeks to play into that idea of the human brain and gamers specifically wanting to close loops I think of in some games how there’s always easter eggs right so people become curious they’re not just trying to get from a to b do you want to tell us a little bit about what led you to writing this specific book well I mean so the backstory is so I gave you part of the backstory right I I was into games I was into visualization I always I’ve approached everything in my life through the lens of how do I visualize it how do I take this information that’s out there and get it up here right the link between complex information and our brains and I think visualizations and games and challenges and things like that are part of it and so then you know as you said in your intro so my sister-in-law had cancer you know my grandfather died of cancer cancer is a fact of life we all face it it’s this terrible random thing that kind of strikes out of nowhere and it’s just so tragic and then it hit my wife and it had metastasized and it was just I was just I was I was freaked out in the bad sense of freakier and and I’ve I had thought about this before I was like I you know it’s I want to be involved I want to do something what could I do you know what’s going on here how could I fix this that kind of mentality and I had heard about citizen science a few years before my wife got cancer and so that was kind of the final that was like an extra key an extra step in the process of like you could take scientific problems and embed them into the mechanics of a game and get everyday citizens to try and use that what we talked about that open loop game that struggling and striving how can I solve this problem energy we have and apply it to a scientific problem without having to spend a decade in a wet lab right a gamer could just get into a game and start actually contributing to a scientific problem and so that confluence of events so my wife’s cancer feeling helpless my background in visualization and knowing about this kind of citizen science that was happening kind of all kind of coalesced together and I thought not enough people are doing this there needs to be more of this there needs to be some and I was like what could I do well I can make a philosophical argument I’m a philosopher I can make a kind of programmatic statement and I can make a book filled with visuals to kind of make a call to arms right let’s hey freaks back in your terms hey gamers hey game designers let’s do more of this right let’s let’s build more of these games can’t there’s so many for the landscape of cancer is so complicated there’s so many types of cancer so many specific issues relating to cancer and there’s so many kinds of games there’s just a ton of potential here and I wanted to sort of make the pitch for that oh my gosh so I love this because we’ve we’ve discussed this before that cancer touches everybody in some way it’s it’s really hard to find anybody in the U.S. or even in the world who can say yeah no I I haven’t heard of it I don’t know anybody who’s had it and I find that people everybody seems to feel helpless especially when it touches a loved one or themselves and everybody seeks a way of overcoming that helplessness like differently right some will really hop on to wearing a specific color of ribbon right it’s the pink ribbon it’s the purple ribbon some really jump into fundraising efforts Relay for Life the Komen Run and then others will get take more the advocacy approach they’ll feel like it’s a lifestyle situation so they want to advocate for different lifestyles maybe cleaning up food ingredients everybody seems to have their thing and what centralizes all of it is this desire to no longer feel helpless to be in action to feel like they’re contributing to part of the solution and what I love about your story in particular is you really sat there and said okay what do I have to bring to the table right you’re not a doctor so that’s right and so I’m wondering like what was that moment was that a quiet moment in the hospital was that at home or was that just that process of your brain not shutting off through the journey where it came to you hey this is what I could do and I think this is going to work yeah so first of all I really like what you said Tanya about like there’s different ways of responding to this tragic occurrence which does indeed impact all of us either ourselves or our loved ones and I like your four I think had four categories of response and I think part of what I’m doing in the book is adding a fifth category like beyond like it feels like unless you’re a scientist like all you could do is raise money or raise awareness and help with prevention these are noble honorable things we should keep doing them there is an additional thing there’s a certain kind of mentality of like there’s a problem I want to fix it we could tap into that and whether you’re an artist a market the thing you said about marketing how do you keep people engaged for these games to work people have to play them they have to be marketed right that marketing plays a role so there’s a way like when you go to a fundraiser you’re just you know you’re raising money that’s fine but when you are when you are a marketer and you could bring that skill to a specific game that could lead to a cure you’re using a skill you have a talent you have in a way that directly contributes or if you’re an artist and you do the art for a game relating to cancer you’re using this specific you’re expressing what’s unique to you into this problem like making you know where like you said earlier what could I do to help and I think people like to be able to help you know if you have a big picnic I’m just coming up with this metaphor but if you have a big picnic or a big collective event people don’t want like don’t put me on like scrubbing duty or something I’m not good at yeah I’m not a I’m not a terrible cook put me on I’ll cook some people want to do something that expresses their unique talents and skills and I think we could tap into that here I asked you a question about when did it all come together so actually that’s the opening of the book is that I was actually we were at Stanford it was an overnight stay and I was just very you know I was concerned and scared you know and in the hotel room and I was kind of tossing and turning and Stanford’s of course a university town and there was like a 24-hour coffee shop across the street and I got up at five in the morning and I just said aha it was a kind of flat this will work and I got dressed I went to that there was people there at five in the morning studying so Stanford you know vibes or whatever and I wrote like a treatment I wrote like the first few pages of the book and so yeah it was a specific moment wow and I I’m sorry I don’t live in a town that has a 24-hour coffee shop but I so wish I did yeah well same yeah right so how I’m curious because you know I’ve I have some experience with publishing and I know a lot of times it can be challenging to sell the idea was that hard for you or when you started talking about this concept for the book did other people catch on quickly well I don’t know it’s so in terms of like the whole process of writing the book I was interacting with people who like because there’s a lot of different pieces that are put together in the book I talk about game design I talk about cancer and cancer biology in this extremely visual way I worked closely with artists and in particular Soraya Boza was she did a great job and the people involved there’s a particular game called Eterna an RNA synthesis game which shows I mean an important thing in the book is this isn’t just crazy you know Yoshimi talking there are games that do this this is that are leading to scientific discoveries so there’s a track record of success to build on so I got to know a lot of people in the Eterna community which is also at Stanford and that was all very positive and then the book itself went through was reviewed by 12 different people so the people at MIT I think were like I don’t know this is this is kind of does this this guy doesn’t know he’s not a biologist he’s talking about biology and and so they sent it through multiple rounds and all of that feedback just about was constructive and positive and encouraging and so it’s been positive feedback but now I’m here this is where you know your expertise comes in now I’m here and the book is there I haven’t no one’s I don’t know if anyone’s read it I haven’t gotten much response yet so it’s early days still it’s early to tell I’ve given talks like this and I’ve talked to people and I gave public talks and people reacted well there so I think people like the idea has there been any reaction that’s been meaningful like memorable I should say because I know it’s all meaningful well I mean one kind of reaction I received I remember I gave a talk at and I think Readley College in in Clovis and there was a person in there who was a suffering from cancer and you know I think that that was a meaningful reaction because it just it put some gravity on the situation it’s like look this you’re writing this book this is affecting me right now and I mean I wrote a lot of the book you know and I that hit home because I a lot of the writing was in cancer centers like in the chemo rooms around people who just tragic you know just but but uplifting and joyful and you know my father-in-law you know he passed of cancer as I was writing the book a lot of was written with cancer rooms with him and you know he was very outgoing I don’t Julio I don’t know if you ever met him he’s hard to forget if you’ve met him I don’t think I have he would bring joy to those rooms and so I guess just that kind of reaction like this is a grave and serious thing and it it’s somehow because there’s another side of this it’s just we want to make games that are fun and engaging and there’s play involved so it’s this weird juxtaposition of you know this extremely serious issue concerning mortality and making an activity that’s actually engaging and draws people in yeah well one of the things that you said earlier that I I think is really compelling which is this can fast track research and treatment and cure and I think that’s the hardest thing with a lot not just cancer right but when I’ve talked to other people on the show who have been advocates one of the things we talk about is when it comes to policy change right the wheels move slowly and the winds are so incremental that a lot of people just run out of steam it’s just so exhausting and so this idea that we could take cancer which we’ve been fighting for I don’t even know how many decades at this point and even at least like a hundred years yeah more than that yeah how fast do you think we could make that somebody who read the book embraced everything in there could potentially make meaningful change because granted with cancer there’s so many different types so many different needs to attack it but just having one creative idea yeah it’s it’s hard to say and I think it’s important to make a kind of qualification here like a big part of the book is saying all right well what happened you know this could lead to new ideas to new cures and I think it’s worth trying right but you know the the most likely thing that’s going to happen is continued incremental progress from you know bench lab scientists but you never know right and what a game will do is it will just get people to it’ll take something you know you’re this is an old thing I mean another thing I learned a lot about was creativity and problem solving in the book and it’s an old idea in the problem solving literature that you know when you’re stuck on a problem go take a trip go somewhere else present your idea to somebody different who doesn’t know anything about your research rest you know sleep a little and just reorient your brain to reframe it in a new way and by taking a problem relating to cancer and translating it into the mechanics and aesthetics of maybe some crazy first-person shooter a real-time strategy some wacky kind of context even a serious existing researcher might look at and say all right well this this is not doesn’t make any sense this is this is garbage scientifically maybe but it’s fun and ah I’m seeing things slightly differently so it could encourage new ways of thinking the other thing and the other qualification here is that even if this didn’t lead straight to a cure it would immediately promote more awareness and scientific literacy right by playing the games and by building them we learn more it’s like one thing to read about like the krebs cycle in a book which is so boring it’s another thing to like and put on the vr glasses and be immersed in it and be attacking an enemy and in so doing seeing oh the way to attack the enemy is by making use of the krebs cycle in a certain way like living in in it so I think there’s huge like and like determinate potential for education in this but to answer your question I think it’s maybe right I think we might have more incremental progress and this will just be on the edges kind of making it a little more effective speeding it along a little more and it could be somebody way on the margins playing one of these games or in the process designing it was like oh my god here’s this thing that will cut the gordian knot and lead to some new approach on some existing cancer yeah so what I loved about what you just said so here’s what I just pulled out of what you said I think especially in 2025 so many people don’t want to start something unless they’re 90 sure they’re going to succeed they’re going to hit the goal the target and what you’re saying you wrote a whole book that says I don’t know what could happen but I think it’s worth checking it out what happens if we try and I mean you know in your qualifications I mean you’ve owned it may not do anything right now but it might take us a step closer to something that will do something exactly yeah and at the very least it allows us all of us no matter who we are to be doing one thing toward improvement that’s right and you know you’re the you’re the marketing expert Tanya maybe you could help me frame this better but here’s another way to put it let me just reverse what I just said there’s a hundred percent I’d say 99.9 guarantee that if you build one of these games this is 100 you will learn more about whatever you’re gamifying right and the people playing it will learn more about whatever cellular process you put into a game there’s like a it will definitely work for better education there’s no question in that and then it’s like this fall off of like and yeah it might make us see things in new ways and it could lead to incremental progress and then the other thing the thing to maybe the lead I guess in journalistic terms so this is not another in is it has worked right it’s not crazy right like RNA like coronavirus vaccines that are stable at room temperatures were developed in part with player input from that game Eterna like that’s a real scientific achievement that had a meaningful impact that originates in part from the efforts of game players and you know this there’s actually a long history of that you know in citizen science like the Oxford English Dictionary originates from it was too expensive they couldn’t do it just with paid linguists and philologists they put out a call for everyday people to turn in entries to complete this giant you know document of the English language I mean there’s tons of the Audubon word count there’s these plankton studies that use commercial fishermen I mean people collectively contribute to public goods and make an actual difference all the time so yeah there’s a few ways to frame it so why don’t we know about that more do you think I mean because that is those are all amazing examples not just of community but of somebody in a position of power being courageous enough to say look we just can’t do this we can’t do it with our funding we can’t do with our manpower we can’t do it maybe fast enough maybe we could eventually do it and so we need help and we’re willing to take help from in some cases trained volunteers but in other cases we’ll just take anybody’s help like anybody who has a phone that can take a picture of a plant and submit it we’ll take that what like where do you think that willingness came from and how come we don’t hear about it more so I think we we have some sense of it just from I’m so we all know what Wikipedia is right right and of course that comes from everyday people contributing you mentioned taking pictures of plants so I don’t know if you’ve heard of iNaturalist but it’s exactly that right if you’ve ever gone to a website and like it’s asking you to like fill in you know some information before you can move on that originates in something called CAPTCHA which was how a lot of the Library of Congress was originally digitized they would take a word that was easy like from the optical character recognition you know they would take there were a bunch they would put it through the computer and some of the words in these old documents were hard to recognize by the computer and so people would fill in all right to go to the next part to fill out your bank statement tell us what this word is and by people just doing that that got translated or all of like human knowledge got translated it got digitized and so I think it’s there it’s in the fabric of society but as you say people don’t recognize it as a thing you know there’s been books written on it this is called you know crowdsourcing is a common word for this and you know there’s an aware open source is this Linux comes out of communal collective efforts free of charge yeah I don’t know why it’s the better marketing is needed but again well yeah good no you please you go ahead well the other the thing I want to say that the thing that made all of those things possible this is why the hero is the designer I guess I’m really not focusing on the designer like CAPTCHA is annoying like you don’t want to what is this garbage I have to do for a second here and it’s been sold right now it’s just like developing like it’s helping the machine learning algorithms for like companies like help me find pedestrians whatever but somebody had to figure out this is a piece of this is a problem we can’t solve alone how could I put it into a format where people could help right somebody had to to do it like the Audubon bird count somebody figured out we need this information we could make a public a yearly event somebody had the idea let’s make a yearly event where everybody goes out and counts birds or somebody figured out we’ve got like in the early days of the internet hey you know it’s not too hard on a computer kind of cloud-based server system for people to enter information we could do better than the world book encyclopedia just by making the right interface and so somebody figures out this link between a public good that needs to be served this interest in serving it but there’s only so much interest right people only have so much time how you design the thing in the middle that can bridge from the one to the other so I think designers are a big part of it marketing is a big part of it making people aware of it but we probably need more marketing to make people more aware of it as you say well I think what you just did so well is to draw the explicit connections because I think that’s what we’re probably missing is people tend to think very like there’s a little bit of a laser focus we know what Wikipedia is in a literal sense but we don’t connect what Wikipedia is to what iNaturalist is right right and so that’s the marketing is drawing the connections between the two yeah and I do some of that in the book um but you know the book needs to be marketed right like people need to read that and there’s and there’s a book there’s a famous book um is I think it was just called the wisdom of crowds I think um and so there is some stuff out there but I think there could be more yeah well I think there can always be more yeah so before we let you go I’m curious so if somebody is listening and maybe they’re personally impacted by cancer or maybe there’s something else but they’re in that place that you were where they’re feeling helpless and you know they’re maybe they’re grieving they’re angry they’re helpless they want to do something but they don’t know where to begin what would you advise them that is an excellent question and one where I also I think there should be more work done there should be some like central clearinghouse or meetup or place where people could talk about this and I speculated a little bit in the book about how to do this but as of now there’s nothing like that and so I think you have to be a self-advocate so go out there play some games there’s a thing called Zooniverse that shows some games there’s my book where I summarize games like Eterna and Foldit watch videos about those like familiarize yourself with the power of what are sometimes called serious games games for good and gamified citizen science see what that could do and then try to like track down somebody who could program it’s easier than ever right people talk about vibe coding AI is a big part of the book too right this is not just humans alone doing it it’s humans in concert with AI which is a much more powerful like combination that has ever been possible before AI is dangerous it’s scary but it also has redemptive power and we ought to be harnessing it so like it’s easier than ever to like take some vision you have for a game and to manifest it to make it real if you team up with the right people so I would say find out what’s possible find a team and build it and maybe if you hear this and you’re interested figure out a way to like we need to make that meeting place too I don’t know what the right way to do it is like shark tank competitions where people pitch things to investors like twice a year or like a subreddit like I don’t know the right forum but you know you really are touching on something Tanya is that there’s people who are concerned like yeah sure I hear this what do I do and there’s artists who would probably like to help and there’s designers and game developers who would like to help how do we link them together that those all those freaks are in different freak pods right let’s how do we get those pods together well I think part of it is doing what you’re doing which is being willing to go into a lot of different places and talking about it it’s asking the questions and then I think for the rest of us right who don’t see ourselves necessarily in the gaming or coding space it’s just keeping our ears open for other people and letting them know that these sorts of things exist I think that’s what makes books so powerful is you know the right book even in the wrong hands eventually lands in the right hands because somebody will read a book and they’ll be like oh that wasn’t for me or it was over my head but somebody else will be talking about something related and they’ll say oh I read this book it wasn’t for me but you might like it because of what you just said so that’s part of it and that’s why topics like gaming cancer have to be books it’s not enough to make them an article it’s not enough to make them you know a few sentences on twitter all right Jeff we’re gonna let you go I will put all of your information in the show notes we’ll put a link to gaming cancer we’ll put your website I believe you’re most active on twitter and blue sky or the platform formerly known as twitter now known as x any place else we can find you so I’m on linkedin and I’ve got a facebook professional page but as you say blue sky and and twitter x are where I’m probably most active awesome and before we fully end are you open to a rapid fire series of questions yeah all right so five questions no wrong answers so let’s finish this sentence you’re my kind of freak if you see games as powerful tools for change that was good what’s something you love that your friends don’t get phenomenology I’m so glad you said that out loud because I didn’t know how to pronounce that word okay what community would you infiltrate just to understand it better your community okay what tool ritual or practice helps you stay connected to your people social media actually oh I like that and what is who is an email and honestly email yeah all professors it’s email yeah yeah so who is someone doing freakishly good work who you think deserves a bigger stage Zach Barthes Nikki Case and I’ll I’ll leave it with them they’re both incredible game designers all right so Jeff thank you thank you for refusing to keep your brilliance in a single box for showing all of us how science can be personal how grief can sometimes be generative and that games are more than a distraction they can actually be an effective blueprint towards solving some really big problems and everyone listening here if you’ve ever felt like your work your passion or your pain couldn’t possibly belong in the same room I hope this episode and Jeff’s story reminds you that sometimes the only way forward is to bring all of it with you we’ll see you next time thanks Jeff thank you so much it’s great to be here that’s it for this episode of find your freaks to help more weirdos find their way here subscribe rate and leave a review and if you’re craving connection join the freak show at finderfreaks.com what makes you weird makes you wonderful normal was never the point
Jan 6, 2026 | Episode Transcripts
[Speaker 1]
Holding it together is not the same as having it together. The people who look fine rarely ask for help because they don’t want to inconvenience anyone, they don’t want to lose credibility, they definitely do not want to drop the ball or be seen as somebody who isn’t reliable, and they don’t even know what help they need because help’s never been an option on the table for them before. So if you’re the strong friend, the competent leader, the person who holds everything together, you’re probably the last person anybody thinks to check on.
But I want you to know it’s not because you don’t matter to them, it’s because you’ve trained them to believe that you’re unshakable. If you’re the freak who blends in, the responsible one, the person everybody counts on, you deserve support as much as anybody else, in fact, maybe more. We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in.
I’m Tanya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras. Because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful.
Normal was never the point. Some freaks announce themselves with neon ink, bold choices, and loud, loud voices. But the freaks that I want to talk to today, you would never spot them in a crowd.
In fact, they’re the ones who look competent, composed, and unbothered, while their inner world is barely held together with duct tape, bailing wire, self-discipline, and a smile that fools everyone, sometimes even themselves. And here’s the thing that none of them, and I’ll put myself in the mix here too, wants to admit. Holding it together is not the same as having it together.
Welcome back to Find Your Freaks, the podcast for people who were never meant to fit the mold. I’m Tanya Kubo, and in today’s episode, we’re going to be following up with the conversation I recently had with Rachel Alexandria. She’s a soul medic who works with high performers carrying what she calls secret messes.
She’s also the host of Lonely at the Top, which is a podcast that features these types of high performers. And what I don’t want to do today, sometimes I kind of recap the interview and sort of go line by line with different things that the guest and I discovered when we were chatting. But today, instead of recapping the interview, what I want to do is talk about what it really costs when you go through so much effort to look fine and you’re not.
Some of the freakiest people you’ll ever meet are the ones who blend in the best. So today’s episode is really for the good kids. You know, you’ve met them, right?
The strong friends, the reliable ones, the leaders, the perfectionists, the silent over functioners, and anyone who has ever been praised for being so put together while quietly falling apart. So to get into it, I feel like today is the best day that I could be recording this episode because I’ve been under the weather and I’ve been doing a lot of faking it till I make it. And it just reminds me of one of the most striking parts of my conversation with Rachel, which was how clearly she sees the people who hide in plain sight, right?
The people whose freakishness isn’t visible on the outside. They don’t look unconventional. You know, they’re not covered in tats and piercings.
They don’t look unstable. They don’t look like they need help. They look perfectly fine.
In fact, perfectly frustratingly fine, probably. They are high performers who keep everything running. They remember birthdays.
They take on more responsibility because nobody else will. They hold their teams together. They show up polished and capable even when they’re exhausted, even sometimes when their entire world or personal life is falling apart.
And because they look fine, people assume they are fine. And that’s the curse of the competent, isn’t it? It reminds me of this conversation I had once with a friend’s dad.
He was talking about some challenging situations with his kids while they were all growing up. And, you know, they had the mix, right? They were like teens dealing with addiction and, you know, partying and breaking curfew and bad grades and maybe I’m not going to graduate from high school and all of those sorts of things.
And it was funny as he said, you know, I was worried there for a while as he summed up all the various issues, you know, his kids had gone through. And then he kind of smiled and he was like, except for Gina. I never worried about Gina.
Gina always managed just fine. Meanwhile, I know the truth because Gina and I have been friends going on 30 some years now. Gina struggled a lot as a kid, struggled a lot as a teen.
Some of it had to do with just general teenage challenges. Others had to do with just kind of fall out from her siblings’ behavior. And, you know, she struggled like many of us do in early adulthood and as she grew and matured through her career and through life.
But though she struggled a lot, she kind of felt like telling the truth about those struggles, especially to her parents, was a luxury she simply couldn’t afford, right? They didn’t need one more thing. Their hands were full.
And so she learned to just paste on a great smile and pretend like it was all OK. If you’ve lived in that space where people admire your stability without noticing that you’re faking it until you make it, you know the loneliness of being invisible, especially inside of your own excellence, right? It’s a bit of your own making.
You’re looking fine and pretty soon looking fine becomes the mask. And once that mask is locked into place, it’s almost impossible to take it off. And so what I want to really talk about is the difference between having it together and holding it together.
You know, when my kids were little, I used to, you know, people would be like, oh my gosh, you know, like, you look great. This guy would be like, I am barely hanging on by a thread here, folks. Barely hanging on.
Because I thought it was important to acknowledge that it wasn’t easy to be a working mom of young kids. And though just because I was able, you know, to get to work looking fairly decent, didn’t mean that there wasn’t a whole lot of chaos that came with it and didn’t mean that I didn’t need a little time to like emotionally regulate before I settled into my workday. You know, having it together means you’re steady because you stand on a steady foundation.
Holding it together, on the other hand, means you are white knuckling your way through life, hoping nobody notices those hairline stress fractures in your emotional drywall. And the reason people confuse the two is that somebody who is holding it together, or like I used to say, barely hanging on by a thread here, folks, looks exactly the same as someone who has it all together. Until one small thing threatens to topple the entire house of cards.
And the crazy thing, or the wild thing, is that most people in your life have no idea which version you are. Because when you’re holding it together, you’ve got a strong posture. You’re doing a good job.
You’re accomplishing everything on your to-do list, right? Your calendars look great. You’re color coding that planner.
You show up on time. You over deliver. Holding it together looks like competence.
But competence doesn’t mean stability. Competence oftentimes is the coping mechanism, right? Sometimes it’s the armor.
Sometimes competence is the only thing that saves you from the collapse that you’re terrified to acknowledge. So when Rachel mentioned to me that so many of the high performers she works with grew up in families with chaos, personality disorders, or emotional stability, like I felt that deeply in my bones. And let’s be clear here.
Not everybody with a big job has trauma. We all love a good rags-to-riches story, but success doesn’t actually require that you’ve had some form of suffering, okay? There are plenty of people out there successful who have had great lives that aren’t marked by trauma or challenges that others have, okay?
But patterns matter. And when you grow up having to scan the emotional weather in a room, anticipating everybody’s needs, or being the responsible one, you end up learning to listen to everyone except for yourself. And you learn to survive by becoming exceptional, which is what my friend Gina did.
Hyper-responsibility becomes your language. Competence is what makes you feel safe. And success almost becomes a costume that you’re hiding within.
So by the time you’re an adult, people see you and all they see is your capability. I mean, just like Gina’s dad. Gina’s dad never saw the cost that she paid to earn that capability.
And that’s what I think sets people up to be the strong friend, to be the leader, to be the fixer, to be the person who holds it together because somebody has to. And I think that’s why the freaks rise to the top, right? Because the traits that once kept them safe are now what make them excellent.
You know, I talk a lot of times about how a lot of people, what they think is their fatal flaw is actually their superpower. But while those traits that were developed in order to feel safe, make them excellent, make them revered, make them respected, make them what we would consider successful, it also makes them a little bit on the invisible side. And I loved what Rachel said when it came to like, okay, how do you break through that, right?
How do you break through that facade if, one, if you’re the person who needs the help, how do you break through the facade of acting like you’ve got it all together when you don’t? But also on the other side, you know, how do you break through the strong friend’s facade? And what she said was simple, but definitely not easy, which was, you know, we all have to learn to say, I need help.
In fact, let me read my notes here. Yeah, she said, we all have to learn to say, I need help, even when we don’t know what that help is supposed to look like. But when I think over my life, and I think in my own relationships, you know, I have to be honest, most strong friends never get that far, right?
The people who look fine rarely ask for help because they don’t want to inconvenience anyone. They’re afraid of being too much. They don’t want to lose credibility.
They definitely do not want to drop the ball or be seen as somebody who isn’t reliable. And they don’t even know what help they need because help’s never been an option on the table for them before. And so I think deep down, many of them are waiting, hoping that someone will notice without being told.
I remember conversations with my friend Gina years ago, and I’d say, I think I’m just, I think I have a Cinderella complex. And she was like, me too, right? Like we both realized we were kind of just waiting for some knight in shining armor to come down and like rescue us on a white horse.
The thing is, is people don’t notice. They don’t, no matter how much they love us, no matter how much they care, they don’t notice. You would only need five minutes with Gina’s dad to know how much he loved her or how much he loves her.
He’s still with us. And people aren’t selfish either, but because you, like Gina, and like me at times, are so good at making everything look fine, people have no reason not to believe us, right? So if you’re the strong friend, the competent leader, the person who holds everything together, you’re probably the last person anybody thinks to check on.
But I want you to know it’s not because you don’t matter to them. It’s because you’ve trained them to believe that you’re unshakable, that nothing could ever crack through your armor. And the world loves an unshakable person, truly.
So I loved Rachel’s advice on breaking through this armor, which was if you become easy to say no to, you get easier to say yes to. And this is something I have to tell you in my personal life, totally true, 100% true. Because it was in the moment that Rachel said that, that I realized that this is actually why Gina and I have been such good friends for so long.
I’m a really easy person to say no to. Because I appreciate people who are just as easy to say no to. I appreciate easy relationships.
I appreciate friends and acquaintances and even like business contacts who understand that I am a 360 degree human who is juggling a lot, right? And a lot of times the Lego pieces just don’t fit like I think that they should. But like Gina, I don’t dump my feelings on others.
I don’t respond well to pity, to pressure, or what I would consider forced or contrived intimacy. And I really, really hate feeling like I’m a burden to somebody or that I have to be their project. What I value is gentle check-ins, low pressure invitations, no strings attached support, and someone who won’t take it personally if I decline or if I have to reschedule.
And I find my strong friends like Gina are exactly the same way. So in my personal life and in my professional life, I have found people open up when they feel safe. And what safety looks like is the message of, I’m here, no pressure.
I won’t chase you. I won’t pry, but I’m not going anywhere. Because when someone feels like they can say no without disappointing you, I think that’s when they start feeling safe enough to say yes.
So if you hear anything in today’s episode, it’s that holding it together is not the same as being okay. And you don’t have to collapse in order to deserve help. Okay, you don’t have to be a 1980s afterschool special to warrant care and consideration and support from those around you.
In fact, I really hope it never comes to that for you. If you’re the freak who blends in, the responsible one, the person everybody counts on, the one who looks fine, but rarely feels fine, you deserve support as much as anybody else. In fact, maybe more.
So let’s keep this simple. I want you to try out one thing for me. I want you to try out being honest with those you trust.
Like, and it can just be a simple sentence, right? You don’t have to weave a long, sad tale of woe. It is enough to say, you know, I’m a little more tired than I look today.
Or, you know, I’m a little more tired than I look right now. It’s just a single sentence. You don’t have to explain it.
You don’t have to say anything more. You’re just opening the door a crack. And you get to see if they choose to open it further.
Now, if you’re on the other side, right? You’re a friend of mine, a friend of Gina’s, a friend of somebody, you know, who’s like this. You’re the helper.
You’re the friend. Maybe you’re the bystander. Try this instead, right?
Try dropping a text or an email or something on Messenger or picking up the phone and leaving a voicemail because you know they don’t pick up calls. They just don’t. And just say, hey, you’ve been on my mind lately.
No pressure to talk, but I’m here if you need a human. Make yourself easy to say no to and you will become safe to say yes to. So I just want to thank you for spending time with me today.
It is a busy time of year as this episode drops and it may be a time when you’re feeling a little reflective and maybe this episode hit a little too close to home for you. Totally cool. I promise not all of them are like this.
But if you’ve recognized yourself in the strong friend, the one holding everything together, I hope you recognize also that you’re not alone. I mean, I wouldn’t have a whole episode if you were the only person on the planet who felt that way. You deserve a community that sees parts of you that you’ve been hiding from everybody else.
And one way to get that community is simply to share this episode with someone else, you know, who seems to look perfectly fine, who you think has it all together and maybe just maybe is holding it all together. Share this episode with them and then circle back and ask them what they thought of it. Sometimes that’s all it takes to start a real conversation where you both can put your masks off.
And if nothing else, in this time of year, when you’re surrounded by friends and family and messages that maybe are telling you that you should feel differently than you do about your circumstances or should be a certain way in your life or at this stage of life or in your work, I just want you to remember that normal is not the point around here. Whatever it is that makes you weird, whether weird to yourself or weird to others, is what makes you wonderful. It’s the supposed fatal flaw that actually is your superpower.
And join us again in a couple of weeks when the next episode drops and we can talk more about what that looks like for other freaks in our community. That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review.
And if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
Dec 23, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
I help high performers clean up their secret messes. The secret messes, people burning out, people struggling with people-pleasing imperfectionism. What I’ve come to realize over time is that a lot of the people I work with who have secret messes actually come from a family where somebody had a personality disorder.
Somebody asked a person who was very highly successful, how did you get so good at this? And he said, other things suffered. There is no gaining of a high level of skill or accolades or success without loss. I think we all have to learn to say I need help and not have to know what the help is going to look like.
We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras, because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful.
Normal was never the point. Some freaks are easy to spot, right? Dyed hair, piercings, tats, bold style. You know, the ones who scream, I refuse to blend in.
And then there’s others who hide their freakiness on the inside. They’re a little bit more private, maybe carefully managed, and often painfully lonely. I’m Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast for people who were never meant to fit the mold.
And today’s guest understands that inner world better than anybody else I know. Rachel Alexandria is a former psychotherapist turned soul medic, and she helps high performers clean up their secret messes, the overwhelm, the anxiety, the perfectionism, that people-pleasing that they hide under their resume-ready competence. And she has written three books on the conversation.
If you’ve been around a while, you’ve seen us chit-chat on Facebook. Her books are on conversations and her critics and stress relief, and she hosts the podcast Lonely at the Top. She’s a brand new podcaster, just like me.
And Lonely at the Top is a show I love. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit, because it is such a sanctuary for leaders who are carrying pressure that nobody sees, because everybody thinks they have it all together. Rachel, welcome, welcome.
Yeah, thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here. I am thrilled because I think this is a very important topic, not just because it’s common, but because so few people talk about it.
And you would think that in 2025 we talk about everything, but that is not the case. So I’d like you to kick us off the same way we do every episode, which is by telling us who are your freaks and why do you love them? I have so many different freaks. Let me just give a shout out to literally all of the NeuroDivergents who basically make up my entire community.
My clients, my friends, my partner. But my freaks are, when we’re talking about Lonely at the Top and the people that I work with, they are high performers. So we’re talking general counsels, we’re talking C-suite folks, we’re talking VPs, people who have reached what most consider to be the highest level in their careers.
And they secretly don’t feel like they get to be their authentic selves. They are hiding things from everyone in their life. They’re not living out loud about their sexuality or their orientation.
They are not living out loud about their humanity or they are hiding difficult relationships. They are scared that things in their private life or things that they just have a lot of, I don’t know if it’s imposter syndrome, although I don’t like that expression, but that feeling like I don’t really fit here. I don’t really belong.
I came from poverty. What am I doing here? I have to keep hustling or I’m going to end up in the gutter. Like they are on the outside, they are people who look like they have it all together.
And on the inside, they feel like they’re falling apart. I love the compassion in your voice when you talk about them. And it makes me curious, what is it about these folks, right? Because you’re careful, right? They’re not all women.
They’re not all women. They’re not all men. Maybe they don’t even identify on a binary.
What is it about them that makes you feel protective or so connected? To some extent, it me. There’s just something about my aura, and this has been the case ever since I was a kid, that makes it look like I have everything together and I don’t need anyone to help me. And that’s almost never true.
Like I have a lot of stuff together. Let’s be honest. I am an adult and I know how to take care of my stuff.
I was a latchkey kid, Gen X here, got to be self-responsible. But I understand what it’s like to be the strong friend that people don’t check on. I’ve had to learn to get so much better at saying, no, really, I need help.
No, please ask me. Don’t take my nonverbals and my appearance or my aura as indication that I don’t need you, that I don’t want you. I was in my second year of graduate school or no first year.
We were graduating from the first year to second year. This is my therapy school experience. And we had assessments that our peers would give us and our second years would give us.
And the second years in my cohort were kind of like, we don’t really know what to say to you. And I was heartbroken at the time. I was like, they’re like, you seem like you’ve got it.
You don’t really seem like that. Like we don’t know what to what advice to give you. And I felt so alone.
And I broke down crying and then they were like, do you want our help? And I was like, yes, of course I do. So I know that experience so intimately and I feel I see these people. And I deliberately aimed my business at those people because everybody needs help in all walks of life.
But I feel like I have a particular ability to go for the highly responsible, the over responsible, the kind of hypervigilant and be like, no, it’s safe to let me in. I can help you. It’s okay.
Yes, I know you need me to push you a little bit on this. Like it me. So, I mean, with what you’ve described, and I love the school story only because of how like obvious that it makes it at like how lonely that can be.
Because I think somebody else could be hearing you tell that story and be like, wow, you must have taken that as such a compliment. Like in therapy school, the therapist couldn’t fix you. And then on the flip side, because I come at this from a journalistic perspective, a former journalist and stuff, and there is nothing I hate more than when I send somebody my writing for review and they have no changes.
Because instantly I’m going, did you even read it? Everybody makes mistakes, right? There’s two periods somewhere there. There’s wonky capitalization and missing comma. It’s just humans.
So when somebody says, no, it’s perfect, I’m going, no, I feel like you didn’t read that. And the response I would often get is who am I to correct you? You’re a writer. You were a journalist.
I’m like, who’s a human? So I, as you’re talking about that, I can totally see how that would make you feel so lonely. I think in your shoes, I would probably feel dismissed, right? Like they were just dialing it in. But I’m wondering if you could paint a picture for us on the flip side for you is when you meet people, because, you know, so far in the conversation, what we’ve talked about is you meet these people and they’re polished and everybody thinks that they don’t need anything.
They don’t need any help. They’re good. What are the clues that you see, or maybe that you hear that tell you otherwise? How do you see them when nobody else does? That’s such a good question.
I, how do I, Molly, how do I bring an unconscious competence into, like, well, how do you teach something that you know so intimately that’s like, I didn’t learn this. It just is what I am. I would say usually they see me.
I’ll just say, hey, I help high performers clean up their secret messes. And they’ll go, wait, what? I need to talk to you. I’m not usually identifying them.
They’re usually self-identifying because they’re masking pretty hard. And also most people get pretty uncomfortable when a therapist or a therapist here steps up and is, you don’t seem okay. People don’t like that.
So I would say I can usually sense anxiety is probably the best thing that I could notice. I can usually, I sense people on a very deep level all the time. With the particular people that I’m working with, I can just feel there’s like a very subtle tremor in them.
And it also has to be a willingness to be vulnerable. Because I can sense some people have anxiety, but they’re not open. And that’s not someone we would want to work together.
Yeah. I would say that I can feel that. It’s a very subtle, a very subtle, oh, God, I’m not okay.
And someone please help, you know, that’s kind of peeking through their smile and their words. You just mentioned secret messes. What are the ones you see over and over again? Because I imagine with as many years of experience as you have, and also how much the world has changed in the last 15 years alone, because that’s part of it is the world has changed so dramatically.
Yeah. I imagine that there are just some that maybe you used to see a lot of and don’t see anymore. Maybe some that you’ve seen bubble up more frequently, say post pandemic, or ones that are just timeless.
And it’s like, yeah, this is this never stops being a secret mess that really holds people back. Well, I don’t think the general category is all that different. Like the secret messes, people burning out, people struggling with people pleasing and perfectionism.
Those are pretty classic. I don’t think those have changed. What I’ve come to realize over time, that would never go into my marketing is that a lot of the people I work with who have secret messes actually come from a family where somebody had a personality disorder.
They come from families with abuse. They come from families that dissuaded them from listening to their inner knowing. So that’s a big part of what we’re retraining is not just my opinion, but how do you hear yourself? How do you know what the right move is? What was the indication inside of you? And undoing years of nagging, basically years of gaslighting.
Sometimes it’s religious, sometimes it’s a specific parent, sometimes it’s a former partner. So those are sadly pretty classic. That’s all of human history.
And then I would add on to that now dealing with perimenopause and the way that perimenopause can exacerbate ADHD. And so I have several clients who I’ve seen for a long time and they’ve moved into perimenopause and just cannot function the way that they used to function. And I’ve been like, I’m seeing enough indicators that I think you should go get assessed.
And they find out they have ADHD and then they get on meds and then they can suddenly function again. Because this is maybe other folks listening know this, but this is just when perimenopause messes with your hormones, it changes your ability to get by essentially to mask. So that’s one.
And then the other would be long COVID. That has definitely brought a lot more work that some of my clients have to do with their health and the ways that anyone confronting some disability have, you know, if you go from a high performer to somebody struggling with a disability, that’s a huge identity shift. And so that’s, that might’ve happened with other stuff in another generation.
It’s just age. But yeah, those are the current events that influence my work. Yeah.
Well, and it’s interesting because statistically speaking, you’re totally right. These were issues with different circumstances a generation ago, but you know, what’s different now, I think is volume in the case of long COVID, right? Everybody across the planet was exposed to a virus that has had a variety of effects on people. Some people got long COVID the first time and some people it wasn’t until the fourth time.
And some people just brought up some other dormant issue that they had. And with perimenopause, perimenopause has always been a thing, but only recently do we have research on it that is old enough for us to start to see some trends. And it’s something to talk about.
I know like women my age who have started down that path. And one of the things the doctor will say is, what was your mom’s experience? And there are several women my age who have gone to their mothers and their mothers have been angry with them. How dare you ask me such a question? That’s private.
We don’t talk about that. And then they’re just like, no wonder I have no clue about like my body and my health because my mom doesn’t talk about her body and her health. And it’s just opened a whole level of awareness for them.
And also there’s this piece of, gosh, our mothers are weird, aren’t they? But it’s like they’re raised by these women with this norm and it just never like never sunk in until they were on a different side where they felt very empowered by education and they weren’t getting it the same way. So I find that really interesting that also has fed into the work that you do. Because the other thing you’ve said is about people who look like they have it all together.
And as you were talking about these situations, I was just thinking that there’s a difference between having it all together and holding it together. Like I know in my life there’s been periods where I’m like, I am barely hanging on by a thread here. And if one thing goes wonky, it’s a house of cards that falls down.
Yeah. And as I hear you describe some of the people you’ve worked with, it was always a house of cards and just something pulled and everything collapsed. And then it’s overwhelming to try to figure out how to rebuild that.
Yeah. And a lot of people who are at high levels in their career, they can’t just fall apart. You can’t be the owner of a hundred million dollar company and just fold.
There’s an interview on my show with a gal who talks about that. She’s like, I don’t have another option. So you look at the part that’s collapsed and then you have to go fix that part.
But you can’t just sit down in the middle of it and be like, you know what? Never mind. That’s not a possibility. Yeah.
And so then what? Then hopefully you find someone like me. You work with somebody. You go do some Ayurvedic healing.
If you don’t have the option, to let things fall apart, you have to find something to make it work. And some people will lean into addictions because people are going to try to get their dopamine when they can. But other people will move towards healings.
They’ll go to a Tony Robbins retreat or they’ll go to a silent meditation retreat or they’ll find a powerful coach person like me. A lot of high performers that I know have a lot of different healing modalities in place. They’re getting acupuncture, they’re getting craniosacral work, they’re in yoga regularly, meditating regularly.
You have to. And what do you think? Because I think you’re right. Part of it is there’s a lot of modalities because there is no one size fits all solution.
Even though I think like human nature is we want that, right? It’s okay. So of course. Can acupuncture just fix all of it? Can’t I just like eat my way to a cure if I don’t eat any of this or I only eat that? Can’t that just fix it? Right.
But it’s like we’re all unique, right? The particular recipe of what helps me is not necessarily going to be the particular recipe of what helps you. Mm hmm. I’m wondering because I imagine that most of your clients probably find their way to you in route, like they’ve done a little bit that’s worked and it’s not like you’re the first step and then they go and find everything else.
But I’m curious, is there a arc that you see these leaders go through, like from not realizing that they are lonely and they’re so cut off to that realization to then being on the other side? I think everyone’s a little different. And when we’re talking about loneliness, because that’s not always that’s not usually what people come to work with me about. That’s not the top identified issue.
But yeah, I’m not an entry level therapist or coach. I am definitely somebody that people come to when they’ve had other experiences, they’ve already done some work and they’re not getting the results anymore from that earlier, that like beginner and intermediate kind of stuff. The arc.
Everybody has a point that’s their breakdown. There’s that super famous TED talk by Brene Brown, where she talks about her breakdown, which was really a breakthrough. But I think that’s the arc and everybody’s spot is different.
Right? I keep thinking of one of my current clients and he came to me. I don’t think he was at a point of breakdown. I don’t really know.
It’s just it’s like, when does spirit bring us together? Very few people I think are working with me because they searched for me. One of my clients, she was like, I know I need somebody. And she asked her friend who was seeing a really good therapist, if that therapist could recommend somebody and that therapist knew me and knew I was a fit because she wanted this person’s opinion is that there aren’t many people with my level of training, like high level executive coach who are also into the woo.
And she needed somebody who was woo friendly so that she could talk about, hey, I have a spiritual mandate to this, that and the other. I’m moving on this path that doesn’t seem well advised, but I have a calling like she needed to be able to talk about that. So I guess she was looking.
But a lot of the people I work with. Yeah, they’re either looking and they ask somebody or it’s just happenstance like they just encounter me and they’re like, oh, I didn’t know I needed you. I didn’t know you existed.
I didn’t know this kind of thing was possible. I mean, that’s how it was for me when I found allergy elimination acupuncture. I wasn’t looking.
I just met somebody in a networking event and he said, oh, I helped through acupuncture. I help people alleviate their allergies. And I was like, that’s possible.
Please talk to me. And I started working with him. Have you gotten to a point where you cannot sustain any longer and you know you have to because it’s inconvenient, right? To get help is really inconvenient.
It’s time out of your day. You’re already freaking busy like three times from Sunday and you have to establish a new relationship. Like I have to find a new doctor and I find it exhausting.
It’s just like I have to do this research and then go through all the hoops and the fill out forms. And so you have to be at a place where you’re really uncomfortable to try to find help. Unless it just shows up right in front of you.
The other path is the spirit path. Yeah. And I think that there is there’s so many aspects of life, right? That you’re not looking for something until somebody says something.
It’s like we have a daughter who has a processing disorder and it affects how she writes. And we always knew she had bad handwriting. I had bad handwriting as a kid.
We thought, oh, it might be this processing disorder. But it wasn’t until a casual conversation with somebody else where they were talking about horseback riding lessons that they had enrolled their child in specifically to help her with her handwriting. And I was going horseback riding and handwriting? I’m confused.
Yeah. And they said, oh, yeah, it’s this. And they explained the science behind it all.
And this like right brain, left brain connection. And they were traveling really far away. And I said, does it have to be a special kind of horseback riding? And they’re like, no, not really.
And so suddenly we were like, our daughter needs horseback riding lessons. Okay. Yeah.
Not something like we are not. We don’t own horses. We’re not those people.
But and it was a beautiful like three years of our lives where my daughter was in horseback riding lessons. I swore that we were the only people who ever went out there who didn’t own horses or a horse trailer or anything. But it was one of those things where I wouldn’t even say we knew it was a problem until somebody started talking about a solution.
Yeah. And then it just for me in that moment, I remember just thinking, oh, this actually has the potential to make the future so much easier. And I hadn’t even stopped to think about the future being difficult.
And I can imagine and mainly it’s maybe it’s because I met you in a networking group, I can just imagine how somebody hears you talk or somebody hears somebody talk about you. And they’re like, I don’t know what it is, but I’m Rachel. Or I need to know more.
I need to follow up with that. One thing I’m curious about, I have a couple of theories, that’s in line with what we’re talking about here. But one that I’m curious about is have you found that whatever that sort of freakiness that people hide? Is that a superpower that actually makes them good at the things that they are accomplished? Does it feed their accomplishments? Absolutely.
I think leaders are freaks. I mean, I used to think it was normal to want to be in the spotlight, for example, until I went around just talking about it with friends and being like, yeah, I’d want to be in the spotlight. Yeah, I’d want to lead this.
Yeah. And they’re like, no, that’s not I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want those things.
And I thought, oh, that’s, oh, I just figured everyone wanted this. So if you’re in, if you’re in like a Hollywood casting call, then yeah, maybe everyone in that room feels that way. But I think most people don’t want that.
Most people don’t want to be responsible. I was a jury foreman. When I was in my early 20s in Florida, everyone in the room was at least 10 to 30 years older than me.
And I could tell how things were going. It was a very open and shut case. I was just like, okay, so we need a foreman.
And everyone just kind of sits there. And I’m like, I can do it. Like, I don’t want to waste time.
Like, I’m happy to do this. So there is something freaky about people who are like, yes, I am the one to shepherd this forward. Like, mom, Donnie, it’s kind of a freak, you know, like AOC is kind of a freak.
They’re people who like lots of people don’t want to be politicians. So if to want that kind of power and responsibility, I think makes you a freak already. Yeah, lots of people just want to get their paycheck and go home.
They don’t want to have to think about the whole community. You’re a community manager, right? That’s one of the many things that you do. And most people can’t do that.
I always think about it in terms of people don’t have the tool set. They also just don’t want to. No, you have to like people even on their bad days.
And like with online communities in particular, you tend to encounter people on their bad days more often than you encounter them their good days. And that’s hard for people, right? Because there’s a million and one things vying for people’s time and attention in any given moment. Why would you choose to work in an area that’s like rife with conflict? Kind of have to be a freak.
Yeah, definitely. And I also think, you know, I’m just thinking of all of the leaders I’ve known in my time and some of the things that I’ve thought about them, some things that have been said about them. When I was working in higher education, faculty members just in general are known as being arrogant, especially there’s this big staff versus faculty divide.
And I was like 30 when I started working at the university and people would talk about this person’s arrogant, that person’s arrogant. And I always found that the most arrogant people tended to be like the most published, the most well respected. And I remember at one point going, maybe it’s just that they had to focus so much on getting to the top of their field.
There’s just certain things there’s not room for, right? There’s not room to practice your social skills. There’s not room or maybe even there doesn’t feel like time to be to develop a high level of empathy for others. Because you’re just so focused on your passion for the field or whatever that is.
It’s like there’s only so much time and space for any of us to do anything. Yeah. And as you’re talking about leaders and I just think of everything comes to the cost.
And the cost isn’t always bad. The story I like to tell that I wish I could remember the first person who shared this story, but it’s really stuck with me. All of my wisdom feels encapsulated by little anchors, little mantras, little moments that either happened to me or that I read and I felt, oh, that’s so true.
Somebody asked a person who was very highly successful, how did you get so good at this? And he said, other things suffered. Hmm. And the Zen in me, like really like the poet in me really resonates with that.
There is no gaining of a high level of skill or accolades or success without loss. There’s no way other things have to suffer. And like you said, it’s poetic.
And I wonder if that’s part of some of the burnout that we see nowadays, right? Is that we’re trying to have it all without sacrificing anything, without paying any prices. Yeah. It’s not possible.
I have always prioritized my relationships in my life. That was always my highest priority as an only child with a pretty small core family who I didn’t live near. And so I’ve gone around trying to make people my family consciously and unconsciously.
And in the last couple of years I’ve really seen, I’ve been working for myself for almost 20 years. So a lot of those years I was just scraping by, like I was paying my rent and eating, but that’s kind of it. And I just got clarity a few years ago of like, I can’t make relationships my top priority.
If I want to be financially stable, I have to make my business a higher priority. And it sucks because some of my relationships have suffered and it’s very visible. And we’ve had to have conversations because I still care.
I still deeply care about the people I love. And some of them have suffered. And rather than flee from that, I just have to grieve that and own it.
But trying to do it all at the same level and pretend like it’s all okay, that would burn me out. And I’m unwilling to do that. I guess probably my top priority is me.
My top priority is my health. Because if I, especially being the high empath that I am, my physical health will fail really fast. I am a canary in the coal mine, baby.
And if I don’t prioritize rest and self-care, I fall apart. So I know I cannot try to do everything. I will physically be ill very fast.
So as you’re speaking that, I’m just like, wow, that just sounds so wise. There’s so much wisdom in what you just said. So I have to ask, is this something that you learned from somebody? Did somebody help you with this realization? Or is this the wisdom that comes from years of having to figure it out solo by compromising your health and your wellbeing and figuring that out? Because I think some people do that for decades and they never connect the dots.
So I’m curious, did you connect them? Did somebody help you connect them? I think it was mostly me. My mom calls me the princess and the pea because I’m super highly sensitive. I’m not ADHD, I’m not autistic, but I have neurodivergent tendencies, especially being an HSP.
Loud noises, things on my skin, all my fabrics are very soft. And anyway, some of it is that. I physically cannot ignore my physical symptoms.
I am a very, for those who know the Enneagram, I am a self-preservation subtype, which is very body conscious. So some of it’s that, but I have a very deep relationship with spirit. Mm-hmm.
And I spent a lot of years, especially after I got divorced in the early 2010s, I spent nine years living on my own. And no matter how much I cultivated relationships, I had a lot of alone time. And I kind of look back at it as a hermitage.
Like I’d spend a day in my apartment and be like, I could be here for three days and be dead and no one would know. Even though I was like always trying to like, yeah, Seattle’s a hard place for extroverts, I think. At least for me it was.
So some of it is just me listening and having understandings, like me having downloads. I do work with a teacher these days, but I wouldn’t say I got that information from her. I would say I got it through just a deep self-knowing and understanding and conversations with spirit.
Well, it sounds like a lot of time with yourself, with your thoughts. That’s something I don’t think a lot of us allow. I heard the speaker one time, I wish I could remember her name, but she talked about having time to think the unthunk thought.
We’re just so busy with our brains are going, our mouths are going. And our phones are going. Oh, yes.
Notifications, computers. So I’m wondering as we begin to wrap up, I know because I know my community pretty well. I know that there’s somebody who’s listening who is, oh my gosh, this is me.
This is me. Everybody thinks I’m the last person they have to worry about and I wish more people worried about me. I worry about me.
I’m exhausted. I’m barely holding it together. That’s languaging I hear a lot.
Where would you suggest they start? What should be their next step? I think we all have to learn to say I need help and not have to know what the help is going to look like. I get that it’s a challenge. Some people you can go say I need help to and they become more of a hindrance than a help in trying to help.
They cause more chaos, but there’s got to be somebody in your life, a best friend, a pastor, a partner, a teacher, somebody that you admire that you don’t even know that well yet who will be able to hold their inner space strongly enough to just say, okay, I see that you need help. Let’s brainstorm together or what would help look like for you? Here’s some things I have to offer. But if you are trying to solve the problem from within yourself, know that what got you where you are can’t get you to the next place.
So yeah, the times in my life where I’ve had to sit down and be like, I’m a problem solver. I’m a strategist, man. That is part of why I do what I do.
But I’ve had to sometimes sit with someone and be like, I don’t know how to get anywhere from here. And that is a really scary, vulnerable thing to do. But most of you have at least one person in your life that you could say that to who is going to be compassionate and walk with you through it.
And it probably won’t look perfect, but it will be something new. And if you have the intention to really get the help you need, and you stay with that intention, you will get there. I like that.
Part of what you’re talking about is trusting the process, but also willing to be honest and vulnerable in your request for help. And I’m sure there’s an aspect of asking for help from the right person, right? The person who can be compassionate, right? Because not all of us have that ability, or some of us just aren’t able to be compassionate in certain instances over others. For people who, yes, I’m wondering about the person who’s listening, who’s thinking of the people they know, who they think have it all together, and is suddenly now wondering.
Do they? Maybe Rachel’s talking about them, and here I’ve been totally dismissing it. What do you think is something they could say? Because I did hear you earlier when you were like, okay, nobody actually wants to be analyzed from the outside. Nobody wants to be told, hey, I think you have a problem.
I can help you. But what do you think they could say or do to just let it be known that they’re that safe person who’s able to be compassionate? I think people are bad at initiating connection. So just initiate a connection, just like sending a text.
I mean, I do this. This is how I maintain a lot of long distance friendships, even if we don’t, with really busy, cool people. Just from time to time, send a message that’s like, hey, you’ve been on my mind.
How are you doing? Do you have time for a chat? And if not, that’s okay. Send somebody a care package. If you have a friend that you think is struggling but has it too together to say, offer to bring them dinner.
Everyone gets fatigued by meal prep. You know what I mean? Unless they’re a freaking chef. And even then, probably like, you’re like, hey, is there anything you’re not eating? Or is there anything you need? And bring them a meal.
Offer to treat them to a massage if they want. And I think here’s the other key. Don’t get weird if they turn it down.
Yeah. Just be like, okay, cool, man. Just know I’m here for you.
Because yeah, if you become easy to say no to, you get easier to say yes to. That is true. That is so true.
And I think if you become easy to say no to, you end up in some of the most interesting conversations. Because people really do feel like they can say anything to you. Because no is the hardest thing for a lot of people to say, especially our people pleasers, our perfectionists.
Oh, okay. So we are going to have all of your contact information in the show notes. I definitely encourage you, if you’re listening and you’re enjoying this conversation, you’ve got to listen to Lonely at the Top.
That is the show I am currently listening to on the 35 mile drive to and from my kid’s school. Because the length of the episodes are perfect at 1.5 speed for me. Because I’m the type of person who tries to listen to meditation things at 1.5 speed too.
I feel like I’m so much smarter for the conversations I’ve gotten to hear on the show, the people who I’ve gotten to meet through the show. It’s really well done. So I just cannot say enough good stuff about Lonely at the Top.
Thank you. And you’ve interviewed our mutual friend Gwynn Bortner. That was a really fun episode to listen to as well.
But let’s move to the rapid fire segment, which I’m one day will be able to say without spitting all over my microphone, which is freak flags fly. I can’t get mad at anybody. I came up with the name myself.
So centering is 100% my fault. But it’s five questions. No wrong answers, whatever comes to mind.
Are you up for it? Let’s do it. All right. So finish this sentence.
You are my kind of freak if. You’re my kind of freak if you’re really into shiny rocks and never having small talk. I hate small talk.
And what is something you love? I think most HSPs don’t like small talk. I’ve heard that. What is something you love that your friends just don’t get? I have so many different friends, but some of my friends do not get that I love D&D.
Oh, OK. Some of my friends don’t get that I love Disney stuff. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else.
All my different friends probably don’t get different aspects of things that I love. I bet if we had all of your friends in the same room, it would be the most amazing, eclectic group of humans just from different aspects of what you’ve shared. Third question is what community would you infiltrate just to understand it better? Oh, there’s some things like I sort of want to know, but I don’t want to know.
It’d be interesting to infiltrate furries. OK. And be like, I don’t get it.
I’m sure I could read enough on a Reddit somewhere. But yeah, I that would be interesting to understand what that’s about. That would be interesting.
What tool, ritual or practice helps you stay connected to your people? Oh, that’s such an interesting question. I don’t think I have a tool to stay connected to people. Well, I mean, practice.
Yeah, it’s like it’s reaching out. But when you say stay connected, what I really think about is being connected to that deeper source spirit. And when I’m connected to source, I am inherently connected to my people.
When I’m disconnected from myself and from source, I am not connected to others. And no matter how much I try, it won’t matter. To stay connected to source, it’s like walks on the beach, getting my feet in the ocean regardless of the temperature.
I live in San Diego, so, you know, that comes with a caveat. I wasn’t doing that in Seattle. It’s too cold.
But in San Diego, the temperature of the at least. And always making sure I take a moment to cleanse myself of other people’s energy, cleanse my like my energetic core of things that don’t belong to me and just connect to divine source. Okay, and last question.
That was a juicy one. You gave us a really juicy answer on that one. But last question is who is someone doing freakishly good work who deserves a bigger stage? Oh, my teacher, Jennifer Arezio.
I don’t know if you’ve met. I’ve heard. I think I follow her on LinkedIn.
Actually, I was just thinking of that for a minute. Yeah, I may have found Gwen through Jennifer. I don’t remember.
Yeah. Jennifer’s work is phenomenal. And I always think she she deserves more recognition.
More people should see what she’s up to or work with her. Awesome. We will get her information.
We’ll put that in the show notes as well. Rachel, it is hard to believe the time has gone so quickly. I feel like I could talk to you for another few hours or half a day at least someday.
I just appreciate the conversation so much. I appreciate just the invitation to explore that people are more than what they present on the surface. Because I think that’s really the lesson that we’re walking away with today is none of us is a one dimensional being.
And if we’re not, then you know, we should probably not assume that others are. And I really love the fact that you’re highlighting how even if nobody can see your freakiness, that doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve to have community around it. You don’t deserve to have people who are willing to see it and willing to experience it and willing to love you because of it.
Thank you so much for joining us today. And I hope that there can be a next time, because this would be super fun to have this conversation again. I would love to be here anytime you invite me.
Awesome. Thank you for having me. Thank you.
That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful.
Normal was never the point.
Dec 10, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
Everybody else is doing things as fast as humanly possible so they can produce as much as humanly possible, right? Why write one really good book if AI can help me get 10 books to market this year? The expectation of quality has gone down as the expectation of quantity has gone up. There are still people out there right now who are willing to take the long road if it means taking the long road produces something that they’re truly proud of. These are people who refuse to contribute to the growing pile of shallow work just so they can say, I did a thing, right? I wrote a book.
Slowing down doesn’t make you lazy. Slowing down doesn’t make you bad. It is an aspect of craft, right? Think of taking the long road as your own quiet rebellion.
Your pace and your process could be your superpower. We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tonya Kubo and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet.
Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. Everyone’s in a rush to publish, to launch, to ship it before someone else does.
But rushing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, right? Especially if you are looking for where you fit in. If anything, rushing sometimes just adds to the noise. We’ve been talking quite a bit about that lately in a lot of different circles that I’m in where just because AI allows you to do more in less time doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be doing more.
And just because you can generate miles and miles of copy all at once doesn’t mean that that copy actually should see the light of day. Like the last thing any of us needs is just more noise or more of the same. And when I was talking to Candace L. Davis in our last episode, right? She’s a good friend of mine.
She’s a book coach. And something that spoke to me when we were talking is her belief that slowing down isn’t weakness. Because of course, if you’re thinking about somebody who is constantly meeting people who feel in a rush, who feel like they’re running out of time, it’s Candace.
Because so often people who want to write books will start trying to write in isolation, right? Like all of us, we all joke about the Stephen King. What I will say is the Stephen King fantasy, right? We all picture Stephen King all alone in a quiet mountain cabin. Snow’s coming down.
He’s by himself with his manual typewriter, right? And he is just churning out bestseller after bestseller after bestseller. And the reality is most books are not written solo, right? Most books are written in community. But then what oftentimes happens is, you know, people are trying to write that book.
They feel like they have to write that book before they turn 30. They have to write that book before they turn 40. They have to write the book before they turn 50, whatever.
And then they start to feel like they’re running out of time. And usually that’s when they seek help, right? Very few people wake up one day and say, I want to write a book and then go and hire a book coach, right? They say, I want to write a book and they usually just start writing. And then they get to a place where they’re just like, oh, okay, how do I get this book out into the world? And that may lead them to courses and to conferences and to coaches from there.
But they very rarely start by seeking professional expertise. I mean, this is not 100% true all the time, but it’s pretty common. And so by the time people will get to Candace and many times they already feel like they’ve wasted too much time, like they don’t have time to spare.
And so she’s often having to get people to pump the brakes. No different than what Mary said about her work with her production studio and helping people bring audio books and podcasts and stuff to light where she’s having to tell them as well, like pump your brakes. Slowing down doesn’t make you lazy.
Slowing down doesn’t make you bad. It doesn’t make you less professional than the next person. It is an aspect of craft, slowing down is how you elevate your craftsmanship.
You’ve got to work on the craft. You’ve got to work on the quality of what you’re producing. And if you listened to my episode with Mary or the reflection I did after that, I think that was episode 11.
You’ll know that my opinion is that craft is really care. Craft is how you show that you care about the people you are producing your material for. And Candace and I talked about a lot when we were chatting, right? Because as a book coach, and especially as a book coach in this current time period, she is dealing with beliefs around AI.
She has seen how AI is changing what people think about publishing, what people think about writing in general, what it also has changed the standard by which people measure writing. The expectation of quality has gone down as the expectation of quantity has gone up. So we talked about AI.
We talked about deadlines. We talked about the pressure to keep up with colleagues or associates who seem to crank out books left and right. They pay X number of dollars to somebody who told them they could crank out a book in a weekend.
And then you’re sitting there still stuck on what’s my introduction or what’s going to be in chapter five versus chapter one. But I think stepping back, because you may not be interested in writing books, right? Publishing may not be for you. So I think it’s important to kind of step back and say, okay, what is the lesson we can all learn here? Like what amazing perspective can we glean from Candace as this veteran book coach ghostwriter who’s written numerous bestsellers and award-winning books with other authors and on behalf of authors? I think the big thing is, is there are still people out there.
I don’t care when you’re listening to this, okay? You might be listening to this in 2027. There are still people out there right now who are willing to take the long road if it means taking the long road produces something that they’re truly proud of, right? So these are people who refuse to contribute to the growing pile of shallow work just so they can say, I did a thing, right? I wrote a book. Like there’s a book out there with my name on it.
You know, they are willing to do the hard work and revise the same sentence over and over again. And I think that idea that there are still people out there willing to take the long road is one that you could benefit from taking to heart. It’s one that I benefit from remembering and taking to heart because I know that for some of us depth is negotiable.
It’s not for Candace. She made that abundantly clear when we were speaking, but I know for some people depth is negotiable. You know, when I worked in a university, I had a supervisor who was like, there’s a time and a place for A plus work, but there’s also time and a place for C minus work.
If everything you do has to be an A plus, you’re just not going to have that much done in the course of a year. So, you know, the big challenge, the strategy that you have to have in the back of your mind is understanding when C minus work will get you the time, the energy, and the resources necessary to produce the A plus work when it really matters. So think about when you’re willing to take time with your work or when somebody, when you can see somebody has taken great time with their work, like what does that say to you? What does it say to you when somebody brings you a homemade pie baked with apples from their backyard apple tree versus when somebody brings you two apple pies from McDonald’s? Like on one hand, pie is pie and pie is delicious, but on the other hand, knowing that somebody had to pick these apples, wash these apples, peel them, slice them, make a crust or buy a Pillsbury crust from the store, whichever they did, and then actually put that all together and then wait for it to bake in the oven and then wait for it to cool so that they could bring it to you, right? That is grandma level care right there.
And you think about, like, what does that say? I mean to me, when somebody brings me something, you know, homemade, I don’t think the from scratch apple pie is any less special than, let’s use a more reasonable example, like a Granny Smith frozen pie that they baked, right? I’m not like, oh, you like me more than this person likes me, or you don’t like me as much as this person likes me. But when somebody brings me a homemade pie, I think, like, they were thinking of me for a long time. It wasn’t like they just opened the chest freezer, saw a pie and said, hey, I should go take a bite of Tanya.
They were going either Tanya loves pie. It’s her favorite dessert ever. And my apples are ripe and I need to do something with them.
So I will make them into a pie for Tanya. Or they’re sitting there going, I gotta make a bunch of pies. Who can I make pie for? Oh, I know Tanya.
Tanya likes pie and Tanya likes apple pie. In any case, what I feel like when that person comes to bring that to me is they’re saying you, Tanya, matter enough for me to do this well, to do this well for you. And again, there is a time and a place for the thought that counts.
But when we’re talking about community building and making people feel like they really, really belong and fostering that feeling of belonging, then we need to find a way to communicate the level and depth in which they matter to us and that we hope what we’re providing will matter to them. So going back to Mary’s, because I think Mary and Candace’s interviews are great, like opposite sides of the same coin almost, right? Where Mary really works on spoken craft, you know, podcasting and recording, and Candace focuses on written. For Mary, her studio, that physical studio that she has created there in the Vancouver, Washington area, is an act of hospitality.
Like she has thought about the furniture that she has there, the beverages that she has there. She had thought about having one particular type of coffee maker and she chose to have a different type of coffee maker because the different type of coffee maker was more versatile than the other type of coffee maker. For Candace, words are much the same thing.
Like she thinks of, like, what is the most important thing that the reader needs to take away from this page? And how do we wrap the words around? How do we get the words to communicate that before they have to flip the page, right? So for Candace, it’s like every sentence is earning the right for the reader to keep reading. The last line of every page of a book is what compels the reader to keep turning the page. So again, it’s just this reminder, I think, that it’s not about excellence for excellence’s sake.
It’s not about perfectionism. It’s just a different way of showing love. Craft is how we can show love to the people that we care about.
And, you know, this is true in our own families as well. This is true in our workplaces, right? This doesn’t have to just be about book writing. And the other piece that I was thinking about as I was going through, like, the editing notes in Candace’s interview is also this resistance against really being fully present, fully yourself until you have arrived.
It’s like, I can’t tell anybody I’m writing a book until I have a finished manuscript. No, that’s not true. You can tell people you’re working on a book.
You can join writing groups. I was looking at a literary agency’s website last night, and what I loved is they had a section for what they called pre-published authors versus their section for published authors, right? So they have the section for all of their authors who have books out in the world, and then they have the section for their authors who are not yet published. And then rather than saying, like, you know, oh, like, wannabe authors, click here.
They’re like, you know, if you identify as a pre-published author, go here, and, you know, we’ve got some tips and some resources for you. So you don’t have to wait until you arrive at some, I don’t know, predetermined point or predetermined level of credibility in order to own the identity of being a writer or whatever it is that you are working on, right? It’s like, I used to run a mom’s group, and my mom’s group, it was very easy, right? From the time you were pregnant until your child was, like, six years old, you were welcome in the mom’s group, right? It was for moms of young children, but I found out that there were other moms groups, even in our area, that weren’t open to pregnant women because they weren’t moms yet. Like, can you even imagine that? Like, oh, no, I’m sorry.
You’re not a mom until you hold the baby in your hands. Well, if everybody waited until they had an actual child in their hand to identify as a parent, there’d be, I mean, talk about a rude awakening. Talk about a rude awakening.
So you don’t have to have everything buttoned up, polished, perfected before you start finding community around that thing, right? So course creators and, you know, back to, like, if you’re somebody who wants to be a hiker, you want to learn hiking or geocaching or cycling, like, you don’t have to have all these accolades under your belt before you can start going to groups that are focused on those places. In fact, if anything, I don’t think there is a better place to learn, to fast track your learning and your skill building than to find the communities that have the experts in them. And as long as they’re open to beginners, go in there and just listen to them.
Don’t talk, just listen even, right? Because think about all the mistakes that they will save you from making just by listening to their experience. You know, the things that they wish they had done, they didn’t, they wish they knew when they were brand new. And for Candace, there’s nothing she loves more than when somebody shows up to one of her writing sessions with a messy draft or a partially finished chapter.
Because one thing that she would say is if somebody has a messy draft or an unfinished chapter, she can actually save them so much time by taking that unfinished chapter, giving them some feedback that they can then use to inform how they finish the chapter, rather than having them hand her what they think is a finished chapter, and then she pokes a bunch of holes in it that they have to go around and rewrite. And the other piece is, is there’s always going to be more to do. Sometimes you have to take the one mile bike ride to learn that you actually should have taken a left when you got 25% of the way, and your destination would have still been a mile, but it would have been much prettier.
But these are the lessons you get when you aren’t afraid to seek out community when you’re a novice, when you’re just learning. And so think about that from your own perspective, like whatever lens you’re listening to, okay? Or you’re listening to this under, I should say. Don’t be so worried about the final destination or the finished product that you lose sight of the fact that you can be building relationships even in the messy middle, or the Spartan beginner stage, right? Like before you even begin, right? You want to plant a rose garden.
You want to have a beautiful rose garden so you can show roses in the fair. Go check out a couple of Master Gardener meetings. Check out a couple of Master Gardener classes.
Learn who is an expert in roses. Get some information from them so that you don’t make the mistake of planting the wrong type of rose for your area, right? Or the wrong type of rose for the level of sunlight and the level of drainage in your soil system. That is probably the best, most practical example I can think of, of why it’s important to be looking for your perfect people in your learning stage, wherever your learning stage is.
And while there are tools out there to shortcut our learning without us having to seek out others, right? You know, you can ask ChatGPT any one of a number of questions. ChatGPT lacks context, right? ChatGPT lacks nuance. ChatGPT can only give you what you give it, to some degree, and what it can think to source.
And I use think, the term think loosely, but it can think to source as in response to what you ask it. But a human can say, well, you know, okay, I know you’re asking me, what is the best type of rose to win in the county fair? Like, what’s the best variety of rose to grow if you want a fair winner? But actually, the question that you should be asking me are, what are the types of roses that grow best here? And then maybe you can tell me a little bit about your yard, your garden, and your habits. And then we can figure out, of those best roses, which ones will do best in your garden? And of those, what are most likely to get catch the judge’s eye at the fair, right? So a human is going to be able to say, I know you’re asking this question, but I think the question that you really want the answer to is this.
AI can’t do that for you. A DIY course can’t always do that for you. And even though those one-to-one direct relationships, whether that’s a support group or taking an in-person class or whatever, those are a slower process than just asking ChatGPT or Google a question.
It is how you tend, or it is the best way to get the most specific answer to your very specific situation. And if you’re a rebel at heart, kind of like I am, if you’re a little rebellious, think of taking the long road as like thumbing your nose at the man. Think of it as our modern day rebellion, while everybody else is doing things as fast as humanly possible so they can produce as much as humanly possible, right? Why write one really good book? If AI can help me get 10 books to market this year, then think of taking the long road as your own quiet rebellion, right? As you going, you know what? No way.
Like I’m going to be punk rock here by taking the long road. I’m going to be punk rock here by really putting some thoughtful, intentional effort toward what I’m creating. So ultimately here, what do we want to talk about? Or how do I want to leave this? I think if nothing else, if you’re sitting there just thinking that you’re a slow poke, right? That you’re just moving too slow and the world is passing you by, or everybody else does things in a neat, tidy way, they don’t need edits, they don’t need revisions in whatever they’re working on, I really hope that you will recognize that that’s not true.
That if anything, your pace and your process could be your superpower. They could be the key to you providing others, especially your perfect people, with depth that they can’t get anywhere else. So whether you’re trying to plant a rose garden, you’re writing a book, or you’re putting some other work out there in the world, people want the most pure form of you they can find, and they’ll wait for it.
Now, back to, right, we can’t live the Stephen King fantasy and hole ourselves up as shut-ins until we have created the magnum opus of whatever it is. You can go deep and be building in community and be building in public, right? There’s nothing wrong with that. You’ll see that all the time on my social media.
You’ll see that all the time in my newsletter and stuff. I’m like almost, you know, live journaling stuff, and then I go back, right, I take responses, and I go back, and I kind of polish what I’m doing. So going slow doesn’t mean you have to go in private.
That’s really what I’m saying. It is, as you build your community around what you’re working on, it’s okay to make it a conversation. It’s okay to put something out there, have them respond, and then you make adjustments accordingly.
Just like if you were planning that rose garden, it’d be okay to say, okay, I’m going to plant this rose bush, and then somebody else says, oh, you know what, that rose bush has thorns that are really pokey, you know, but this rose bush produces flowers that look the same, and it’s not as pokey, and then you just say, oh, okay, well, I’ll plant that new rose bush next to it, and I’ll see which one does better. Okay, so create in public, right? You can go slow, but you can still share your stuff in public. Invite people in to your process, right? Don’t worry about fast-tracking it.
You’re not fast food. You don’t have to be on a conveyor belt. Let the people you’re creating for, whatever you’re creating, let them shape the work as it evolves, and know that as you do that, more people will find you.
They will be attracted to you. They will help you go on to create better and better works, and at the end of it, if it’s the case of a book, it’s a book you’re really proud of, but it’s also a book that people feel the ideal reader feels like was written directly for them, and if it’s some other work, maybe it’s your version of that homemade apple pie made from the apples in the backyard, but just think of how much people will value what you’ve created because they know that deep down, you centered it all around how much they matter to you. That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks.
To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review, and if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
Nov 26, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
[Speaker 1]
Some ideas are bigger than a blog post, thank goodness. That’s why we have books, but we see more and more books now that really could have just been a blog post. The problem comes when you want AI to do the thinking and the creating of ideas and the putting together of words for you.
If it’s creating the work for you, it is pulling from other people’s ideas. I’ve had multiple coaching clients send me their outline and I immediately know when ChatGPT created that outline. It is not usable, my friend.
Or you can write a bad book really quickly. I’m not sure that’s what you want to do. Once that book is out there, it represents you to the world forever.
We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tanya Kubo and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras. Because around here, what makes you weird, makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. We love to talk about community here, how to build it, how to grow it, how to sustain it.
And today we are going to talk about the art of going deep. What does it mean to actually write something that matters? And what do we lose when we try to rush the process?
And so I can’t think of a better person to have this conversation with than Candice L. Davis, who is a book coach who helps experts move beyond that surface level knowledge to actually figure out what their deep wisdom is. I would say it’s their genius so that they can actually write books that matter.
And she is an award-winning writer herself. So she’s just not the person who bosses you around. She actually has done this stuff.
And she’s a fellow podcast host. She has nothing but the words. So Candice doesn’t just help people get published.
She helps them write world-class books from a place of joy and delight. Candice, with that introduction, we are going to kick it off with the question I love to ask everybody, which is, who are your freaks and why do you love them? Thank you for having me, Tanya.
My freaks are the literary writing community and anyone who cares deeply about great writing and great books and the actual art and craft of writing. So it’s like your geeks are my geeks and we’re so happy together. Yes, it’s about excellence and it’s about art and it’s about craft and it all comes together in the book.
So, you know, it’s 2025. I have to ask the question that I’m sure you get asked all the time. You believe literary excellence matters, but how does that play out in the world of AI?
Yeah, that’s such a good question. I always feel like I have to start with saying, putting aside ethical concerns, well, you can’t really put us ethical concerns, friend. Like the truth is that we know that AI was developed on other people’s copywritten work that they were not compensated for.
The truth is that we know AI is terrible for the environment, right? And yet we all still use AI to some extent. That’s the reality of the world, including me.
That’s the reality of the world that we live in. I do not use it for writing books, but I do use it for other things in my business sometimes, right? In terms of writing, my question for people who talk about using AI to write their books is why do you want to do that?
Why do you want to do that? Because if you’re just trying to get to faster, you are probably going to contribute to the ever-growing pile of terrible books out there in the world. Yes, that is true.
What reasons do they give you? I’m curious. Usually faster.
They have a deadline, they have a conference, they have a whatever coming up and they really want to have their book by that date, but those are usually not my people because these are not people who are super invested in the excellence of their work, right? They’re just invested in having a book with their name on it. So I think what people who are interested in excellence really wonder, because I think they sit back and go, why would you do that?
Conversations I have with fellow writers all the time is I can actually write from scratch much faster than I can get AI to produce something that sounds like me. So I’m that person who uses AI to do things like help me figure out how to help my kids with their math homework. That’s my number one use.
I don’t know what yours is, but I am just curious from your perspective, what are we losing individually or culturally when we devalue depth in favor of speed? That’s not specifically an AI question, that’s anybody who’s rushing a book to market for any reason. And that’s been the case since self-publishing became a really big thing with Amazon allowing for Kindle direct publishing, right?
So people have wanted to get books out faster and faster. AI is just now making it even faster than it was. I don’t know if you remember all of the write your books in a weekend program that were out, I don’t know, maybe 10 years ago.
Everywhere you looked there was a program to write your book in a weekend. This was pre-AI. And the person I saw one of those, I was like, what the heck is happening here?
And then I actually saw the books they were producing. And I was like, oh, I get it. They’re not actually books.
No, because most of them, most of those kind of top of funnel, big business card style books, they’re like what? 20,000 words max? Or just a few blog posts.
Yeah. There are just a few blog posts. And I’ve read some 20,000 word books that were great, but these are generally not that cohesive.
No one has thought deeply about it. And what we lose is that we don’t really get new ideas. We get recycled, refurbished looks at the same old ideas over and over when people don’t take the time to actually do deep thinking that leads to deep writing.
Yeah. And you know what I think we also lose is context. That’s the whole thing.
Like when I’ve sat with agents before, every agent I know, they always ask the question, it’s funny is if they’re really nice, they’ll preface it and say, well, may I be direct? But the question is always some version of why does what you’re talking to me about have to be a book? Why can’t it just be an article?
Why can’t it just be a newsletter? And the answer is usually because this is a concept, this is an idea that somebody needs 60,000 words or more to understand and to apply to their life. And so I just don’t see how anything written quickly, whether it’s AI or human generated, can accomplish that.
It almost never accomplishes that. And don’t even mail me, email me or message me with the exceptions. Because to me, the exceptions just prove the rule, right?
Like you have someone who has written hundreds of articles on a topic and they write their book, quote unquote, quickly or more quickly than the average person. They’ve already done the work. They’ve done the deep thinking and they’ve done all of that.
So of course it’s a, not of course, but it may be a faster process for them, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Some ideas are bigger than a blog post. Thank goodness. That’s why we have books.
But we see more and more books now that really could have just been a blog post. Yeah. And honestly, I would rather just read the blog post.
As would I, friend. Save me the time. Save me the time.
So I’m going to show one more, I’m going to call it argument in favor of AI that I hear a lot is accessibility. When I was in book marketing, for instance, I worked with a lot of authors that were dyslexic, had learning disabilities, and they would have to invest heavily in having their books edited at a level that was more than their publisher could even handle. And it’s these individuals who are like, Oh, writing is such a pain.
AI helps me overcome that. So what would you say to the person who says, Oh, all this deep writing you’re talking about, Candice, it’s so elitist. Like we need greater accessibility in the market.
So I am here for greater accessibility. I’m here for more people being published because the history of publishing is that white men get the book deals and everybody else gets the leftovers, right? That has been decades of the publishing industry.
What I love about independent publishing, self-publishing is that it doesn’t matter who you are. If you can get access to a writing device and an internet connection, you can get your ideas out to the world in the book. I am here for all of that.
I think there are certain kinds of AI. Like I have a client who uses AI to read her content back to her because she does have vision problems and she does have a certain form of dyslexia. So instead of her reading it, she has AI read it back to her.
I think that’s wonderful. The problem comes when you want AI to do the thinking and the creating of ideas and the putting together of words for you. That is where the problem comes.
There are lots of ways you can use AI. You can use AI to transcribe your thoughts so that you’re not typing. You’re just speaking to a machine.
You can use AI to ask you the questions that you want to answer in your book. Lots of ways. I have no issues with let’s make this publishing process more accessible for everyone.
I think it should be. But if it’s creating the work for you, it is pulling from other people’s ideas. That’s the big thing, right?
And it’s a race to the middle, right? Because it’s pulling from the best and it’s pulling from the worst. And there’s way more of the worst available on the internet.
I just want to stop there and be like, okay, episode over. Because it’s what I tell people, right? It’s garbage in, garbage out.
And when people, because people will complain to me, like I’ve bought these prompts and everything, and I’m just not getting good stuff back. And I’m like, because all AI can do is take what you give it and take what else exists on the internet. And most of what’s on the internet is bad.
Correct. Correct. How it is.
I’ve had multiple clients, coaching clients, send me their outline. And I immediately know when ChatGPT created that outline. And it is not usable, my friend.
It is not usable. I immediately know. Like without even reading deeply, just a quick glance, it always creates them in the exact same style, which is not a style that any human would use to create an outline.
It’s just not good. So I’m curious, because I imagine 10 years ago, you probably could easily find your people. Because us writing geeks, we love to hang out with each other.
Yeah. What’s it like finding them now? Is it harder?
It’s interesting. So I can find my people on a social level, still pretty easily. Like I could get on my Facebook profile right now and find friends who care deeply about their writing.
Whether they’re publishing books right now or not, they’re actively engaged in it. They care deeply about the words that they’re putting on the page. That is no problem.
The clients are a different story. Because many of my clients are coaches, speakers, and entrepreneurs. And they do feel a pressure to get their book out quickly.
Their colleagues are getting their books out quickly. They want to apply for a certain speaking gig that they’ve not been able to get in the past. And they know if they can just get their book out, they can get that speaking gig next year.
So on the professional side and clients, it is a little bit harder because I do have to deal with the reality of the time pressure my clients are under. Is the time pressure real or is it perceived, do you think? Oh, it’s totally created by them.
It is totally created by them. Occasionally, it will be a person who has a traditional book deal already. And they just need support in getting it done.
That time pressure is real. Because that deadline- Yes. That is a real deadline that the rest of their advance payment is dependent upon.
But for the people who are self-publishing, publishing independently, it’s made up in their heads. And they’re convinced like, if I don’t do it by next year, I’m going to miss out on the speaking engagement. Or you can write a bad book really quickly and take that with you to the speaking engagement.
I’m not sure that’s what you want to do. Once that book is out there, it represents you to the world forever. Yeah.
Yeah. That’s a good thing. That’s a good thing.
Yeah. It’s funny because I remember early in book marketing, I had somebody who came to me and she had been trying to get a traditional deal. And because I learned very early on, and you know why I learned this, to always ask them why they were choosing independent publishing over traditional publishing.
Because you could find out a lot about the quality of the book based on the answer. And her answer was, her manuscript was 180,000 words. And every agent she talked to, and it was prescriptive nonfiction.
Because it’s George RR Martin and it’s a whole world of fantasy. Like three books. Yeah.
She gets a pass on that one. And her whole thing was, every agent I’ve shopped it to says that no publisher will buy 180,000 word manuscript. And I spent too much time writing it.
I’m not cutting it. Wow. And I’m like, oh, we cannot work together.
No, absolutely not. Because no reader wants that either. So that’s why the publishers don’t want.
It’s a Mark Twain quote. I didn’t have time to write you a short letter. So I wrote you a long one.
[Speaker 2]
That’s right.
[Speaker 1]
Yes, absolutely. So since I have you here, one of the things I wanted to talk a little bit about is writing as a community. Because I’ve had a couple of authors already on the show.
And it’s funny is they’ve talked a lot about how they thought that writing in their genre would be more competitive than it was. But I remember when I went to my very first writer’s conference, I was shocked to find out how much collaboration went into professional writing. And I’m a former journalist.
So I was used to collaboratively writing in a newsroom. But that’s because I had a daily deadline. I think we all buy into this myth of watching movies of the writer in the secluded mountainside who just does everything siloed by themselves.
Do you find that you have to help people unlearn that myth? Or by the time that they find you have they already realized that they need writing community? I think it’s so interesting because people are different.
My husband is also a writer. And I am his writing community for the most part. Like we talk story, we were just in the kitchen, he was making coffee, and we were talking about a script he’s working on right now.
But he doesn’t really participate in a larger writing community. He goes into his hole, and he writes in his hole a lot. But with scripts, he’s going to get feedback anyway, at the next level of script before it goes to production, right?
So he knows that feedback is coming, whether he wants it or not. Because someone’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this film. So for authors of books, it tends to be different.
We don’t have that community. And it’s always sad to me when people think they’re going to get it from their publishing company. You’re not.
Even if you get a traditional book deal, you’re not. I came up as a young writer, young, I was in my 30s, in the LA writing community. It’s young, my daughter’s 34 now.
So in the LA writing community, and I was in workshops with absolutely brilliant writers and mentors. My colleagues were brilliant, my mentors were brilliant. And what I noticed was my mentors, some of whom had their books been made into movies, they’d won huge literary prizes.
They also were all in workshops. They also were getting the support of other writers. They were not feeling like I can’t share my work with Janet because she’s going to tell Mary and then Mary, no, it was none of this, they’re going to copy my idea stuff.
It was supporting each other through the writing process and helping each other really make that work the best it can be. And for me, that’s the height of a writing community. Now, do you host communities for writers at this stage?
I do. So I just closed one cohort. Oh, I just closed one cohort yesterday.
That was such a hard call. It was such a hard call. Oh my goodness.
And one of the girls said, I didn’t realize how lonely writing my book could be. I don’t know what I’m going to do without this group. And I said, you can join the next cohort because I’ll be starting another one, a specific writers workshop.
So I do the group thing. Some of my clients are not into group. They want just to get it done, right?
Their time is really tight. They’re running a business. They’ve got parents to take care of or kids to take care of or both, and they just don’t have space for the group.
But other people understand and really value the community aspect of it. Have you seen people who, for whatever reason, the community tends to ignite their writing? Oh my gosh.
Yeah, me. Right? Like they’re doing so much, like they’re writing so much more now that they’re in a group than they ever could have done by themselves.
Including myself. So when you have to show up every two weeks with a new section to share with your group, you are much more likely, especially when you’ve invested some of your good money in that group. And when you care about the opinions of the people in that group, you are much more likely to show up.
But also there’s a shared creativity that happens even sometimes when we just get on a co-writing call on Zoom and write together. I was laying on the couch on Monday, exhausted, and my friend texted me and said, hey, you want to co-write? And I was like, oh, I’m too tired.
And then I got on with her, and I wrote for two hours. It was great. Yeah.
Oh my gosh. That is amazing.
[Speaker 2]
Yeah.
[Speaker 1]
Yeah. It’s surprising. Now in your groups, have you ever…
I’m just curious if there’s like a story of somebody who came in just feeling like they were running out of time. Because I think a lot of us get that feeling. We feel like we’re too old.
We feel like we’re too this, too that. And then was able to make that shift to stop rushing. I’m just curious what you saw change in them and in their writing.
Typically what I see for the people who are rushed and realize, wait, I’m not… It has to happen that they realize they’re not going to make the deadline they had in their heads. And once they accept, they’re not going to be able to publish on their grandma’s birthday.
They’re not going to be able to… I’m not kidding. I’ve had that.
They’re not going to be able to launch on their anniversary of when they started their business. And that artificial deadline goes away. Then they realize they can slow down.
And when they slow down, they stop overthinking. The overthinking is what keeps them stuck. And I’ve got to hurry up and write this.
Once they slow down, they stop overthinking. But I have one woman in my group who has been in my groups for three years now, has written four or five books, and she’s in her 60s. She’s going to be retiring from her job soon.
It’s too late in terms of time, time, like your lifetime. No, I see people showing up and writing, but it’s too late in terms of that deadline could actually be a great thing for you because it can set you to actually do the work and not be so rushed. Yeah, and actually spend time in the chapters that need development.
That’s what I learned when I got into a writing community earlier this year is that, yeah, as a former journalist, I can write fast. But back to our earlier point, nobody wants a book that was written that fast. And sometimes, I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, maybe I’m the only person on the planet, but sometimes I have to write 8,000 words to get to a good 500.
Of course, I’ve had that experience. Absolutely. You get all the way to the end and you’re like, oh, that paragraph’s usable.
And everybody has their own process, right? So for some people, and you have to know yourself because otherwise it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’re making progress and you’re not. For some people, it’s, I’m going to rewrite this chapter three times before I move to the next one because I need it to be decent before I move on.
For other people, they’ll get caught up in that rewriting cycle because they’ll never move on to the next chapter. So they just have to leave it as a rough draft, move on to the other one, and come back and do the editing at the end. You just have to know yourself.
Yeah, and there’s parts where I just have to write more words. Placeholders all through the manuscript. More words go here.
Yes. Without a doubt. Or, you know, I’ll write it all and I’ll highlight a paragraph.
I’ll be like, I hate every bit of this, but I’m moving on. Because I just want to, I want to remind myself when I come back to it and go, oh my gosh, that’s absolutely terrible. I want to remind myself, I knew it was drivel when I wrote it.
I never thought that was good. I was not deluding myself. I will say like I, for my own work, I tend to be the rewrite, rewrite, move on person.
That serves me well. But I’m rewriting to, I’m writing rough and then I’m rewriting the whole thing and then rewriting the whole chapter again. My husband is, he’s not putting the words down unless he thinks they’re right.
So he doesn’t have to do a lot of rewriting on the back end. Just different processes. There’s no right or wrong.
Yeah. It sounds like, I have a friend who does this, like she writes her books in her head. And so she talks about, everybody thinks I’m a fast writer.
She’s, I’m not actually that fast. It’s that I don’t sit down at my computer until I’ve got 10,000 words I can just spout off really quick. Oh, I love that.
Edward P. Jones, who won some big prize for The Known World, his novel that came out, I don’t know, 15, 20 years ago, worked at the post office when he was writing. And he talks about how when he sat down to write the book, it only took him a few weeks, a few months, because he’d already written the whole thing in his head at his very boring post office job.
So I love that. I think that’s fantastic when people can hold that whole story in their heads. Yeah.
I could probably hold 2,000 words in my head at this age. That’s more than most, friend.
[Speaker 2]
That’s more than most.
[Speaker 1]
I don’t think I can hold much more. So because you’re a book coach, I’m hoping that you are willing to give a little bit of advice. Sure.
All right. So the first thing, because we’re going to put all the information for your podcast, because I’ve listened to your podcast. I know it has great advice.
We’ll put your website, we’ll put your socials. I know Instagram’s a good one for you. For sure.
But I know that there is somebody listening who is going, okay, I’m in a writing community, but I don’t know if I’m in a good one or a bad one. Like it doesn’t feel right, but is it a me problem? Is it a them problem?
What are some questions I could ask myself to figure out whether I’m in the right writing community for me? I do think the first thing that you said about not feeling right is a big one. I do think you have to feel comfortable with the people in order, especially if they’re giving you feedback, in order for you to be able to take that feedback seriously, you have to be comfortable with the people and you have to respect that they have the ability to give you the feedback that you need, because not everyone does, right?
It’s something you have to learn how to do. It’s not something everyone can do. I think if you’re paying money to be in that community, you really should be able to go based on that feeling of how do I feel about this?
And are they taking you seriously? I was in a workshop once with wonderful people, brilliant people, and one person who almost made me quit the workshop. What was it about them?
Oh, she was entirely self-centered. The world revolved around her. She didn’t care about anyone’s feedback except for the mentor we were paying.
And she also did not give us any helpful feedback. So she was distracting. We went to dinner once.
We all went to the opera. And before the opera, we went to dinner and there was shared bread and butter on the table. And she stuck her finger in the butter, licked the butter off her finger, and stuck her finger back in the butter and did it again.
If that doesn’t tell you enough about this person, I don’t know what could. So yeah, make sure you respect their ability. They respect your ability and feedback.
And listen, they may be brilliant people, but you may just not vibe. If you don’t vibe, that’s okay. Yeah.
It reminds me, I was in one of my first groups and there was a woman who shared, she was writing a marriage book. And the facilitator, we were in a small group mastermind and she like pulled her aside and she said, I’m going to have to get you into a different group because everything that you are talking about, my marriage is currently the opposite. And I can’t hear what you’re saying.
I can’t be positive. And so you need to be in a group with somebody who can work with that. And I was fascinated, right?
Because she could have stuck it out and said, I want this person’s money.
[Speaker 2]
Right?
[Speaker 1]
But she was like, no, I’m not going to be able to give you good insight. So why don’t you just go find a different group that will. Which I think is brilliant.
But sometimes you have to make that decision for yourself too, right? To decide this isn’t for me and that’s okay. All right.
So if you’re in a space and you’re like, okay, this isn’t for me, what are some things you can do to find the right group? Like proactively? First, I would say, talk to other writers that you know, and see if anyone who you already have a good relationship with is in a group or has been in a group and can make a referral to you.
Take writing classes in your local community or online. Both workshops that I was in for the longest time in Southern California were from classes that I took. So I took a class with a teacher and then they invited me to apply to their workshop.
This was many years ago before people were really taking classes online. So now you can do that online too, right? It doesn’t have to be down at the local community college or the extension program, which is what I did.
But, you know, get to know like quote unquote instructors. They may be coaches. They may be mentors.
They may be authors who are hosting workshops. Maybe before you give them money, get to know what they’re about. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, really what you’re saying is do your homework. Do your homework.
Yeah, for sure. I read this woman. I was paying her a lot of money.
I read her novel. I went to her signing. I went and took a class from her.
Like I did all these things before I invested. Yeah. So I hear do your homework.
First of all, know yourself. You got to figure out who you are, what you need, what you want and what kind of environment is going to get you that. Yep.
Then do your homework so that you’re finding the right fit. I imagine there’s a little bit of trust in your gut. It doesn’t feel right.
Like you said, just don’t because there’s something. Yes, that’s a huge factor. That’s a huge factor for me.
If you don’t have a vibe with those people, it’s fine. Go somewhere else. There are plenty of workshops available.
So before we get to our final segment, which is our freak flags fly, I’m curious for the listener who’s been trying to write the book and is just feeling ashamed, embarrassed because they just haven’t been able to finish fast enough. What would you say to them? I would say welcome to being a human being because the vast majority of us who love writing have books that we have left unfinished, that we have left half done.
I found a binder in my garage a couple of weekends ago that had a novel that I wrote like two thirds of like in, I don’t know, 2006 or something. And I started reading. I was like, I still like this.
I want to finish this. But I’m like, it happens. That’s just what it is.
But if you feel stuck, get support in some way, shape or form, whether that’s a book coach, a class, a course, a local community college course. There’s nothing wrong with getting in the car. Everything doesn’t have to be online.
There’s nothing wrong with getting in the car and going down. And pretty much every major city and lots of small towns have free writing groups that you can join. Check your library somewhere where you can get some support to help you get back into the process and keep going.
But there’s no need for shame or embarrassment because it’s the most normal thing. Yeah, I think it’s just like in business, right? It’s like most overnight successes were 10 to 20 years in the making.
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like books are the same way.
And I get caught in that trap too. I don’t want to talk about the fact that I’m writing a book because what if I’m still writing this book two years from now? And it’s been, I’m still writing the book two years.
[Speaker 2]
Exactly what it is. Yes.
[Speaker 1]
And I’ll be writing mine with you at the same time. Yay! I love having company.
We’ll have to hang out. Yes. All right.
So before we let you go, it’s time for a quick round, which I said is Freak Flags Fly. Five fast questions, no wrong answers, just whatever comes to mind. Are you ready?
All right. So finish this sentence. You are my kind of freak if.
If you love books more than you love almost any other kind of media. Oh, I like that. I thought you were going to say people, but I like how you went there.
I love people. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. Introverts unite. What is something you love that your friends just don’t get?
Oh, probably I’m very elitist about the types of books that I read. Like I am a book snob. So there are certain literary and typically dark books that I read that my friends would not touch.
And what community would you infiltrate just to understand it better? Oh, I almost went political on you, Tanya. I was like…
You would not be our first guest to go political on me. This is terrible because it hurts my heart to even say that this exists, but the young black male manosphere would be what I would infiltrate. I don’t understand you.
I don’t know what, who hurt you, how you started to think this way, but I would like need to be one of them. I’d need to be dressed as one of them so I could understand. It stresses me out every day that they even exist.
And so that would be what I would infiltrate to understand better. Yeah. I love that question really because it just speaks to curiosity.
I want to save them actually so I can save the rest of us. I want to know them so I can divert them and get them on a better path. Yeah.
Okay. So this one will be a little bit lighter. What tool, ritual, or practice helps you stay connected to your people?
That’s a good one. Probably, it’s painful to leave the house, but actually showing up for book events helps me stay. Because the nerds that will come up for a book event, not like a celebrity book signing, but for a real book, for a real book, like deeply written, deeply thought through book, going out to those events, that helps me stay connected to my people.
Okay. And who is someone doing freakishly good work who deserves a bigger stage? Oh, golly day, golly day.
Ooh. See, the people that I’m going to name already have a big stage. Oh no, she has a big stage.
I was looking at her book next to me. I was like, no, she already has a big stage. Someone doing freakishly good work.
This is a hard one. This is a hard one. Maybe it’s a great book he read that hardly anybody knows about.
I will say this. Jessamyn Ward has a book called Sing Unburied Thing. It won a huge award, but no one I know has read it.
It won a freaking national book award, but I don’t know anyone who has read it. And it is brilliant. I find all of her writing brilliant.
Well, thank you for showing me because I totally massacred that spelling in my notes. Yeah, you would, because it’s hard for me to say it. Every time I say it, and I say it a lot, it’s hard for Sing Unburied, like not buried in the ground.
Sing is the title of the book, but I don’t think, I don’t think she gets enough credit. I don’t find anyone who knows her work. Thank you for that.
I’m going to have to pick that up. Candice, I am so grateful that you came today to talk to us about the importance of really having pride in your work, because that’s really, whether you’re a writer or not, it’s about having pride in your work and honoring the pace at which you are going, no matter how slow that is and no matter how fast everybody is around you. And so for listeners, I would just say, if you’ve been ever made to feel like your pace is too slow or your words are too much, I hope you will hear Candice’s deep message, which is simply that your depth is your power, you have more time than you think you do, and just say or write the thing.
Thank you, Tanya, for having me. That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review.
And if you’re craving connection, join the Freak Show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
Nov 12, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
Tonya Kubo (0:00 – 28:04)
People really want to get famous before they put in a lot of time, energy, and effort toward earning the fame. A lot of people actually want fame. They want to go viral.
They want to be known. They want celebrity status. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting that, so long as you’re willing to admit it.
We’re past the era of quantity. The best thing most of us can do is think long and hard about the things that only we can do and then just show up really well in those one to three places, ideally one to two. I don’t see true belonging or true community coming from being everywhere.
I see it coming from showing up somewhere, a specific place, with depth and consistency. Keep in mind that you can’t foster belonging for people if they don’t know you exist.
We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras. Because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
Visibility isn’t vanity, although I think it gets confused a lot, right? But visibility really is the best way to make sure that your freaks can find you. Now, that is what I want you to be thinking about as we sort of go through this reflection of episode 10, which was my interview with Mary Williams.
Now, if you have known me for a while, like if you did not first encounter me through Find Your Freaks, if you have known me from other aspects of business or have met me anytime pre-2020 or since, you will know that Mary Williams of Sensible Woo is like my best bestie. We talk almost daily. In fact, we talk so often, we’ve actually seen each other in real life.
I have to wear my Powell’s City of Books shirt today, so if you’re listening, I’m sorry you can’t see it, but if you’re watching on YouTube, you will see my Powell’s City of Books shirt that is ginormous. But Mary is the person who took me to Powell’s for the very first time ever, and I could live my whole life inside that bookstore. I love it so much, so much.
I cannot wait to go back. That being said though, you know, we talk all the time, and so episode 10 for you is very much a snapshot in time, right? So you heard a conversation between the two of us on this idea of visibility and people who want to be really visible, especially, you know, professionals who say they want one thing, but deep down, they really just want to be famous, right?
That’s what the interview with Mary was about. But you know, the conversation hasn’t stopped between the two of us. We keep talking.
In fact, on that episode, we talked about a full-service recording studio that she was in the process of building, and that’s now open. It’s called Sasquatch Media Grounds. She’s got clients going on in there.
She helps people with pre-production, post-production. So, you know, that is how much time has passed since we recorded the interview, and when I’m sitting here now with you to sort of reflect on some, what I will call some bigger lessons from that episode. And also, I want to acknowledge that because we know each other so well, that specific episode was a little bit sprawling.
Let’s call it sprawling, shall we? Like, let’s not call it unfocused or meandering. Let’s call it sprawling, overly comprehensive.
You know, and that’s what happens, I think, for a lot of us, right? When we get on the mic with people we’ve known for a really long time, right? You bring in all this stuff that happened off the mic into the conversation.
It doesn’t always do the greatest service to listeners. So, what I want to do today, specifically with this episode, is I want to distill down what Mary and I talked about into sort of three clear takeaways for you to be thinking about as you explore your role in finding your freaks, right? Finding your place to belong, but also your role in providing a place for your chosen people to belong, right?
Because I know some of you listen just because you just love a good story. You love to hear about all walks of life, and that’s why you tune into the show. Some of you are here just because I’m hosting it, and you like the sound of my voice, and I love that for you, and I love that for me.
And then others of you are here because you’re trying to find your place in the world professionally or personally, and you are interested in community, and you just don’t quite know how to find it for yourself or how to create it for others or which you want to do, right? Some of you might say, hey, if there’s a good one out there, I’ll join it, but if there’s not, then I want to build it, and that’s why you’re here. Ultimately, right, we’re all looking to find our perfect people and figure out, like, what is the best way for us to get our needs met and for those of us who feel called to create community or build it for others to meet the needs of others.
So, you know, while the tangent-filled episode with Mary was a lot of fun for the both of us, I just want to give you some, you know, just a couple of threads to tie it all together. So I think the first thing that comes to mind now that I’ve re-listened to the episode a few times is the idea of belonging in spotlight. Because what I see a lot of times, and especially, you know, now that we have this creator culture, this creator economy, right, is people really want to get, like, they want to be famous before they put in a lot of time, energy, and effort toward earning the fame, right?
Because they’re like, well, you know, if this doesn’t make me famous, then I don’t want to do it. So I would like to just kind of do level two involvement out of level ten, you know, ten levels. I want to do level two involvement until I know this is going to take off, and then I’ll increase my level of involvement.
But the thing is, is it doesn’t work that way. Usually, right, you have got to work on getting yourself out there in whatever way that means to you in order for your perfect people, whether that’s the people to serve you or the people you want to serve, to see you, to know what you’re about, and to know whether there’s alignment between the two of you. And so when you’re thinking about visibility, when any of us is thinking about visibility, making ourselves known, especially our true selves, you know, I think it’s really important to recognize that it’s not about ego, right?
It’s not about, like, look at me, look at me, throw me a party, aren’t I so special? That’s not what it’s about. It is really about fostering that belonging.
Because if you’re not seeing, how can anybody include you? And how can anybody know whether they want you to include them? And, you know, what I love about Mary is she’s just not afraid to say quiet parts out loud, right?
Like, she is the person who you look at her and you go, that came out your mouth. That was not inside your head. And she’s like, yeah, I know that was intentional, right?
That wasn’t meant to be an inside my head conversation. That was meant to be an outside my mouth conversation. And so one of the things she talked about is that a lot of people want to be seen.
A lot of people actually want fame. They want to go viral. They want to be known.
They want celebrity status. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting that, so long as you’re willing to admit it. Just like there are other people who really want community.
They really want to build a place for others to belong, but they’d really rather not be like the face of that place. And that’s okay too. You just got to know where you stand.
And you’ve got to be able to present yourself in the way that makes the most sense for you and what you want and not be shy about it. Not be shy about it, right? Because back to, if you truly are somebody who’s looking to find your people, you’ve got to be visible in some way.
So if visibility is your goal in any way, right? If you want to be seen, just know that that’s not a selfish endeavor. That’s actually in service to finding the people you want to help or helping the people who are out there wanting to help you find you as well.
So, you know, what we really are meaning there is that whatever part of you that you’re trying to get connected, you can’t keep it a secret. That’s really what it’s about. All right.
So second, the second thread that came out in my interview with Mary was craft. Now, Mary is all about craftsmanship and, you know, she and I have both worked together long enough and, you know, individually before we ever knew each other. We know that sometimes you just have to stick a fork in it, call it done and move on.
Like we get that, right? And I am probably somebody who lives out the truth of done is better than perfect more so than others. And that’s just because I know my perfectionist nature.
And I know that in this day and age, I can always fix things later, right? There’s always editing that can be done. I can’t spend too long polishing things or they’ll never see the light of day.
Ask me about the books I’ve been writing and ask me how long I’ve been writing them. That’s the perfect example. So I am somebody who likes to move quickly and get stuff just out in the world.
I like to co-create in public for that reason, right? I just allow all those mistakes to be out in public and I just polish the rough edges as I go. Mary is somebody who is much more about craft and quality and staying power.
But here is where we see eye to eye because you would hear that and you would think like, oh, they are totally different people and we are totally different people, right? But you would think that we are on opposite ends. But the reality is, is we’re not.
Because where we agree is that craftsmanship isn’t about polish. It’s not the packaging. It’s not the expensive equipment.
It’s not the high-tech setups on whatever you may have. You know, in the case of in-person community, your craftsmanship isn’t your meeting location. It’s not the full service place with a wet bar.
Your craftsmanship comes in the form of the foundation that you have built, right? It is showing that you care enough to have thoughtfully designed the space that you’re creating or the work that you’re putting out into the world. So, you know, whether it’s being really clear about the story you’re telling, you know, in the case of a writer, say a podcaster, speaker, if it’s about being intentional about the time that you’re taking, especially like if you’re leading an organization, maybe you’re a non-profit leader, maybe you lead a support group, or maybe you’re a member of support groups.
There’s a difference between being a member of one support group and saying, this is where I choose to give an hour of my time every week and saying, well, I’m going to casually dip in and out of five support groups. Even being thoughtful about how your message lands. I mean, look at this podcast as an example.
In many ways, this podcast is not like super high, like high production value, right? Like I record this remotely. I record it in my home.
I don’t have a big fancy setup. I don’t have a dedicated studio, but I spend more time. In fact, I spend three times the amount of time outlining episodes and really thinking through what makes the most sense to talk about on the mic and to build out to form an episode than I do actually recording the episode, because I think it’s important to honor your time.
And if I want you to give me 20 to 40 minutes of your time, then the least I can do is spend two to three hours to make the 20 to 40 minutes worth your while. And when you bring that level of care into what you put out in the world, and again, we’re talking like it could be a club, right? Just a club that you host.
It could be a small group you lead in your home. But when you put that level of care out into the world, people feel it. And when they feel cared for, they come back for more.
And this is a conversation I’ve been having a lot on LinkedIn recently. There’s a few people I know who have shifted their business models a bit and they’re focused more on member experience or membership retention, membership churn, which is something that I also work on in my business. But they’ve been talking kind of their take on what leads to churn, what causes people to join a membership and cancel, what causes people to join a membership but not renew when the renewal period is up, or what causes people to not keep up with a subscription.
And one of the things that comes up time and time again is people will leave subscription model offers, whether those are like getting a product once a month in your home or once a week, however often, or a traditional online or in-person membership, people will leave those. They will not renew. They will cancel when they don’t feel like they’re cared for, when they don’t feel like they matter.
It’s not even just that they don’t see that they fit into the hole. Maybe they don’t know where they fit into the hole, but they certainly don’t think they’ll be missed. And so it’s just easy for them to duck out the back door.
And so think of craft, when we talk about craft, especially in this specific context, this episode and the last episode, don’t think of it so much as, you know, am I using a $6,000 camera? But think about, am I putting as much thought and care into what I’m doing as if it was being recorded by a $6,000 camera, right? Because that level of care and that level of intention will shine and will automatically be much more valuable than anything else out there, regardless of the production value of how it’s presented.
So ultimately craft is how I think you show respect to your audience, you show respect to your community. And even if you don’t say it out loud, right, it’s one of those things that can be felt and it quietly promises to people that their time matters to you. Right?
So said another way, right? Craft is how you show respect to your audience. And it’s your quiet promise that says your time matters to me.
And because I believe like for most of us, the time that other people give us does matter to us. Like we value that. We understand there’s only 24 hours in a day.
So if somebody gives you an hour on Tuesday, that’s an hour they couldn’t do something else. Whether that’s an hour they couldn’t sleep in, an hour they couldn’t go to the gym, an hour they couldn’t clean their kitchen, if that’s their idea of a good time. It’s an hour they couldn’t read a book or listen to a podcast, right?
That’s an hour that could have been spent any one of a number of ways, but they chose to spend that hour with you. And you want them to know that that decision matters a lot to you. And you want to let them know that you recognize that by them spending that hour, you understand how much you mean to them.
All right. So finally, see, we’re going to like wrap this up. It’s going to be like partial, partial time that we spent with Mary, but I think it’s so, so important.
The third thread. So if you’re keeping up here, right? So the first thread that we kind of pulled from Mary’s interview is that visibility isn’t about ego, right?
Visibility is really how you identify where you belong and help other people recognize that they belong with you. The second thread was craft, right? And really think of it as craft as community care.
The third is focus. So the third thread is focus. And you’re going to hear me talk a lot about focus, I think in the next year, especially because, you know, we’re just seeing some shifts all around us and these shifts all around us distract us, right?
They’re like getting us ping-ponging in several different directions. And that’s exhausting. So you’re going to hear me talk a lot about focus in a variety of ways.
But in this case, one of the things that we’ve emerged since the pandemic is that, you know, especially those of us who work online is that you have to be everywhere all the time, right? You have to be on every single channel. You have to like post 10 times a day.
The term omni-channel, right? Omni-channel was not even a word 10 years ago, but now everybody’s like, oh, well, you have to be omni-channel. And, you know, there’s this pressure to exhaust yourself into relevance and the idea that your perfect people are in 22 different places.
And so if you’re not on TikTok and Instagram and Blue Sky and the platform formerly known as Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, that you’re somehow missing the boat, that there’s this big population of people that you are ignoring because you’re on two platforms instead of six, or you’re on, you know, six platforms instead of 10, or maybe you’re on one. And the reality is it’s just not true. You know, you only need to be in as many places as you need to be to reach the people that you’re meant to reach.
So, you know, I, having a background as a social media manager, I have experience on every single platform. I have an account on every single platform. But at the end of the day, when I crunch my numbers, my people are on Facebook, my people are on LinkedIn, and my people are on Instagram.
And as much as I don’t personally love Instagram, since I’ve launched this podcast, I have discovered that I get the most traction to the podcast from Instagram. So when it comes to posting about an episode and actually having an uptick in downloads for the episode, that comes, number one, from when I post on Instagram, number two, posting on LinkedIn, and number three, posting on Facebook. And I find that really, really funny because when it comes to getting clients and getting referrals, I get the most from Facebook.
I get the most business from Facebook. Second is LinkedIn, but like it’s a distant, distant second, and almost nothing from Instagram, right? But I don’t have to worry about TikTok.
I don’t have to worry about Blue Sky, although I have to tell you I do really love Blue Sky. I don’t have to worry about threads or any other platform that may be emerging because I have strong data that says I’m reaching enough of my people on three platforms. And that’s social media.
Let’s not discount the fact that we have people who are hungry for us, who are exhausted by social media, and that’s not why they’re present. So, you know, don’t let the latest technology distract you from what we’ve always known to be true, which is that if you can have a direct relationship with somebody via email, that’s golden, right? So if all you can manage to do at any given time is write an email once a week or read an email newsletter once a week, that’s not nothing.
And maybe you’re gifted with writing and so you want a blog or maybe, you know, you want a podcast. I mean, right now I am hosting this podcast. I co-host another podcast.
My voice is out in the world a lot and I love it. And because there’s a lot of planning and organization that goes with that, my writing isn’t as, or new writing isn’t coming out with quite the same level of frequency that it did a year ago. But that’s okay, right?
Because I’m focusing my time, I’m focusing my attention because the last thing I want to do is put out a half-hearted podcast episode, right? Back to I value your time and your time is too precious for me to hand you throwaway garbage or to hand you non-important drivel. And so as much as there’s no shortage of platforms out there that help you be everywhere all at once, I think of tools like repurpose.io and there are other content repurposing tech tools. OpusClip is another one that will let you repurpose content and that way you can produce like 100 pieces of content from one video and just broadcast it out to the world. You use Restream and it just like can flood like 10 posts on 10 platforms at a time, 10 times a day if you wanted to. As much as that is possible and you’ll have a bunch of gurus telling you that that’s what you have to do to be seen, to be heard because there’s just so much going on, I actually think we’re past the era of quantity.
I think now that AI is so prevalent, like AI is infused into everything we do, that the best thing most of us can do is think long and hard about the things that only we can do and then just show up really well in those one to three places, ideally one to two, right? Because I don’t see belonging, like true belonging or true community coming from being everywhere. I see it coming from showing up somewhere, a specific place with depth and consistency.
So maybe that’s your membership community. Maybe that’s a Facebook group. Maybe that’s your Bible.
Maybe all that is for you is church on Sundays. Church on Sundays and the PTA meeting at your kid’s school once a month. Maybe that’s it.
But I think that when you show up somewhere, wherever that is, with depth and consistency, even the people who aren’t there, right, if they’re going around talking to their perfect people, right, or they’re looking for you, somebody will tell you. Somebody will tell you. I had this conversation the other day with somebody.
We’re working on the landscape project and I was saying that I couldn’t find resources for what we wanted to do with our front yard. And they said, oh, you know, well, there’s a regional Reddit. Okay.
The last time I was in Reddit, I was working at a university in 2016. And I was just like, what, Reddit? Like people still use Reddit?
And she’s like, yeah. And actually when it comes to the type of landscaping you want to do, there’s very active subreddits on that topic. So what did I do?
I changed my password on Reddit because I had forgotten it, got logged back into Reddit and started going down subreddits and seeing how much Reddit had changed. And I went down a bit of a rabbit hole, but I got the information I needed. And now I know who in my actual community is doing the same stuff I want to do to my yard.
And I know who to ask for advice. Right. So even though Reddit is not on my radar, I went there because when I was looking for something specific, somebody I know was like, that’s the place to go.
Okay. So when you choose one or two places to be wherever that is, you know, to find your people or to at least make it known that you’re looking for whoever it is, and you commit to those places with intention, you will make it easier for your freaks to find you, even if your freaks don’t normally hang out there. And when you couple that being someplace specific with being there as authentically as possible and as consistently as possible, you will build trust, right?
Because when they do come to find you over there and they see a depth, they say, Oh, she has been, or he has been showing up here consistently for this period of time. They instantly feel like, Oh, this person knows what they’re talking about. Oh, this person has staying power.
So if you’re still with me, right. Main takeaway here from my conversation with Mary, like really when we’re talking right now about showing up, like you mean it, right. The primary takeaway here is that if you want to be visible, okay, you can’t, you’re not going to succeed at being visible if you come from a place of vanity.
And if you are worried that your hunger for visibility makes you vain, then vanity is not your problem because vain people don’t worry about whether they’re too vain. It’s just not on their radar, right? Cause they’re vain.
They don’t worry about that. So if you are someone who is like, I want to find my people. I need to be out there.
I need to be seen, but I’m worried about it making me vain or making me look vain or making me look like it, you know, like I want to be the center of attention. Keep in mind that you can’t foster belonging for people. If they don’t know you exist, you can’t have other people connect you if they don’t know how to go about doing that.
So visibility isn’t vanity. Craft is not about how expensive or how glitzy your presentation is or your tech is or your production value. Craft is care and focus more than anything.
If you remember nothing else, focus will beat frenzy. Okay. Seriously, you don’t have to be all the places all the time.
You just have to be somewhere as authentically as possible and as consistently as possible. So if you want to start small, just think, just think about like, where’s that one place I could show up consistently that shows the level of care and consideration I want to provide for the people that I’m trying to build community with or I’m trying to build community around. Okay.
So if you are a community builder in this case, if you are a creator who’s trying to build up an audience or community, I think what you need to know is that your freaks aren’t looking for perfection. They’re just looking for you. And if you are somebody in search of community, right, you, you want a place to join, don’t get distracted by high production value.
Pay attention to the quality and the care that is showing up, right? Even if it’s raw, even if it’s not fancy, pay attention to the quality of the content that’s being presented to you. All right.
I will see you next time. That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks.
To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the Freak Show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful.
Normal was never the point.
Oct 26, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
(0:00 – 2:47)
My freaks are people who are unafraid to say the weird thing out loud. And the quiet thing that has to be said out loud is because I want to be famous. Craftsmanship is not necessarily always about the technicalities of what you’re doing.
It is also the intention in which you go into something. If you can show up at eleventy billion percent with no one watching you, not only do you know that you’ve nailed your craft, but also you know that you really, really love it. We have too many of us in entrepreneurship just listening and regurgitating the same thought leadership principles over and over.
But if you’re regurgitating Mel Robbins or Simon Sinek or whoever, they’re not going to know who you are. They’re just going to know who you read. And that is not the same thing.
We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tonya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras.
Because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point. All right, we love to talk about community around here.
We love to talk about how to build it, how to grow it, how to sustain it. But today, we’re taking a little different approach, and we are going to talk about what happens when you finally admit you want more. More visibility, more recognition, more impact, and what it takes to claim it without shame.
So today’s guest is my very own biz bestie, Mary Williams. Yay, Mary! Mary is the founder of Sensible Woo, which I don’t know what we’re calling you these days. Are you the content architect and chaos whisperer for intuitive entrepreneurs who want to get seen and get their stuff together? Is that what we’re calling it, Mary? That’s what Chat GPT is calling me these days.
Yeah. All right, I love it. Well, here’s what I can say is Mary brings over 25 years of intuitive advising and more than a decade of content strategy experience to helping solopreneurs stop winging it and start making media that matters.
And I will say she’s really good at holding your proverbial hair back when you need it. That’s the role she provides for me in my life. So Mary, you and me, we go way back, especially in internet years.
We actually met in the trenches of an online education company pre-pandemic, and we survived the pandemic in online business together. Therefore, we are blood sisters. Oh, totally.
(2:49 – 3:54)
So you’re the host of the School of Moxie podcast, and you are the mastermind behind some of the most creative in-person communities I have ever encountered. Today, what I want to do is pull back the curtain on the truth that most people won’t say out loud, even though it drives their every move. Let’s start off, Mary, by you telling us who are your freaks and why do you love them? Oh, I love this question.
My freaks are people who are unafraid to say the weird thing out loud, or they’re willing to go there. And I usually find that they tend to be neurodivergent. They tend to be queer and allies, and they tend to frequently lately, I’m discovering, be online dinosaurs like us.
We’ve been doing it for so long that you forget how long you’ve been doing it. And so you don’t jump on every fad. You do jump on trends when it’s appropriate.
(3:55 – 6:53)
I think we’re the OG freaks. And I find that the best people that I collaborate with, that I do the biggest projects with, we are like from the Paleolithic era of online internet marketing. And lately, though, we’ve been talking about it more and more because there’s been this cycle change in the online business world as it happens.
And I’m just noticing that my freaks are definitely very much around me. And that is very comforting. I agree.
I agree. It is comforting when your freaks are around you. We have guests fill out an intake form just so we can outline and make a really good episode.
You said your freaks want to be famous, but they just haven’t found a safe space to admit it yet. Yeah. Talk to me about that.
Well, if we’re going to talk about online dinosaurs, I think there are those of us who have been very successful making money, getting our message out there, working with the right clients, going through all the evolutions and changes that everyone is going to do. It’s inevitable. And we have watched these celebrity entrepreneurs come and go.
They come and they go. They come and then they go. They burn their business down, then they rise from the ashes like a phoenix.
Yes. And they were just like, oh, I’ve seen this before. And what I noticed is that there are those of us who basically do what is considered good business.
We do good, solid business. It’s not flashy. It’s not performative.
It is actual numbers, dollars and cents coming in and going out in appropriate ways. And we ride through the tough parts and we soar when things are doing really well. But because we live in such a visibility culture now with marketing and especially with celebrity culture infiltrating our online entrepreneur world, especially, I find that there are a lot of people who when we have quiet moments and I spot it and I just ask them, what’s the goal here? Why are we producing this thing? Why are we making the course? Why are we making the podcast? Why are we starting YouTube? Why are we doing whatever we’re doing? And the quiet thing that has to be said out loud is because I want to be famous and that there’s no shame in wanting fame.
Now, I started in entertainment. I used to work in the moviemaking business. I have been around celebrities.
I worked for an infomercial company that puts celebrities on paid TV time to hawk beauty products. It’s not weird to me to be famous or notable to be seen is not weird for me. And I don’t know that that is always the case in our online marketing world because everything gets wrapped in this.
Well, I’m going to be super glam, but I have space for everybody. And it’s like, no, you want to be famous, girl. You want to be famous.
Just say it. Just say it. And you like having the numbers.
(6:54 – 7:27)
They are vanity metrics at the end of the day, for the most part, unless your business model is based off making money off of those metrics. But for most people, numbers on, say, an Instagram account are just vanity metrics unless you’re converting them into actual sales, which doesn’t require someone to follow and like your stuff. So that’s the business part.
But the fame part is, but I accumulated more followers. Look at me. I feel fancy.
And I think it’s a natural human thing. I think it’s part of our modern society. I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with it.
(7:28 – 7:33)
But there is a path to fame. I may be the right person to help you with some of that. I may not.
(7:34 – 9:24)
But I probably have a lot more contacts than the person who’s pretending like fame isn’t part of your desire map than someone like me. So I think we should start talking about it more. I really do.
Yeah. So let’s do that. So what, people like different words.
So you can choose myths or you can choose lies. Do you see around content creation and fame right now? I think there is a myth right now that more means more. I think we are hitting an era of quality over quantity.
I think the pendulum swings back and forth. We definitely went through an era of quantity where it was like posts on everything 10 times a day, seven days a week, every single channel. We’ve seen it.
I was like, be a hominy channel. You must be everywhere all at the same time. All the time.
And the exhaustion from that era is still very much felt right now because you get the resistance from people. You and I talk about this all the time in the clients that we work with, in the communities that we’re in. And people are like, I’m so tired.
I don’t want to do that. And the pendulum has been slowly swinging back where you’ve seen people take big breaks from social or they’re just not sending as many emails or they’re just showing up a little differently. The whole work harder, not smarter dialogue has been going on for a few years now.
But I really feel like with the influx of celebrities into our online marketing space, especially podcasting and YouTubing, we’re seeing, and I’m seeing it now in newsletters too. I’ve seen a lot of celebrities infiltrate the kit creator network and that has been another symptom and sign. So I like to watch what they do because I used to work around them all the time and I just find them fascinating.
(9:25 – 9:54)
But I find that it’s also kind of a canary in the coal mine moment for the rest of us in business, which is they have dollars and ability to access certain quality markers that we used to bootstrap and just sort of throw on a bad pair of microphone headphones and a bad webcam. And they’re just going to kind of post whatever, whenever as an entrepreneur. And that era has long since passed.
(9:55 – 10:45)
So I really feel like we are hitting an era where you kind of need to think like you’re going to be famous. Your goal may not be to become, as my t-shirt would say, Pedro Pascal. It might not be to become that, but to have your mindset in a place where you ask yourself, is this the highest quality output that I can put out for this? Am I rushing it? Am I doing it right? Or am I just trying to ignore the fact that I want to be seen as quickly as possible? So I’m shoving this thing out the door and then people wonder why their marketing feels like a mess and they get really frustrated.
And it’s just a domino effect from there into other parts of the business. Yeah, yeah. And that is such the big lie right now, right? Is you have to be everywhere all the time.
(10:45 – 11:31)
There’s the quantity over quality. But then there’s this other piece that I think keeps people absolutely paralyzed, which they think they’ve got everything they produce has to be Mr. Beast level quality or they can’t do anything. Yeah.
One of the things I like to tell people is there is always space for you to get better. Yeah. There’s not space for you to act like you just rolled out of bed and woke up today and decided, I want to be internet famous.
We’re past that place. But there is always space to get better. And you and Rachel Allen are probably the biggest proponents, advocates, I will say cheerleaders for craftsmanship that I know.
(11:32 – 12:19)
So I’m curious with your focus on craftsmanship, why do you think that’s the first step to getting seen for the right reasons? I firmly believe that when we say meet people where they’re at, that where people are at is they have been primed by big dollars and big creator economy, aka the entertainment industry and big marketing, TV, film, even Mr. Beast, he owns like a whole town in the Carolinas or something and like employs everybody. I mean, like he is not a solo creator. Right.
So big, big money. He is big money. And because the people where we’re meeting them at, those people have been primed to expect things in a certain way.
(12:19 – 19:17)
You have to think about craftsmanship. So we have these professional podcast networks now like Wondery or Lemonada, they have a certain amount of quality that is required in order to be on that network. Sometimes they’re paying for the studio time, or they’re paying for extra behind the scenes, post production, or even pre production, and they’re making sure that the quality is as high as possible.
And then you’ve got your celebrities and notable people entering the space. Like I’ve been listening to Michelle Obama’s podcast a lot lately. It is amazing.
She has money. She has money. She has an agent.
She has a whole team behind her just like any other celebrity would. And because they have that they can afford to do craftsmanship almost without thinking about it. It’s just simply a requirement.
It’s just something that you do. And I think for our business people, we end up with thinking about craftsmanship almost like it’s something that happens three or four or five points down the list of to-dos. At that point, it starts to become more expensive.
It takes you more time because you’ve got to triage things. And if it’s the thing that you do at the beginning of the process, you will elevate your end product better, even though it’s not the sexy thing to do at the beginning because nobody’s seeing you do it. So first of all, I think that craftsmanship doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody, right? Because I think when people hear craftsmanship, they’re thinking, let’s just say, video production quality.
They’re thinking a book with a really fancy cover design and high quality printing. They’re thinking that super posh website. And what you’re actually saying is that that comes after the true craftsmanship, which is the quality and intentionality around the concept and the idea and the strength of the foundation that you build whatever it is on before you wrap it in the glossy packaging.
Yeah, that is exactly what I am talking about. And craftsmanship is not necessarily always about the technicalities of what you’re doing. It is also the intention in which you go into something.
It is the clarity of the long game that you’re playing with whatever it is you’re doing. Yes, we do figure things out along the way. Yes, we do evolve along the way.
We get better the more we do things. All of it. Yes.
Yes, yes, yes. And also, this is where I think entrepreneurs are so obsessed with Simon Sinek’s The Why because they’re searching for what is my long game? What’s my story arc? What am I trying to do? And I think if you don’t know what that is, it’s time to get hella curious and really start investigating in yourself what you want. And to get out of the thought leadership bubbles.
I really believe that we have too many of us in entrepreneurship, just listening and regurgitating the same thought leadership principles over and over. And it becomes this echo chamber. And then you don’t sound unique.
And that erodes your craftsmanship. Because the thing that makes you stand out is the thing that nobody else can tell you. Like you have launched Find Your Freaks.
I mean, I’ve been cheering you so hard. I’m just gonna cheer you publicly. Like I am so stinking excited about this.
And it has been an idea and something that you have essentially done craftsmanship on over quite a while. But it was not sexy. It was not glamorous.
Nobody saw you doing it because it’s not something that other people can see you do. The stuff that they can see like the pretty cover choices on the book that you publish or the fancy microphone you buy so that you can look nice on a video recording, like all of that stuff does contribute to the end product of good craftsmanship. But the foundation layer of that has nothing to do with the mic.
Technology is going to upgrade, you’re going to buy another mic. At some point you are. It has nothing to do with the set that you’re sitting in.
That’s going to come and go. One of my favorite things to do to look at people’s craftsmanship is to kind of hyper focus on somebody for a minute and scroll all the way back to the beginning. I’ll do it on social platforms.
And sometimes if they have not deleted or curated their material over years, it’s a very long scroll. But you can see how they’ve grown over time. On YouTube, I remember doing this with Marie Forleo years ago when she was at her height, and it went all the way back to the beginning of her YouTube.
And she had older sets, and she had not as good lighting, and she had not as good microphones, and her makeup was kind of harsh, and her hair was just a little too much herring. Everyone talks about her hair. And it was just a little too much Jersey girl.
But craftsmanship was in there. The quality of the delivery was there. She definitely got better at it over time.
You’ll hear this on podcasters. I’ve done this with John Lee Dumas back in the day because he publishes so much. It’s a great example.
If you go all the way back to the beginning at this point, it’d be a very long scroll in a podcast app. But his very, very first episode, his enunciation isn’t as good, but the ability to show up is there, and you can tell that he has practiced it. You can tell.
And those are just things that I really appreciate seeing other people do, and I think we can see examples of it. And when we see somebody who appears to have popped up seemingly overnight, it is rarely that case. And the ones who do seem like they pop up overnight, I think the bookish community online is a great example where you’ve got influencers seeming to pop up overnight because they’re really hot and young, and they’re talking about smutty fiction and all the right molecules combined for them to blow up in six posts, which happened on TikTok in the last week.
And when I look at the person in front of the camera, I can always see that they have thought deeply about what it is that they are coming on for. They’re not just rambling. And so there’s really not as much luck, I don’t think, in somebody’s product turning out so amazingly well.
Things are actually a lot more thought out than we believe. Yeah. Well, and you cannot avoid or sidestep putting in the reps.
(19:18 – 19:43)
Yeah. Yeah. I have this conversation all the time with people who want to try video, because I’m a big fan of live video.
They want to try video, but they don’t want to put in the time and energy to outline a really meaningful, valuable live stream if they’re only going to have two people watching them. Yes. And that is so unfortunate because that’s where you build your craftsmanship.
(19:43 – 23:12)
Right. And I’m such a huge fan of speaking to no one, because if you can show up at 110 billion percent with no one watching you and no one listening to you, not only do you know that you’ve nailed your craft, but also you know that you really, really love it. It’s not performative because when the thing hits and now you’ve got to pump out content to feed the content beast, if you do not love what you are doing, it is going to show up so fast, so hard.
And I’ve seen people just start to hate what they’re doing. And I can totally understand feeling a little bored with the content or needing to evolve the thing. But you hear this, like there’s been sort of an exodus of OG podcasters and YouTubers.
They’ve been saying, oh, it’s dying. Podcasting is dying. YouTubing is dying.
And maybe your evolution of that has died, but it is definitely not dying. It’s just beginning to hit mainstream, which is the perfect time to be adding that into your marketing portfolio of materials. And it tells me that even though they might have had some really nice product, that foundation level of craftsmanship, which is like, where is your heart in this, was missing, which means that maybe you didn’t have all the craftsmanship you thought.
Right. And part of how you get the perspective that you get, I definitely value the ideas and the thoughts you bring to the table is because you’re not out there going to 37 billion free webinars and regurgitating what everybody says in the top of their funnel or their conversion event. You’re not consuming mass amounts of YouTube and podcast episodes and taking what somebody shares in 30 minutes and assuming that’s the full picture of who they are.
For somebody who is in the thick of online business as you are, you’re a big fan of in-person gatherings and in-person community. And off the top of my head, I know of your part of Hustle Hard, Slide Faster. You’ve got Commonwealth.
You’ve got my personal favorite, which is the Feral Book Club. All very different. Deeply human.
I would argue unapologetic. What’s the thread that connects them? What is your appeal to each of those environments and why in-person versus let’s just all hang out on Zoom together? I want to preface that I have been online full-time since 2016. And I was creating content since 2010.
So I love the online world. But I’m also very aware, and maybe it’s all those dinosaur years of it, that makes me very, very aware that there is a certain quality that is still required for you to meet in person in order to connect as deeply as we need to. There is something that gets a little lost online.
I think those of us who’ve been doing it a long time, because we know how to connect more deeply, we find it faster than anything. A lot of people struggle to gain traction online with their online marketing and whatnot because they’re not doing enough in person. They’re not human-ing enough.
(23:13 – 23:28)
And if you don’t human enough in the real world, when you get online, it shows. It really, really shows. You start to look like every other girl boss.
You sound like them. You sound like every other bro dude. It can even come down to just simply regurgitating the same quotes.
(23:28 – 24:33)
We were giggling over a critique of Mel Robbins’ book on a podcast this week. And it’s the same thing where if I hear one more person quote her from her plagiarized book, I’m going to poke my eyeballs out. And it always tells me who the person is.
If I hear one more dude quote 10x is the new 2x in a mastermind or in a networking meeting, I’m going to know you don’t spend enough time in person. Because in person, everyone isn’t regurgitating the same rhetoric that’s being spoken online. There are other things going on, whether it’s mundane, like, oh, this salad is really good at lunch today.
Or whether it’s a bit more personal, like, I’m so sorry I was running late. I had a late school drop off. And it’s like, oh, how are your kids? And you human, you connect with somebody in a different way.
And so in all of those groups that you just mentioned, first and foremost, they are local. And last year, I was going through such a big pivot. And I realized, after romanticizing years of my Los Angeles life, I was like, why am I romanticizing this? Because that was a really hard time.
(24:33 – 26:45)
And the thing that I realized after digging and digging and digging through lots of journaling, so hopefully someone out there can get some benefit from my hours of journaling here. And I realized that it was the support. It was the in person support system.
I had an in person network. And I used to go to film screenings, and I would go to do stand up, and I would go hang out with people. And up here, I had lost that I had lost it in my migration through the southern states when I had moved and work.
And then it was post COVID up here. And I went, where is my in person support system? So what have I changed that I’ve got extra time on my hands, because I’ve retired my mastermind program. I’m servicing b2b clients.
That’s great. But I’m honestly not as packed. And I’m a little burnt out.
And what if I decide to go find my freaks locally? Who are they? And I just started talking with people who I know I had had this type of high craftsmanship level connection. And it just started with like a two hour cocktail party that I co hosted with Isaac, our friend Isaac that you introduced me to. And slowly, but surely, all of these connections started coming in.
And then because we weren’t afraid to be freaky in our conversation, we were like, you like reading unhinged romance. So do I let’s get together and talk about it. And you know, we were all business owners.
And one thing led to another. And then the latest is hustle hard, slide faster with Megan Ackman. And she was organizing the freelancers union.
They changed their way they’re doing all their city satellite locations from the national level. And we were sitting around talking, she was processing what she was going through. And I was like, we need a Pecha Kucha group in Portland.
And so we started a group because we realized that we noticed other people having a hard time connecting. And I think it’s important to do that. I think I figured it out.
Because in 2023, when I was recording season one of School of Moxie podcast, I recorded everyone in person. And so I traveled, and I piggybacked a lot of those batched recordings on top of conferences. And so I went to all the conferences, I paid the money.
(26:46 – 28:07)
And I had a great time at the conferences. But the take home yield wasn’t there, I got home. And I was like, I still have the same problem.
Where are my freaks? Where’s my network? And so last year, I was like, I am not traveling, I am staying put. And in 2024, I figured it out, like it came down to becoming very local again. And it doesn’t mean that my business has become local.
It just means that I’ve anchored myself better. Okay, so before because I want to ask a question about in person connection. But before we do that, I need you to tell people what Pecha Kucha is, because I didn’t know for the longest time.
So it’s a Japanese presentation, I call it a game, people sometimes call it a 20 by 20 presentation. So it is exactly 20 slides in each slide is exactly 20 seconds long. So we have it in Canva, it automatically times, and you can’t pretend and be like, oh, let me spend a little longer on this.
No, the slide will turn over. And in about six and a half minutes, you’re done. It’s the presentation.
And it had a really big heyday in the early aughts. And I keep hearing about a couple others around town here in the Portland area. And I think it’s starting to make a comeback because we all like a framework, it’s easy to wrap your brain around.
(28:08 – 28:59)
And the people who’ve started to do it regularly with us, you can see them like getting it and they’re like, this is so much fun. And what we’ve noticed is because we gear our event specifically for business owners and entrepreneurs, they are getting to know each other on that human level before launching into the here’s what I serve and what I offer. And as soon as we’re done with the presentation, our generous host, Graybox, big shout out to Ben Parrish, they have beautiful rooftop patios, and we watched their last event.
And everybody just got immediately up out of their chairs, started talking together, started taking selfies, they were out on the patios, enjoying the last of the refreshments. And we did not see that behavior when I was hanging out in Megan’s chapter for Freelancers Union. And I think that is very fascinating, and very telling.
(29:00 – 30:56)
I would agree. And kind of following this thread, what do you wish more people understood about the mechanics of in-person connection? Because you have just talked extensively about what makes in-person connection different. But there’s a mechanics piece there you haven’t quite touched on, I think.
Yeah, I think. Well, the number one mechanic is you are your own system. All my old systems training.
I was waiting for when that was going to come out. You are your own system. It was the number one tagline in all of my systems coaching for the longest time.
And when we talk about you being your number one system, your best system, I really believe it plays heavily into all of the human-ing part. When you know yourself, and you do the inner work on yourself, whether it’s spiritual work, therapeutic work, health is a really big part of it. Physical health and mental health, all of it.
And that is the basis of being able to now human with other humans. And we have been through a really, really difficult stretch of time here where I would argue we were largely on autopilot pre-COVID. And then COVID happened.
And when everything shut down, there was a lot of awareness on mental health, especially for many, many individuals. And just the need for socialization and community and what community looks like in a new hybrid era and all the things. And I think if you’re going to go out and human today, that if you’re like, why do I feel like I don’t make friends easily? Or why do I feel like I don’t connect with people? Or just always that frustration.
(30:56 – 31:19)
Before you look outside yourself, you’ve got to look inside yourself and ask yourself what is going on there. So somebody could come into your Facebook group, which is super robust, has been going since forever. It’s amazing.
And they can still come in there and be like, how come nobody’s interacting with me? And like, why am I not making friends on Facebook even? And that’s not the platform’s fault. It’s not Metta’s fault. It’s not Facebook’s fault.
(31:19 – 31:25)
It’s not the group’s fault. Start with yourself. The common denominator is always you.
(31:25 – 32:42)
And the same thing’s true in the other systems in your business too. You get unhappy with your social media marketing and it’s like, well, you are the common root denominator of that entire equation. Unless you’re a massive company like Disney and you are no longer the central reason that that company exists.
That is not the case for any of us, even for quite a few businesses that are quite large. Your CEO is still very much a central part of that branding. Apple’s a great example of this with Steve Jobs.
And even after his death for many years, it’s very hard for people to talk about Apple without talking about Steve Jobs. In the online space, as online business owners, we can fake a lot, right? I only have to be known, and we’ve talked about this before, I have to be known from about like collarbones up. I don’t have to even be wearing pants as we’re having this conversation.
I am wearing pants for the record, but I don’t have to. I don’t have to even wear makeup, right? Because I can have all these filters in place. But when I show up in person, it’s like me and my awkwardness and good, bad or indifferent.
(32:42 – 33:36)
And I either get really comfortable with that or I don’t. But that’s part of the mechanics. There’s only so much you can fake in an in-person environment.
Yes. And if you want to bring out a full circle back to the whole idea of people needing to come to terms with, am I doing this because I want to be famous? It comes down to what we’re talking about here, which is at home, when you’re in your sweatpants, and you’re not wearing makeup, and you’re using 20 filters to show up when you do turn on the camera, you can very quickly figure out what the real motivations are behind that desire around being seen and notoriety. And that it’s usually frequently wrapped in something that is somewhere in the center of a Venn diagram between a business problem and a therapy problem.
(33:36 – 34:26)
And yes, you need to be visible in your business. Yes, you might have a desire to be seen more and acknowledged more as a human. And in order to figure that out, as they say, business is the best self-development course you’ll ever take.
And it will unearth all these things for you. And so there are people who have learned over time working with me, and they’re like, if I ask Mary, I know I’m going to start going deep on something. It’s like, yeah, we’re going to go dig around in those spaces.
And I will tell you if it’s something where it’s like, this would be a great thing to go take to your therapy appointment this week. But until you solve it, the business part is not going to unravel for you. And when it comes to our content online, I am all for making it more equitable and easier for people to be seen and to be heard.
(34:26 – 40:36)
That is a technical thing to solve. That is a marketing thing to solve. It is an accessibility thing.
But then beyond that, it’s a you thing. And so somebody can book me and come into the studio that I’m building up here. And if they are filled with head trash, there is a certain amount that I can help you with.
And then there’s a certain amount where it’s like, the product is a product, and you’re going to grow from here. And if you want me to help you with the coaching part, I will show you all the places, because sometimes you need somebody outside yourself to show you. And it’s like, here are the great things for you to go figure out.
But I think the number one thing is starting to human again. And if you can walk into a networking group, it doesn’t mean that you have to be the ultimate schmoozer. But if you can at least tell yourself you’re going to put it on the calendar, get yourself there on time, stay the whole time, and don’t bounce early, which is what a lot of people do.
They’re like, but I went. I’m like, yeah, you went for five minutes, and you freaked out, and you left. Not the same.
But to stay. And not just to collect business cards, but to say, can I find one person in this room and have a really human conversation with them? And recognize that my weird is completely acceptable. It’s OK.
And also, not everyone’s going to like it. And the more you human with other humans, you start to realize that it’s OK that not everybody loves everything about you. There’s a reason why we do attract and repel marketing.
We need to. Just like there’s an app for that, well, there’s a service provider for that. And you need them to know who you are.
But if you’re regurgitating Mel Robbins, or Simon Sinek, or whoever, they’re not going to know who you are. They’re just going to know who you read. And that is not the same thing.
Oh, that was so funny. All right. I think that’ll end up being full quote for the episode.
So let’s bring it to our listeners. And so for the listener today who’s curious, who’s like, oh, this sounds really good, but I don’t know. What’s one small, but maybe meaningful step they can take today to own their desire for visibility without shame? I think it is figuring out where your baseline is today, because it’s going to be different per person.
So let’s say you’ve been, I think this is probably the most common thing. This might not be your thing, but this is the most common thing I see, which is consistency is a real problem. So I would argue, I know you also feel the same in today’s day and age, if you are still not able to send a weekly email to your list, that that is where you start.
And there are a lot of spokes on that wheel that come off of that. People knowing that you have a list might be because you share it on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or something like that. But being able to send that email every week and do it for you, no matter who’s coming or going off that list, no matter how many people are clicking on things in that email, but to make something that you feel proud about, that feels like you.
And if you don’t know what that is, it’s time to get curious and to look at who your sources of inspiration might be so that you can get some foothold or nugget and go from there. And you can’t push all the boulders up the hill. So if you’re like, I’m going to do email and podcasting and YouTubing, and I’m going to go on five social networks, you’re going to burn out so fast because the one thing you need is just simply the thing that you can own, which is your email list.
And I’m watching the evolution of our social networks again. And I’m so nervous for some of these young entrepreneurs, especially Gen Z who came into the space, the Mr. Beast generation, dare I say it? And I watch them on YouTube and I always am curious and I go look at all their materials and the number of them that do not have a website, their own domain, their own email list. It’s all in one platform and maybe TikTok.
And it makes me so nervous for them because we have seen things change on a dime in the past and that is not a good place. Yeah. So what would you say to the person who secretly wants to be seen? They’re listening to you.
They’re like, yeah, that’s what I want. But they’re scared that they’re going to look fake, arrogant or unworthy. Yeah.
Yeah. I think now is the perfect time when nobody’s paying attention to practice finding your presence, whether it’s on a microphone or in front of the camera or both. And it’s the perfect time.
You have a chance to get comfortable talking you and I in the spaces and places that we formed our own apocalypse team during the apocalypse. We logged so many hours in front of people on camera, on a microphone, on recording. And that is something that you just have to log the time and the experience and being a natural in front of the camera.
The microphone is yes, there are people who have an X factor for sure. I’ve been around enough celebrities to tell you there is an X factor in some people and it’s like the sun shines out of them. And I don’t know why I don’t know how it just does.
I’m sure everybody has met somebody in their life where they’re not even famous and they’re just like that person just shines. And that is a thing. But for the rest of us mere mortals, it is a learned skill and you can have sun shining out of your face all day long.
But if you don’t know how to sit in front of a microphone without being fidgety, if you don’t know how to look at the camera and project into the camera, it doesn’t matter how sun shiny you are. And so I think sometimes we bank on this idea that there’s just sort of like a natural talent, you know, and you can feel a certain way, but to project that out into a recorded device is a whole other skill set. And so if you don’t really know and you start getting curious, like I always send people to acting classes.
(40:37 – 41:37)
I mean, go take a theater class, go take a scene study class. It can be community theater. It does not have to be fancy.
Bonus points if you go full on standup because you will never pee your pants harder than that. And everything is easy after standup, but learning how to access your emotions and to share them with other people is actually a skill. And you’ll see some of our like internet famous celebrity entrepreneur type people later talk about how they have acting coaches after they reach a certain point, partly so that their voices don’t wear out when they’re doing like a lot of these keynote speaking and lots of speaking, but also because there’s a certain amount of presence that you need to have and helps you figure out who you are.
Like, who are you? One, I think that’s the most important thing, right? Is if you don’t figure out who you are, it’s really hard for your freaks to find you. So hard. So, okay, we’re getting ready to wrap up.
(41:37 – 42:19)
We’re going to get to the rapid fire segment, which is like my absolute favorite. We’re going to put all the information on how to get ahold of you, Mary. But for those who are listening, oftentimes in the car or on a treadmill, they cannot write things down or read.
It is sensiblewoo.com. You’ve got the School of Moxie podcast. I happen to know that while you are on just about every platform under the sun, your favorite playground is Instagram and you are at sensiblewoo over there. So are we ready to let your freak flag fly? Let’s do it.
Okay, so it’s a quick round. It’s five fast questions, no wrong answers, just whatever comes to mind. We start off with completing this sentence.
(42:20 – 42:36)
You’re my kind of freak if you like to read five chili pepper spicy books. I think they need a chili pepper rating at some point. Maybe we’ll put that in the show notes because I have to say five chili peppers is not five chili peppers for everybody.
(42:37 – 42:48)
No, it is not. I read a book once and somebody was like, it’s three chili peppers. I’m like, I’d give that half a chili pepper, but okay, I guess I have a different barometer.
(42:48 – 43:19)
What’s something you love that your friends just don’t get? Asian snacks. Oh, but I get it. You do.
But you know, I’ve been humaning so much more in the more people I meet. Well, I mean, speaking of like a freak flag moment, it’s sort of like, ding, ding, ding. This is my person because they know what white rabbit candy is.
They know what rice snacks are. They know what all the snacks are. And I have been finding my snackaholics lately and I love it.
(43:20 – 47:27)
Yes, yes, the snacks are good. Okay, what community would you infiltrate just to understand it better? Oh, oh God, so many. Can I split myself into like 20 places? I want to infiltrate like the Gary Vee crowd, the Tim Ferriss crowd.
What’s weird is I’m kind of like second degree connection to these people. And I just want to infiltrate them just to see like, what are you guys really talking about in your masterminds? Like, is this just like bro dude city? Or are you sitting around having like crying therapy together? Like, I don’t know. I can’t tell.
I want to know. But because the dialogue that comes out of them is, the vibe is so similar in so many ways. Like the material is different.
I just, I have to know. I want to know. Yeah.
Okay. Last one. Who is someone doing freakishly good work that deserves a bigger spotlight? Oh my goodness.
I have been following these cosplayers on Instagram. And I’m just going to give like the cosplay community sort of a big shout out. Because I started back in the olden days as a blogger.
I sewed my own clothes. I lived in LA. I did the whole like handmade fashion blog, style blog kind of thing.
And I showed everybody how I made everything. I did sew along. Like it was great.
And because I understand clothing construction, maybe that’s where a lot of my craftsmanship comes from is like, I really love that. And so I’ve been watching these younger, new generation sewists online. And they are doing things that just blow my socks off.
Like it is incredible. Some of them do period corsetry. And like when I was sewing, I really got into corsetry and it was so hard to source materials and find information.
They’ve created pattern companies. Like they do the most incredible things. There’s a couple of them online.
They’re pretty young. They are like engineers. One of them made the Katniss Everdeen dress from Hunger Games.
The one that lights on fire. And she actually sourced flammable material and like did the spinning thing and the dress went on fire and then had the new dress underneath. The engineering that goes into that is incredible.
And I’m so blown away by it. And I find it incredibly inspiring. And it always makes me realize that there are people doing really cool things out there.
And there’s room to really attempt things. And it took her a long time. And she showed you every step along the way and everything had a disclaimer.
She’s like, please don’t do this at home. Like here’s my dad with the fire extinguisher. But she didn’t just like make a dress.
Like she figured she sourced her materials. She talked to experts. She figured out what to do.
She gets paid frequently by like film premieres to make a dress and walk the red carpet. And like it’s really, really cool. The things she’s doing.
She’s so young. And I just think it’s the neatest thing out there. Okay.
That’s a good one. That is a good one. So Mary, thank you.
Thank you for your honesty. Thank you for your courage, your clarity, but really it’s like honesty and absolutely contagious moxie. So for everybody listening, if you’ve ever been taught that wanting to be seen makes you selfish or fake, I hope this episode reminds you that visibility isn’t vanity.
It’s your invitation to lead. But before you can lead, you’ve really got to take a long, hard look at your craft and be willing to invest in the quality of it. That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks.
To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful. Normal was never the point.
Oct 13, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
(0:00 – 0:20)
How often we let labels and lifestyles divide us when, at our core, we are so much more alike than we are different. Nobody ever felt accepted, loved, or wanted through judgment. So the best thing any of us can do is to just practice curiosity.
(0:21 – 0:47)
Curiosity is what opens doors. We don’t dehumanize people just because we don’t agree with them. We don’t dehumanize people because they vote differently from us.
We don’t dehumanize people because they live differently from us. You don’t have to agree with someone’s structure to recognize the fact that the fight that they’re fighting is similar to the fight that you’re fighting. We’re wired for connection, but most of us are faking it to fit in.
(0:48 – 1:20)
I’m Tanya Kubo, and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras. Because around here, what makes you weird makes you wonderful.
Normal was never the point. You can look at someone’s family, their politics, their religion, and think it is nothing like yours. But underneath, most of us are fighting for the same things.
(1:20 – 1:32)
Safety, belonging, and a shot at raising the next generation, or at least leaving the world a little bit better than we found it. Hey there, freaks. Tanya here.
(1:32 – 1:57)
Today I want to unpack what might be my freakiest interview yet here on Find Your Freaks, which was episode 8 with Jen Girardi, a parenting coach who works with non-monogamous families. Now, if the vocabulary already has you shifted in your seat, hang tight. This episode is not about the practice of engaging in multiple romantic relationships with the consent of all people involved.
(1:58 – 2:23)
It’s about the way surface-level differences, whether in family structures, politics, religion, you name it, distract us from the deep sameness that actually connects us. That human thread that connects all of us. And let me be clear, this is not about changing your mind on polyamory or politics or faith.
(2:23 – 2:33)
I am not qualified to do that. It is not my calling, nor is it my desire. But what I am qualified to do is to ask you to look under the surface.
(2:33 – 3:08)
Because what struck me most in my interview with Jen and what continues to rattle around in my brain rent-free ever since is how often we let labels and lifestyles divide us when at our core we are so much more alike than we are different. Jen’s community exists, so the community that she hosts, exists because most parenting groups assume a very specific mold for families. One mom, one dad, one maybe general set of values.
(3:09 – 3:25)
And if you don’t fit that mold, of course you can show up. But you can only show up if you’re willing to hide big chunks of yourself. And, you know, that happens a lot outside of parenting, too.
(3:25 – 4:07)
I mean, how many of us have sat quietly at a family dinner because we know voicing our political opinion would set the room on fire? Or we keep our doubts to ourselves in our faith communities because we don’t want to be labeled as somebody who doesn’t belong or isn’t a true believer. The pain is the same, right? We all want support without having to lie about who we are or pretending we’re something we’re not. And Jen teaches one simple principle to the families that she works with that I think we can all agree is a really good idea, which is don’t ask kids to keep grown up secrets.
(4:08 – 4:29)
And when she said that, I was like, huh? If you’ve listened to the episode, you heard me go, huh? We have a similar rule in our house. Our rule is no secrets, only surprises. And because, well, we thought of all the cases in which our kids may be asked to keep secrets from us.
(4:29 – 4:40)
And we realized in most cases that those would not be situations that were in our children’s best interest. Those would not be healthy situations. Those would be toxic, potentially criminal situations.
(4:40 – 5:05)
And so we thought, well, if we don’t want our children to be susceptible to a predator who tells them to keep something secret from mom and dad, we shouldn’t be people who start planting the seeds of it’s okay to keep, you know, it’s okay for mom to ask you to keep secrets from dad. It’s okay for dad to ask you to keep secrets from mom. So we do surprises.
(5:05 – 5:18)
We never refer to like birthday gift planning, Christmas gift planning as secret keeping. It’s just we’re planning surprises. And the girls are totally welcome to tell their dad that we went shopping today for a surprise for him.
(5:18 – 5:25)
Like they’ll never get in trouble for that. Because we all are aware and we’re all on the same page. Surprises are okay.
(5:25 – 5:33)
Surprises are positive. Secrets are not. And some rules, just good human rules.
(5:35 – 5:59)
And thinking of my lifestyle and Jen’s lifestyle being so different, but yet we both believe the same thing when it comes to adults asking kids to keep secrets. And that’s just one area that we’re the same, right? Like we really, really want to raise good, well adjusted kids. We really want our kids to grow up and be capable adults.
(6:00 – 6:22)
Jen does not have to parent like me or live like me in order to see that we have a similarity in what we want for our children. And the same is true for me, right? I don’t have to live like her, make the same choices as her in order to be on the same page with that shared goal for our kids. You may not agree with somebody’s choices.
(6:22 – 6:40)
You may never make the same choices as them. But you probably, if you’re a parent, desire to raise good, compassionate kids as well, right? It seems to be a fairly universal goal of parents. I spent years involved in MOPS, which is now called MomCo, but it’s a ministry that supports mothers of young children.
(6:40 – 7:07)
And every woman I ever encountered between 2010 and 2019 when I left the organization wanted to raise good, compassionate kids. Wanted to know that their kids would one day grow up to be independent, make good choices, and leave the world better than they found it. Right? Universal.
Hands down. And the desire to live honestly, to not have to hide. I think a lot of us want that.
(7:07 – 7:28)
A lot of us who talk about places where we feel like we belong, places where we feel accepted. A lot of that acceptance, that feeling of belonging comes from being able to be honest about who we are and not feel like we have to hide, not feel like we have to lie. Right? That’s common ground I think all of us stand on.
(7:29 – 7:49)
And one of the phrases that Jen used in our interview that I think is also applicable to most of us was this term she called parenting off script. And the reason it stuck with me is because I think a lot of us, whether it’s parenting, politics, faith, I’m thinking of other things. Just some of us just like the habits we have, the grocery stores we shop at.
(7:50 – 8:07)
I mean, it’s a silly example, right? But even the grocery stores we shop at. A lot of it is just running the programs we’ve inherited. Right? If you’re raised in a home that tells you that babies should sleep alone in a crib, then you feel like a failure if you have one baby who only sleeps when they’re with you.
(8:07 – 8:18)
Jen had that situation. I told her that we had a Velcro baby too. And in her case, she was given a script that said you have to force independence, sleep train, do this, do that.
(8:19 – 8:42)
She stopped and said, OK, what’s in my best interest? What’s going to work for me? What’s going to work for my child? What’s going to work for my family? And found that by co-sleeping, everybody in their house slept better. In our case, we were not raised by parents who practice co-sleeping. But before Brian and I ever had kids, we were like, yeah, we had decided we were going to do whatever worked for our kiddos.
(8:42 – 8:56)
And that meant that with baby number one, we had a nursery with a crib. But we started off with a bassinet in our room and we started off co-sleeping. And then we realized very quickly that she slept much better all by herself where she couldn’t hear her father snoring.
(8:57 – 9:13)
And baby number two came along and baby number two was in the crib once, screamed bloody murder. And co-sleeping was a way of life for us for a very, very long time. The thing is, is parenting aside, we all have scripts.
(9:14 – 9:35)
My family had a very deeply ingrained political script. People in our family vote like this. We vote for these candidates.
We don’t vote for the other candidates. My family had the same kind of script when it came to religion. People in our family go to this church with these people and do these things.
(9:35 – 9:49)
And we have nothing to do with people who go to other churches. We have nothing to do with people who subscribe to other systems of belief. And as an adult, I’ve made different choices.
(9:49 – 10:16)
My husband’s made different choices. You know, we recognize that we don’t have to vote like our families vote. Our families don’t have to vote like us.
It doesn’t make us any less family. We happen to really enjoy academic discussion in our home. We have really rich conversations and sometimes they are heated around faith, around what makes sense, what we were always told is true.
(10:16 – 10:30)
And what even now as adults, we’re kind of like, yeah, we just kind of go along with it because it hurts our brain to think too deeply of it. But what things that we do really enjoy thinking deeply on. We love having these kinds of conversations with our girls.
(10:30 – 10:38)
We love it when our girls ask us why. We love it when they challenge our thoughts. That’s something that we just value in this home.
(10:38 – 10:56)
We value that kind of discourse, but not every family does. You know, and a lot of families are just following the programs, the scripts that they were given. And when the script doesn’t fit, you’re at a crossroads.
(10:56 – 11:12)
You can either force yourself to fit into it and everybody around you, which likely will land with somebody, maybe all of you being quite miserable. Or you can pause, get curious, and write a new path for yourself. It’s up to you.
(11:13 – 11:31)
Just like it’s been up to me, it was up to Jen when she made her choices. In our family, for instance, because I was raised by a single mom, I was raised around a lot of chosen family. The people who I would tell you are my cousins, who I am so closely connected to, aren’t even blood related.
(11:32 – 11:46)
But I feel fortunate to have had this like sort of village that helped to raise me up. All these single women who had children that were my mom’s friends. My mom died over a decade ago.
(11:47 – 12:04)
And these are women that I call up now for those things that I would have called my mama, right? You would never know I was an orphan. Most days I don’t feel like an orphan because I have this wonderful village of women that I can still lean on. My kids do not lament lack of grandmothers.
(12:04 – 12:15)
They’re very fortunate to have Brian’s mom still alive. They’re very fortunate to still have Brian’s grandmother alive. But there are so many true like blood related aunties.
(12:15 – 12:39)
And there are so many of this chosen family dynamic of aunties that my girl’s lives have always been rich. And even for them, they have their own chosen family even now. The women who were our teenage babysitters when they were born are still a valuable, highly, highly loved part of our lives.
(12:40 – 13:18)
And so for Lily, my oldest, the fact that there were so many trusted adults in her life growing up has given her a level of confidence. You know, she knows that no matter what happens, even if I’m not there, there will be somebody there in her corner. And she loves it.
You know, if I can’t go to a school event, she’s like, well, can this person go or can that person go? And then she’s just as happy with them in the stands. They take pictures, they take video, they send it to me. And there is no resentment there.
Right. That that that chosen family aspect works really well for us. It doesn’t work for everybody, but it works really well for us.
(13:18 – 13:57)
And, you know, if you’re not somebody who has a lot of chosen family that, you know, if for you it’s really more of your nuclear family or your actual blood relatives, it may seem like super kooky that my kids call people auntie and uncle who actually share no blood with us. But I don’t pretend like my kids do know that those people do not actually have blood relations, but they also know that they are in their corner no matter what, just as I would be just as our blood relatives would be. And really, it’s a way of expanding the circle.
(13:58 – 14:18)
And I think that is something else that is a side effect of really embracing the fact that there is more that draws us together than separates us from each other. An expanded circle is a good thing. An expanded circle is a positive thing.
(14:18 – 15:11)
I think we’re all better when we surround ourselves with people who think differently, live differently, because it allows us to fully appreciate all that makes up the world, all that makes up the rich fabric of a community. And as much as this episode isn’t about polyamory, right, because even my interview with Jen, I mean, polyamory was a very small percentage of that. I do think that we have to address the elephant in the room here, which is the morality piece, right? Because it would be easy to write off the entire interview with Jen if you feel a strong moral pull against how she lives and the families that she supports.
(15:11 – 15:41)
But, you know, what it makes me think is who counts as good and who counts as bad? Because there’s more to morality, I think, than a one-dimensional definition, right? All good people do these things. Because I think we all know good people who do some things that we would never do, some things that we don’t think is their best interests. Smoking.
(15:43 – 15:57)
Okay, does smoking make a person bad? Well, it is my personal opinion smoking does not make a person bad. But I don’t necessarily want my kids smoking. I don’t want my kids looking up to people who smoke.
(15:57 – 16:09)
And so then I have to kind of go, well, huh, how do I reconcile that opinion in and of myself? I honestly don’t have an answer for you. I wish I did. That would make this episode so much neater and nice.
(16:09 – 16:16)
But, you know, find your freaks. This is a messy show. This is a show where I will oftentimes admit that I don’t have answers.
(16:16 – 16:28)
But, you know, I’m quick to say that people who smoke cigarettes are not bad people. And yet I am just as quick to say I don’t want my kids smoking. I don’t want them to grow up to be adults who smoke.
(16:28 – 16:42)
I don’t believe it’s healthy. I don’t believe it’s a path toward living their best life. But I also know that my kids would be the ones who would confront me with, well, how can you say you don’t want that for us, but then still say that it’s okay for so and so to do it.
(16:42 – 17:01)
And all I can, all I would ever be able to say is that, well, so and so is an adult and adults get to make adult decisions. And you will grow up as an adult and make decisions that I don’t like too. And though I may not like the decisions you make as an adult, I will respect your adult right to make them.
(17:01 – 17:14)
And then I’m sure I will go into a bad choices don’t necessarily make you bad people. Just like bad people can still make good choices. Right.
(17:14 – 17:25)
It’s just it’s not a monolith. All good people don’t always make good choices every minute of every day. All bad people don’t make bad choices every minute of every day.
(17:25 – 17:37)
You know, there are good people who experience bad things. Bad circumstances happen to them. There are bad people who never get what the rest of us would think is coming to them.
(17:38 – 17:50)
This is the conflict in the world. It’s just how it is. But this idea of who counts as good and who counts as bad.
(17:50 – 18:15)
You know, I’ve said many times, maybe not on this show, but motherhood is the nastiest competitive sport I ever played. It’s probably the nastiest competitive sport I ever will play. I didn’t know that how I chose to birth a baby, whether I slept with my baby, didn’t sleep with my baby, how I fed my baby, how I diapered my baby, when I fed my baby solids, if I fed my baby solids.
(18:15 – 18:33)
I did not know all of those things individually put a mark in the bad mom category or the good mom category, depending on who I was thinking or who I was talking to. And we see the same thing right now with politics. Everything right now feels politically charged.
(18:33 – 18:46)
It feels like everything is a political statement. I will oversimplify it because I’m not a political expert at all. But there’s a lot of good people vote this way, bad people vote that way.
(18:46 – 19:16)
In religion, the faithful do ABC and the faithless do not. Something that we grappled with early on with our girls was we saw that a lot of parents around us were raising their kids to believe that all Christians were good people. Well, I’ve lived on the planet long enough and have read enough news coverage and seen enough courtroom cases to know that that is not true.
(19:17 – 19:45)
There are people who say they are Christian who do things that are very bad or who have done things that are very, very bad. Right. So it is not accurate to say all Christians are good any more than it would be accurate to say there are no bad people who live in a particular state or there are no good people who live in a particular country.
(19:45 – 19:54)
Right. There are good people and bad people everywhere. And they say they subscribe to all different manners of thought and belief and philosophy.
(19:54 – 20:19)
It just is. But the thing with good versus bad and just labeling anything, anything, whether it’s a lifestyle, it’s a belief system, it’s a value system. Anything is abjectly good or abjectly bad is we are making a judgment and judgments shut doors.
(20:20 – 20:50)
Curiosity is what opens doors. You know, when we’re talking about belonging and community, nobody ever felt accepted, loved or wanted through judgment. So the best thing any of us can do in order to expand community, to be the person who helps somebody feel like feel safe in our presence is to just practice curiosity.
(20:50 – 21:49)
Okay. It’s to recognize that different isn’t dangerous. It’s just data.
Right. When you talk to somebody who lives differently from you and you go, I’m curious, like, what led to that? Like, what was the sequence of events that led you to this without trying to do some big gotcha and trap them in their bad choices? Right. Your curiosity can turn the data into wisdom.
You might gain a new perspective. You might get an appreciation of what led somebody to believe that their most recent choice was the best choice for them, given the circumstances and the information available to them at the time. And curiosity looks different in different circumstances.
In parenting, that filter can be consent, can be honesty. It can be no secrets. Right.
(21:49 – 22:50)
And just being open and curious, but making it really clear that our non-negotiables here are consent of all involved. Our non-negotiables here is that we will always be honest. Our non-negotiables here that we’re not going to keep secrets.
In politics, your filter may be dignity and integrity. Right. We don’t dehumanize people just because we don’t agree with them.
We don’t dehumanize people because they vote differently from us. We don’t dehumanize people because they live differently from us. They have different priorities than we do.
That’s a hard one right now because we see a lot of dehumanization happening and a lot of us versus them languaging. That is a lot of what episode five, if I recall correctly, episode five talks a lot about that dehumanization of our enemies. And then when we’re talking about religion, approaching everything with a filter of compassion and humility versus coercion.
(22:50 – 23:28)
You know, not having this agenda to convert somebody to our way of thinking is going to do so much more for opening doors and building like an actual connected relationship than otherwise. You know, they’re not suggesting that you have to agree with other people. Right.
You don’t have to agree with someone’s structure to recognize the fact that the fight that they’re fighting is similar to the fight that you’re fighting. Right. If you’re just trying to raise good kids to be good adults and good humans, you can recognize somebody else who’s raising their kids totally different from you is doing the same thing.
(23:28 – 23:41)
Right. You guys just may have different definitions of what that means. Most people are out there trying to live with integrity, trying to love their people well, trying to give everybody in their family a better shot at life than they had.
(23:41 – 23:48)
Right. I mean, these are things, you know, I know that that’s what my mom wanted. She wanted me to have a better life than she had.
(23:49 – 24:42)
So many people I talk to just want their kids to have a better life than they have. I know I want that for my kids. I’m sure my kids are going to want that for their kids.
It’s pretty universal. So even when we have all these differences, there is so much that is actually the same. So this is the problem for solo episodes.
They can get babbly if I’m not careful. I think what I want to leave you with today are just some ideas for experimentation. Because I know like this, this episode’s a little bit heady, but it’s also just one of those things that if you can’t, if you can’t move past the idea that there are people who live like completely different from you, and that that might be okay, that you might still have some similarities to you, and that you don’t have to agree with how they’re living in order to appreciate those similarities.
(24:43 – 25:50)
Some experiments you might want to try just to see how comfortable you are looking for similarities over like stopping with differences is consider replacing a snap judgment this week with a curious question. So whenever you find yourself thinking, how could they, or like only animals would do such a thing, think about, you know, ask yourself like, what need is this meeting for them? I feel like that is a really curious question. Like there’s anybody who does anything differently than you, like what need is this meeting for them? Another thing you can do, very safe, very simple, is think about your ecosystem of support, right? You know, thinking of like, what is the community online, in person, that you have around you? You know, I talked about how I was fortunate to be raised around this village, and these are women who I can still call upon as mentors even now, as an adult, even though I’m orphaned.
(25:50 – 27:23)
You know, who shows up for you? Who are those friends, those mentors, other trusted adults in your children’s lives, whether they’re blood relatives, chosen family, send them a quick thank you text. Just send them a text and say thank you for being part of my community, being part of my village. And, you know, think about what your world would look like if you didn’t feel the need to keep secrets, right? Just think on if belonging requires hiding, that’s not real belonging.
What does that mean for you and what you’ve got going on in life right now? And if you want some deeper reflection, I have a few more questions. These are ones I’m personally chewing on. Again, I have no answers, just asking the questions, right? But here’s what I’m chewing on right now.
Where in my life am I confusing what’s familiar with what’s right? This is a big one for me right now as I feel like so much of what I always thought was true or would be true, I see it changing in front of my eyes. Where in your life are you confusing familiar with right? Where do you silence yourself or who do you silence yourself around because you fear judgment? That’s what I’ve been thinking a lot about. I don’t feel like I silence myself a lot, but I’m paying closer attention to the spaces where I feel safe to speak up and those spaces where I kind of think maybe I don’t need to say anything here.
(27:24 – 29:02)
And what’s the one script you inherited that no longer fits and what would it look like to rewrite it? This is a question I’ve been thinking about ever since I interviewed Jen, is when she was talking about going off script, you know, for her, the fact that she lives this non-monogamous lifestyle kind of made everything for her safe to question. Because she felt like that was such a core belief that, you know, families were one man, one woman, that when she said, okay, I’m making a different choice, that opened up her world to making all sorts of different choices and made it feel safe to question everything she thought she knew. I’ve been thinking, what are scripts that I’ve inherited that no longer fit? Like, can I even recognize them? And I’ll tell you, like, I’m constantly curious about that.
One of them is respect. I was raised in an environment where compliance equaled respect. So to be respectful meant that I did not speak up.
I shared no disagreement with my mom. So I wasn’t allowed to disagree with her. I couldn’t speak up against anything she might say.
I had to go along with everything. And I had to have a pleasant personality with it all. And so in the back of my mind, I still think of that as respect.
But I happen to enjoy raising spirited girls. I happen to enjoy hearing how their brains work. And I can’t fully appreciate how their brains work if I don’t allow them to entertain ideas that are different than mine, if I don’t allow them to question things.
(29:02 – 30:17)
One of the funniest things that ever happened, and there’s a lot of funny things that happened in this house, but I was frustrated with Lily for not doing something around the house. And I’m like scolding her the whole time about it. And I don’t realize as I’m scolding her, I’m doing it.
And she called me on it. She says, Mom, like, what’s the point here? Like, do you want me to do the chore that you reminded me of three times that I keep forgetting? Or do you just want me to feel badly about the fact that I didn’t do it? And I said, Huh, what do you mean? And she says, Well, you have this thing, like you get upset with me for not doing something. But then you start doing it yourself as you’re lecturing me about the fact that I didn’t do it.
And I’m just not sure how I’m supposed to respond. Am I supposed to get up and like, get in front of you and start doing it myself? Or am I just supposed to sit here and be lectured? And I just started laughing. I absolutely started laughing because I was like, I had no idea I did that.
But as she said it, and as I looked at what I was doing, which was washing the dishes while griping at her about the fact that she hadn’t washed the dishes. I was like, you know, you’ve got a point there. And no, I didn’t know I was doing this.
But thank you for bringing it up. I have no idea why I do this. And I’m gonna have to go and think about that.
(30:17 – 31:42)
That’s one of those examples of a script that I obviously inherited. It doesn’t actually fit. But if somebody hadn’t brought my attention to it, I never would have known about it.
So in some of these cases, we can ask ourselves these questions. In some of these cases, we just have to be open to somebody else bringing it up and being willing to explore it rather than to bite their heads off. So in closing, you know, really, what we’ve talked about today is families can look different, but still be fighting the same enemies, still have the same goals.
You can have different families, same fight, you can have different faiths, same fight, different politics, same fight, the surface shifts, but your heart rarely does. And so if today’s episode made you think, good or bad, indifferent, even, share this with somebody you know, and open up a conversation about that. Tell them the one thing that made you go, huh.
Ask them what makes them go, huh. And if you’ve missed the full interview with Jen, go back to episode eight, check that out. I think you’ll get a lot out of what she shares, regardless of what you think about polyamory as a lifestyle or not.
And you know, this is Find Your Freaks. I’m Tanya Kubo. And remember, normal was never the point.
(31:44 – 32:00)
That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the freak show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird, makes you wonderful.
Normal was never the point.
Oct 1, 2025 | Episode Transcripts
(0:00 – 1:36)
My freaks are the ethically non-monogamous or polyamorous parents that has led me to find community that fits me as a person and to be whole in the world myself for the first time in my life to be wholly myself. If you are a person for whom the world is not a supportive and easy place, you may experience more challenges than other people do and it’s not because you are a problem. It’s because the world is not set up to support you the way you need.
It matters that you find spaces in which you are able to be seen and valued for all of who you are even if it’s by people who don’t necessarily share every single one of those identities. It’s almost like being polyamorous doesn’t make you a bad parent. Shocking.
We’re wired for connection but most of us are faking it to fit in. I’m Tanya Kubo and this is Find Your Freaks, the podcast that flips the script and spotlights the quirks you thought you had to keep quiet. Subscribe now and head to findyourfreaks.com for show notes and extras because around here what makes you weird makes you wonderful.
Normal was never the point. We love to talk about community, how to build it, grow it, sustain it, and today we are going to be talking about what happens when you parent outside the lines. When your very existence challenges the mainstream idea of what a good family looks like.
(1:36 – 1:47)
And honestly, I’m expecting a little hate mail here. I’m totally comfortable with hate mail. You can send that to info at tanyakubo.com and we’ll be happy to get in touch with you.
(1:47 – 3:56)
Jen, I want to get started today by asking the big question. Who are your freaks? Why do you love them? Well, I love freaks in general because it’s what makes people interesting. What makes people freaks is what makes them unique and special and that gets my curiosity going.
But especially my freaks are the ethically non-monogamous or polyamorous parents. And I love them because when people question all of the things that they’ve been indoctrinated with about relationships with adults, they tend to also carry that over into questioning the things they’ve been indoctrinated with about relationships with their children. And so they create family dynamics with adults and the kids that are unique and really suited to the people that are involved.
And they just really critically think and get curious about what everybody needs and how everybody is going to thrive together. And I love that. Oh my gosh.
There is so much to unpack just in that what? Like not even 90 second response. So Jen, first of all, we should let people know your last name, right? So you are Jen Girardi and you refer to yourself as a holistic family consultant who helps queer, non-monogamous and neurodiverse families build joyful, connected relationships without shame and without erasing any part of who they are. And what you were just talking about is how so much of what we bring into the parenting dynamic comes from how we were parented ourselves.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, all of us get programmed with whatever happened to us in our lives.
And a lot of that comes from our, how we were parented, but it could also come from society, media, the books we’ve read, other impacts on our lives. And a lot of people, all of us, if we don’t think about it, we follow those scripts, right? We follow those scripts in all of our relationships. And some of them are helpful and some of them are super not helpful and super don’t feel good, especially if you or your child is somebody who doesn’t follow the rules.
(3:57 – 4:19)
Yeah. So give me an example of what that looks like in your experience. So the person who brought me to this work is my almost 10 year old.
And I read lots of books when I was pregnant with him and I was like, okay, I’ve got this down. I know what I’m going to do. And then he was born and he was like, I will not sleep without touching an adult.
(4:19 – 7:07)
It’s just not going to happen. You want to sleep? I’m going to be with you. We had a Velcro baby too.
Yeah. And the thing that happened, I was faced with a point where I could either try to force that and he would be miserable and I would be miserable and nobody would sleep and everybody would cry. Or I could start to do some research about how else that could look and start to consider how else I could take care of myself with the understanding that there were not going to be long periods of time where my baby was sleeping peacefully in some other room for a long time.
Eventually he started to sleep in another room. But as an infant, once I made my peace with that, he slept great. I actually slept fantastic with him curled up against me.
And we started to be able to navigate the world together in a way that actually fit him and me. And that’s not to say that was like a light switch. That was like the first step on a journey that has been a decade long.
But that was my invitation. That was my invitation into a world that has led me to completely understand myself and my identities differently. That has led me to find community that fits me as a person and to be whole in the world myself for the first time in my life to be wholly myself.
And all of that is because of being invited to consider that my child might not conform to what a book said he was going to be. Right. Because a book is quite honestly written for the masses.
Right. Even though those of us who are writers always told we write to one ideal reader. It is humanly impossible for the entire world’s population to fit the profile of your one ideal reader.
You know, I always have said, and we won’t make this a whole lot about just the parenting journey, because I think the parenting journey is important to discuss simply because the parenting journey oftentimes is the loneliest period in our lives until we find that place where we fit in. We all need parenting friends. It is so hard to parent alone.
But on that parenting journey, there is. So I feel like the world feels quite free to judge you and your choices in a most extreme way when you become pregnant as a woman and when you parent. I have never seen anybody feel so free to tell people what is absolutely right and absolutely wrong with their choices as they do in those two specific life circumstances.
(7:08 – 10:45)
Was that your experience as well? Or do you feel like what you were carrying was entirely inborn and just driven from yourself? No, that was absolutely my experience. And I think it comes from a good place. And compassion is the basis of everything that I do, even compassion for the people who piss me off by judging me.
But I think it comes from an intention to protect children, because most of us feel a sense of responsibility towards children generally, not only toward their own offspring. And we think it’s like a social good if children come out okay. And so therefore, we feel some sense of responsibility if we think someone is harming a child.
And most of us just have not learned how to hold curiosity and compassion for something, even if we think it’s wrong, so that we can figure out where it’s coming from and whether it actually is causing harm. And someone maybe needs support to learn another way. Or if actually maybe there’s room for us to learn something new about what is a healthy and appropriate way to parent.
And I think you also, you said something really important there about the loneliness of parenting. And so the reason, so I started out supporting parents more broadly. And the reason that I have started to work with my little niche, my queer and non-monogamous and neurodivergent folks, is because the thing that I have seen is that yes, everyone needs parenting community.
And most of the parenting community that exists is sort of based on you like broadly having a similar life to the other parents in a group, especially the non-monogamous folks, but really all three of those groups. In order to have parent friends, they often have to like just sort of not mention this part about their own identities in order to be accepted in the parenting groups. And so it’s like they have some community maybe, and they maybe get answers to some of their parenting questions, but they can’t be fully themselves in that space.
And that’s where I was like, we need spaces where we not only have parenting friends, but we have spaces where we can be all of ourselves, all of the things, and nobody is going to say that you’re evil because there are three parents or two parents and some other involved adults who don’t get called parents or, you know, whatever the structure looks like in an individual family. Yeah. And so there’s the, what I’m thinking about, right, is how much morality plays in parenting in general, right? How we parent our children, how we view who is a good parent, who is a bad parent, what are good choices, what are bad choices.
And to some degree, morality is something we all have to come to terms with on our own. I think it would be lazy to make this conversation one about morality, because really what you’re talking about is this very inborn natural human desire to connect at a very base level, regardless of what you’re doing in life, right? There’s that base level of connection, having alignment, feeling like you can just take a deep breath and just be with somebody and not have to couch and censor and all of that. I mean, I think of my time early in parenting and feeling like I couldn’t talk to anybody.
I couldn’t open up to anyone because everything I was doing at that point felt like a landmine. My feeding choices felt like a landmine. My sleeping arrangements felt like a landmine.
(10:45 – 11:15)
How I diapered my stinking baby felt like it was opening me up for a lecture. And so I would love if you could just walk us through a little bit of what that was like for you, however it came about, because I don’t exactly know at what point in parenting you chose to embrace a non-monogamous path and what that looked like. But I’m curious at what it was like before you felt like you could fully be present with your parenting friends versus after.
(11:16 – 12:09)
So I think in some ways I’ve had this easier than some people. When my kids were born, I was in a monogamous relationship. And so my very early parenting community, the non-monogamy was not part of what I was looking for or what I felt didn’t belong.
And as I started to understand that that was part of me, I had known that was a part of me and I had just thought I wasn’t allowed to be non-monogamous. And so I had just kept it in the closet and not acted on it for a long time. So as I started to rediscover that part of myself and realize that it was not something that I could make go away, that it was still there even if I wasn’t acting on it, I first started to find that community in friendships and adult support groups and things like that.
(12:10 – 15:40)
And the sigh of relief of just being able to be fully myself and not need to try to fit into some suburban mom box that I was largely in at that point, that was such a huge point of growth for me to be like, oh, I actually can be fully myself and have people accept me. And then I started to find that a lot of the people that I was connecting with in that way weren’t parents. And so they just didn’t understand that part of my life.
It wasn’t that it wasn’t accepted. They just were like, okay, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And in particular, as I started to actively practice non-monogamy and started to consider like, do I introduce someone to my kids? At what point do I do that? What do I tell my kids about who I am? What do I tell them about who other adults in their life are? Am I going to be super out publicly, which obviously now that I do this for work, I’m very out and very public about it.
And I started to encounter those kinds of questions. And what do I do if somebody tells my kid that our family is weird or wrong or something like that? And so as I started to encounter those things, the adults that I knew who were very versed in polyamory, you know, adult relationships, they were just kind of like, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t have kids.
So that’s a you problem. Can I just pause you for a second to say, I appreciate those friends because I only know of one person that I’ve encountered in my entire 15 years of parenting who had the self-awareness to say, I’m not a parent. That’s a you problem.
I have found that the most vocal parenting experts are the people who don’t have kids. Yeah, that’s true. That’s true.
And I, and absolutely all of the appreciation to people who are like, yeah, I don’t know the answer to your question. Ask somebody else. And then I started, so then I did meet a couple of people who were polyamorous and also had kids.
And one friend in particular, he had kids relatively recently and in a relationship that’s already polyamorous. And so the things he’s navigating are completely different because he’s navigating like from pregnancy onward, what are these other partners relationship with the kids going to be and how do we talk to our families about that? And what happens if our families are not supportive of that? And what do we call this person to our kids? And can we put them on the authorized list to pick up from daycare? And, you know, so I was like, oh, okay. Well, there are multiple experiences of how you can be a non-monogamous parent.
And, you know, he was encountering the same thing of like, he’d ask somebody and he’d be like, I have no idea. That was not my experience. And so he and I together were like, okay, well, maybe we should have a place for people to ask these questions.
And that was the seed of like this particular community building of like, we’re like a little pod of people who need a space where we can be all of us and all of our experiences and learn from each other and laugh together and cry together and just not have to pretend to be anything we’re not together. And that sounds like every parent’s dream. I can’t speak for dads, except for what my husband tells me about being a dad, but I can speak for the moms, the mom I am, the moms who I have known.
(15:40 – 17:05)
And it’s like, that’s the dream. The dream is to just walk into a room with other people who are day-to-day trying to do the hard stuff that you’re trying to do and don’t expect you to pretend it’s easier, harder, or any different than however it is. So you mentioned finding the community.
What does that community look like now? Is it in person? Is it online? How are you connecting with these other parents at this point? Yeah. So it’s mostly online, uh, in part because that makes it easier for parents. So somebody can be like listening on headphones while making their kid dinner or something like that.
It just makes it so much easier for people to actually make it. So we meet twice a month on zoom. And like I said, we’re very happy to have people doing whatever life parenting things they need to do and still be in community.
Cause that’s the reality of the lives we’re living. And, and also because that allows us to be open to people who don’t live near us physically. We’re open to people anywhere in the world that the time zone lines up for, and we meet twice a month virtually, you know, it’s only been a few months.
So we’re still figuring out what the community needs. We’ve sort of settled into a little bit of a, like introduce each other invite. If anybody came with something specific, like I am dealing with a challenge right now and I need some help, then we offer space for that first.
(17:06 – 25:27)
And then I’ll kind of have some like icebreaker or discussion questions in my back pocket, if there’s time for more than whatever people bring. So we’ve had discussions on all kinds of things, mostly related to either how people talk to their kids about their adult relationships or how they want to structure those things or how they talk to other adults about their kids and like weaving all of that. Because one of the things that’s really great about the polyamory community is that we’ve stepped outside of the like one size fits all about relationships.
And so different people have different structures in their lives that work for them. And so just coming with, I think this is what I want, but it, I’m not sure how to make that happen. And then just having the wisdom of the group of like, you know, have you considered this impact or have you talked to somebody about this and just bringing that like helping somebody think through it so that then they can be like, okay, I think I’m ready to do what’s right for me and for my family.
Okay. So it sounds like you have a keen sense of the problem that everybody is trying to solve when they show up to the meeting, right? Like they are coming maybe for just connection, but probably with all the things that they had to do that day, they made time because there was some kind of problem to solve or some specific need that they were hoping to get filled. And so you, you kick it off, right? Introductions.
Then you kick it off like, okay, who has an immediate need so that if you’re only getting together twice a month, and this is really the only place where they can truly be themselves and be honest about all parts of their lives, they get that addressed immediately. Then you go into sort of icebreaker discussion time. And what I really loved about what you were just sharing is it sounds to me like, because this is already outside of the box, because this is already, we’ll just say beyond what anybody would consider normal.
It almost makes it an even safer place to talk about all the things. Is that how you feel? Is that what you’ve heard? Yeah, that’s definitely how I feel is that the group has been so far really, really good at leading with curiosity and questions. And there are certainly things that are widely considered best practices in polyamory.
And I’m actually working with another colleague who’s a researcher. We’re going to put together some polyamory parenting 101 videos over the summer to kind of the most frequently asked questions when people are coming out or making changes to their lives. There are some things that are widely considered best practices that do a good job of protecting the interests of children, as well as creating space for the adults.
And so it’s easy in that kind of situation for somebody to just launch in with like, you’re doing it wrong. This is the correct way to do the thing. And it’s been really wonderful to see that the people who are coming to the group regularly, and especially the people who come, even when they’re not having a big crisis, and they’re coming to support other people have been doing a really great job of leading with curiosity about, you know, why that, how’s that going to work for everybody in your family? Have you considered this? Have you thought about this? And helping people think through it, rather than like prescriptively saying this is the best practice, do it this way.
And I think that’s important for everyone. But especially when you’re not following the norm, having the space to really think about what is right for you is the most important thing, more important than what the outcome ends up being, is the space to really be intentional and unpack all of that, like it has to be this way stuff that you’re programmed with, so that you can just really consider like, in my family, this is what is right for us. So you mentioned that there’s a few things that are considered best practices, you want to give us like two or three, just for those who, honestly, this may be the first time they’ve ever even heard the idea that there are people who openly live in non-monogamous relationships, because let’s be real, a large percentage of US society alone lives a non-monogamous lifestyle, they just might be a little bit more secretive, and even their partners don’t necessarily know.
So that’s not new information. I think the new information is, oh, this is a choice you can make, and oh, by the way, you don’t actually lie to people about it. What would be a couple of those best practices? So I mean, that’s one, is that cheating is not the same as ethical, consensual, non-monogamy, or polyamory.
So if there’s non-monogamy happening in your life, and anybody’s lying about it, that’s not what I’m talking about. And I’m not going to go too far into that, because there’s a lot of other people who talk about that with the adult relationships, but just to be very clear, for anybody who’s hearing about this the first time, if there is lying about it happening, that’s not what I’m talking about, and that’s not what I support in any way, shape, or form. As far as the parenting best practices go, one of the things that’s really a common question is like, should I come out to my kids, basically? Because there are some people in which, you know, the bio-parents, or the step-parent and bio-parent, or whatever that is, they look to the outside world like a monogamous couple, and the other people they date don’t have any kind of relationship with their kids.
And that is one structure that works for some people, and sometimes people are like, but I want to tell my kids, or I want to introduce this person to my kids, should I do that? And the first, and probably most important consideration there, is what is it that you’re asking your kids to do? And if you are going to then ask your kids to keep a secret about who that person is, and not like say something at school, or be out publicly, don’t tell your kids. It is not appropriate to ask a child to keep a secret. So that’s a really important first best practice.
Another piece that comes up frequently is with people are afraid that if they introduce their child to someone, and then they eventually break up, that that will hurt their child. And so there’s not like a single right answer about whether or when you introduce someone to a child. But it is important to talk with the other adult before they meet your child about what that would be like, and consider what is it that that person wants from a relationship with your child, or is willing to put in terms of time and energy and care, and be intentional about whether that is a good match with what you want for your child.
And that doesn’t necessarily mean that every person ends up being involved in your child’s life for the rest of time or something like that. One of the things I think is really wonderful to consider is an expansive idea of the idea of parent. You know, so in a monogamous world, we think of parent as only either the biological parent, an adoptive parent, or a stepparent.
And we really don’t have, but any of those arrangements, it’s one or two adults. And maybe there’s another household with one or two adults, but that’s it. And the reality is monogamous families have aunts and uncles and friends, hopefully, and friends, parents, and grandparents, and maybe neighbors and teachers.
And there’s a whole ecosystem of adults who are caring for a child. And the isolation happens in part because all of those bits of that ecosystem are separated and don’t talk to each other. Or they only are allowed to give this very narrow piece of care in a child’s life.
(25:28 – 28:24)
And maybe there are needs that are going unmet in that ecosystem. And so I want to invite parents, even if they’re not polyamorous, even if they’re monogamous, to have an expanded idea of this concept of who cares for a child and what does that look like? And is it possible for someone who’s important to you, an adult who’s important to you, to also be important to your child, regardless of what kind of relationship you have with that adult? Can there be an invitation to have more adults who love a child and are offering care and support to a child and worry a little bit less about what definition we give those relationships between the adults and more about when we’re thinking about whether somebody should be in a child’s life, thinking about how are they going to support the child’s development and that being the most important thing? I just want to take what you said. I want to clip the beginning and the end and just package that out for everyone.
Because I feel like what you’re really advocating, right, is intentionality around not just how you parent in terms of, you know, if I tell my child yes to Cheerios for breakfast or no to Cheerios for breakfast, what does that do to dinner time tonight or whatever? But just really think like being much more present. And I think what you’re really saying is when you parent outside of the box already, you’re just naturally thinking through a lot more if this than that scenarios. Whereas those of us who all just say parent according to societal norm, so much is just flying by the seat of your pants.
You just don’t really think, right? Dad has a role because he is dad. And that’s just what society has. And then we’ve got grandma and grandpa and whoever, this expansive idea of who can speak into your child’s life, who your child can love, who can love your child.
Like, that’s not that foreign to me, because I was raised by a single mom who didn’t have a lot of family support. Right? So there were a lot of aunts, I think I was, in some cases, I was in college before I realized there was no blood relation between me and these people I had known since I could remember. And as a married couple, two income household with a pretty extensive like work requirement, our kids were raised with a lot of other adults.
And we laugh because my oldest, we used to laugh that for her, she had no particular connection to any one adult. It was just like, insert trusted adult here, and she was happy. And she’s like that even now, right? It’s like she she was in a show on opening night, I could have been there.
Dad could have been there. Miss Dinova, who’s been caring for her since practically the day she was born could have been there. And there’s half a dozen other people.
(28:24 – 29:09)
She was just as happy to have them in the audience as she would have anybody else. And honestly, it feels really good for me to know, regardless of how I feel, like, did I want to be at opening night? You’re darn sure I did. But I didn’t have to be all sad about nobody being in the audience for her or her feeling left out because of the perspective that she has on those other trusted adults.
And so it’s like so much of what you’re saying feels like smart parenting in general. It’s almost like being polyamorous doesn’t make you a bad parent. Shocking.
(29:13 – 31:29)
Well, that was I’m not gonna lie. I was like, do I say that out loud? Or don’t I? Right? Because to some degree, like, how offensive is that to you? If I go, oh, so what you’re telling me is, is your relationship choices that you’re making because they’re rooted, it sounds like in everybody being on the same page on the same table, open conversations, mutual consent. I loved specifically once you said if you’re asking your child to keep a secret, right? Like that’s not appropriate.
So you’re not asking kids to be more developmentally advanced than they are. You’re not asking them to take adult roles in the family dynamic. Yeah, I’m just gonna argue that that doesn’t sound as unhealthy as I think I have seen other people portray this particular lifestyle.
And that leads me to another question. This is something we talked about before we started recording. But you said something about how much different the conversations become when you’re not trying to pathologize people’s choices.
Can you expand on what you mean by that? Yeah, so this is something I see with parents who are non-monogamous. I also see it pretty often with people who are neurodivergent or who have a neurodivergent child, where, you know, they’re having some kind of challenge. And they go to their trusted expert, a doctor or a psychologist or a parenting forum or whatever it might be.
And they basically get told, well, if you were monogamous, you’d stop having challenges. Or if you made your child act less neurodivergent, they’d stop having challenges or something as if who you are or who your child is, is the cause of a challenge. And obviously, that’s ridiculous, because people who are putting themselves in the narrowest possible normative box still have challenges parenting, because shockingly, parenting is challenging.
Newsflash. Yes. And being a kid is challenging.
(31:29 – 37:45)
And being an adult is challenging. And sometimes it may be true. You know, the kernel of truth there is that if you are a person who the world is not well set up to support, you may experience more challenges than someone else.
But that doesn’t mean you are the problem. Okay, I was gonna say, I need you to say that again, because I operate squarely in the midst of neurodiversity advocacy. This is not new information to me.
But I do think that’s new information to everyone else. I would love for you to just repeat that one more time for people who are like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, what did she say? Like, I don’t want them to have to rewind. Because seriously, like, to you, this may be like, well, yeah, duh.
But for so many people, they have never heard that before. So if you can remember what you just said, try it again. Yeah, if you are a person for whom the world is not a supportive and easy place, you may experience more challenges than other people do.
And it’s not because you are a problem. It’s because the world is not set up to support you the way you need. And that’s the whole point of this work, is to take that pathologizing out, to take the idea that you are somehow the problem out and say, No, you are a perfectly valid person experiencing a challenge.
How can we address that challenge in a way that supports who you are, instead of trying to erase who you are? I’m curious, when you have that conversation with parents, for the first time, what are their reactions? How are they responding to hearing that? If they have previously talked to other professionals who have pathologized them or their child, it’s usually a sigh of relief of like, oh, that’s what I’ve been saying. I’ve been saying that I’m not the problem or my kids not the problem. So sometimes it’s a sigh of relief.
Sometimes if they if that’s kind of there, but they haven’t thought through that yet themselves, sometimes there’s a little bit of a Oh, you mean there’s another way that I could think about this. And then sometimes they need to digest that a little bit before they’re ready to go further. Because it is a new idea.
A lot of people do they ever argue with you like they’re so entrenched in that neurotypical normative programming, that they actually try to convince you no, no, you’re wrong, you should treat them more poorly. Do you mean like with their child? That like, oh, my child actually is the problem kind of idea? No. So I’ll give you an example.
So when I’m talking to neurodivergent adults, and a lot of times people will come to me, they’re newly diagnosed, or their spouse is newly diagnosed, because they know how openly my family lives in this space. The person who is neurodivergent, right? I’ll say, Oh, yeah, let’s Oh, you’ve got that problem. Yeah, that totally makes sense that that’s that problem.
Because of this, that and the other, like, for instance, moms oftentimes can cope really well until their kids get into school, and they have to manage so many more calendars in their head. That’s like a typical thing that’s expected, like mom’s supposed to know when the field trip is when the permission slips do what the AR score is. And oh, have we done I ready tonight, all this stuff.
And so these moms are like, I’m dropping balls left and right. Right? I’m dropping balls left and right. And I’m like, well, yeah, I mean, there’s only so much executive function to go around.
And it sounds to me like you’re using all you have to be a good employee to keep the people fed and transported because that’s enough of a thing. They Yeah, it would make sense that you would forget that they the tomorrow’s wear green day and the day after that’s crazy hair day. And they go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, it’s not okay.
Because Susie’s mom doesn’t ever have a problem. I mean, Susie’s mom went to school. Like she took her kid to school looking like Cindy Lou, who? And I’m like, no, no, no, no.
Like, I can’t manage that. Like, I just look at my kids and say, guess what you’re gonna learn right now. But not everybody gets to dress up for crazy hair day.
Because I don’t have the bandwidth to do that for you on top of everything else them scheduling in this household. But they will try to argue with me that it’s really not okay for them to say, there’s only so much I can do. Right? That doesn’t work for me.
And so I was just curious, if for you, by the time people actually come to you, are they already past that they’re already like, no, I’ve already accepted that the rest doesn’t work for me. And I am so desperate, Jen, help me figure out what does work. Or are they still in that point where they’re trying to fit the normal box? Sometimes I get each of those, I would say, sometimes people come in, they’re like, I there has to be another way.
And there and that’s the sigh of relief of like, Oh, finally, somebody who gets it. But yes, I do. And I hear all the time, I should be able to, especially from neurodivergent moms.
That is the most common group that I hear that from. And that is the work that is the work is to bring the compassion to that. And sometimes then we’ll spend some time exploring, you know, where did that idea come from? And sometimes there’s some grief there about the things that, you know, I really want my kid to participate in crazy hair day.
And it really hurts my heart to see them sad. Because my brain can’t keep track of all this, right? Like, it makes sense for that to be hard. And it makes sense to resist that idea to like, if I could just make myself better.
Like if I could just force myself more, then I could avoid my child feeling sadness and disappointment about not getting to participate in crazy hair day. And that’s I have so much empathy for that. It is a hard place to be.
(37:46 – 41:22)
Well, and what you’re saying is really parenting is hard all by itself. Relationships as an adult are hard all by themselves. It sounds to me like a lot of what you talk about is really about learning almost how to reparent yourself as you’re navigating all of this.
All of that is hard individually. And then when you bring it collectively, I am definitely probably more apt than others to ask for help when I need it. Because it’s a survival mechanism.
But it’s of course you would need help. Of course you would need outside perspective. And so I’m curious, as we begin to wrap up, if somebody is listening and they’re like, maybe number one, they’re listening and they’re like, oh, I didn’t even know these were choices.
Like I had no idea that I had so many choices as an adult. Or somebody is just willing to be curious, willing to explore the fact that other people live differently than they do. And maybe that doesn’t make those people automatically evil, terrible, and awful.
What would be one step they could take today to either learn more about their options or maybe unlearn the rigidity that they have been operating under? What would you suggest? Set up a call with me. Let’s talk about it. Because I think exactly what that path looks like depends a little bit on where somebody is coming from.
If they are wanting to explore whether non-monogamy or polyamory would be right for their family, that might look a little different than if they’re like, I’m neurodivergent and I want to explore how to get my needs met better. So rather than say like there’s one size fits all answer to that, I would say shoot me an email or schedule a free 20-minute call with me. And let’s talk about it.
I’m not into pressure or something like that. I’ll try to connect you with the right resources, answer your questions. And if it makes sense to help you work through those layers of that programming or of learning how to relate with yourself differently so that you can make those choices for yourself and your family, I’m happy to do that.
And if there’s some other resource I can direct you to that will answer some of those questions and help start those wheels turning, I’m happy to connect people with those as well. So yeah, let’s say shoot me an email or schedule a call with me and I’ll be happy to help. That is super generous.
And first we will have all of this information in the show notes. If you don’t see the information you need for some reason, you can just reach out to us and our team and we will make sure to connect you with Jen. And so what I really appreciate about this is you could have given us a cute little soundbite that would have been totally appropriate to put on TikTok, right? But you’re like leaning in to the basis of this entire conversation, which is your mileage may vary.
Like what is right for me is not necessarily going to be right for the person who comes after me. And so I just want to say thank you for not giving the easy answer that would have applied to maybe 10% of the population, but not everybody else. The next piece though is for the person who’s listening right now, whether they’re neurodivergent, polyamorous, or something that we don’t even know about, but they’re carrying shame, fear, maybe feeling isolated, especially because they’re that plus their parents.
What would you say to them? I would say you’re definitely not the only one. Even if your community is small, you’re definitely not the only one. And also that your community doesn’t necessarily need to share a hundred percent of the same experiences with you.
(41:22 – 42:13)
But what matters is that your community is able to hold curiosity and compassion instead of judgment or telling you what to do. And that’s what I do and what we do in my communities. And there are other communities doing that for other groups as well.
And it matters. It matters that you find spaces in which you are able to be seen and valued for all of who you are, even if it’s by people who don’t necessarily share every single one of those identities. Just like we’re having in this conversation, you’re not polyamorous and yet here you are seeing me as a valid person.
And here you are giving me some really stinking good parenting advice. Okay. Which by the way, you know, it was like minor 15 and almost 11.
(42:13 – 42:39)
And some of what you said, like really lands, not just because like, Oh, I never thought to do that. But some of the things are just things like, Oh, well, you know, we were flying by the seat of our pants and that just felt like a right choice. You know, the don’t keep secrets, for instance, that’s a big thing in our house.
If anybody asks you to keep a secret, that person’s not safe. We don’t keep secrets even around birthdays and like gifts and stuff. It’s like, okay, those are surprises, but those aren’t secrets.
(42:39 – 43:16)
But the other thing is we don’t try to use the kit. Like, I don’t try to get the girls to tell me if daddy’s planning a surprise for me, because I don’t want them to sit in the middle of that sort of dynamic. It just doesn’t feel healthy.
I don’t know if it is or isn’t. I haven’t even taken the time to look it up in books. It just doesn’t make sense for our family.
So we don’t do it. So I’ve appreciated some of the insight that you’ve provided. Now we like to close our show with a rapid fire segment.
It’s just five fast questions. No wrong answers. Would you be up for that? I would before that I want to offer people one other resource that’s free on my website.
(43:16 – 44:15)
I have a workbook. That’s a free download. That’s about getting your needs met.
And we talk about in that some of the skills, like you were talking about asking for help, which is a skill that is hard for a lot of people. And so it talks about both like what your needs might be, what beliefs you might have that make it harder to get them met, and also what skills you could maybe develop that might make it easier to get them met. And then like some creative problem solving and what to do if your need is in conflict with somebody else’s need, which happens all the time in neurodivergent households in particular.
So yeah, I want to offer that. That’s a free download on my website. Yeah, because understanding better about what you need and how to get it met really is the first step in being able to ask for it effectively.
So I love that. Thank you for offering that. I’m sure that our listeners are really going to benefit.
So rapid fire segment where we let our freak flags fly. Finish this sentence. You’re my kind of freak if.
(44:16 – 44:45)
You’re weird and goofy and a little bit silly. Oh, I like that. What is something you love that your friends just don’t get? Oh, God.
So my mom’s an archaeologist and I grew up being dragged to digs. And in particular, I’m also a knitter and a textile artist. And so I could go on for hours about ancient Peruvian textiles and your eyes would be glazed over and you would not care.
(44:50 – 45:02)
All right. If you, like me, after you hear this, are going to go Google ancient Peruvian textiles. I just want to know I’m not alone because I’m such a geek for the deep rabbit holes of research.
(45:03 – 45:18)
All right. So third question is what community would you infiltrate just to understand it better? Oh, young white men. I’m so confused.
(45:22 – 46:36)
That’s a good one. We’re just going to leave that there. That’s like your that is your own private mic drop.
How about what tool, ritual or practice helps you stay connected to your people? The staying connected. I was going to say journaling and meditation. That’s staying connected to myself for staying connected to my people, just going and being in the community spaces regularly, like support groups and things like that, even when I don’t need the support, just going in.
So I’m there just basking in the joy of being with my people regularly. There is something about that, right? Just being surrounded by your perfect people. All right.
Last question. Who is someone doing freakishly good work who you think deserves a stage? It could be anybody. Someone that I’ve connected with relatively recently, her name is Sarah Santa Croce and she runs Humane Marketing.
And it is a shockingly affordable group for people who want to do business in a way that feels good and not icky. And I mean, I don’t have a business degree. I’m trying to figure out how to do this thing in a way that feels good to me and to the people I work with.
(46:36 – 47:25)
And she is an incredible resource and she brings in incredible resources and she should have like 500 people in that membership. You know, it’s funny as I was actually in a summit with her a few years ago. She is absolutely delightful.
And I don’t think I’ve heard her name since. So thank you. Thank you for that.
So Jen, this brings us to the end of our time together. And I just want to say thank you for your courage, for your perspective, and most of all your voice, your voice on behalf of yourself and the life you live, but also for the members of your community. And for those listening, if you’ve ever been made to feel like you don’t belong or taught that somebody else doesn’t, I just hope that this episode reminds you that staying true to yourself might actually be the greatest gift you can give to those around you, including your kids.
(47:27 – 47:40)
That’s it for this episode of Find Your Freaks. To help more weirdos find their way here, subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re craving connection, join the Freak Show at findyourfreaks.com. What makes you weird makes you wonderful.
(47:41 – 47:43)
Normal was never the point.
