Why strong communities aren’t built through activity, but through shared responsibility and trust.

Most communities don’t fail because of bad content, the wrong platform, or even the wrong people.

They fail because of design.

In this solo episode, Tonya Kubo explores why many communities appear active but still feel shallow or fragile. High engagement doesn’t always mean people feel connected—and connection alone doesn’t guarantee belonging. What actually sustains a community is interdependence: the sense that members rely on one another and that their presence truly matters.

Using business strategist Gwen Bortner’s client ecosystem as a real-world example, Tonya breaks down the design decisions that create durable belonging. Instead of organizing people by stage, industry, or hierarchy, Gwen curates for shared values, protects the culture of the container early, and intentionally encourages members to rely on each other—not just on the leader.

Tonya also addresses a harder truth: communities often fail because leaders unintentionally centralize power. When everything flows through one person, the group may look lively but remains fragile. True belonging only emerges when leadership distributes trust and members become necessary to one another.

If your community feels loud but lonely, engaged but disconnected, this episode offers a powerful reframing of what it actually takes to build spaces where people matter.

You’ll hear how:

1. Communities often fail due to design, not engagement levels
2. Connection is required for belonging—but they are not the same thing
3. Belonging forms through interdependence, not proximity
4. Curating for shared values strengthens cohesion more than grouping by stage
5. Protecting the container early preserves culture later
6. Member-to-member reliance deepens trust and relational density
7. Over-centralized leadership creates dependency instead of belonging
8. Sustainable communities distribute trust and shared ownership

Timestamp Highlights

1. 0:00 – 4:45 Why most communities fail due to design, not engagement
2. 4:46 – 9:20 Connection vs. belonging—and why the distinction matters
3. 9:21 – 16:40 How Gwen Bortner unintentionally designed belonging into her client community
4. 16:41 – 23:10 Curating members by values instead of business stage
5. 23:11 – 28:45 Protecting the container and maintaining culture through selection
6. 28:46 – 33:30 Why member-to-member reliance creates relational density
7. 33:31 – 40:10 The danger of leader-centered communities
8. 40:11 – 46:00 When control replaces stewardship—and communities collapse
9. 46:01 – 52:30 Why belonging comes from being necessary, not visible
10. 52:31 – 57:10 Designing communities where trust transfers and leadership distributes

Resources & Mentions

1. Episode 18 – Small Circle, Big Impact with Gwen Bortner
2. The Business You Really Want Podcast
3. Clutter-Free Academy by Kathi Lipp
4. Rachel Allen – Community support for spouses of incarcerated individuals
5. Nikki James Zellner – Carbon monoxide safety advocacy

Meet Your Host

Tonya Kubo is a community strategist, marketing consultant, and rebel with a cause: helping people find the place where they truly belong. For nearly two decades, she’s built online spaces that feel less like comment sections and more like chosen family. She’s the fixer you call when your Facebook group has gone straight-up Lord of the Flies and the bouncer at the door of internet nonsense. As the host of Find Your Freaks, Tonya brings together unconventional thinkers and bridge-builders who know “normal” was never the point. Her favorite spaces? The ones where the freak flags fly high.

Support the Show

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You can purchase Find Your Freaks merchandise online through Abilities and Attitudes.

Let’s Stay Freaky

1. Facebook Group
2. LinkedIn
3. Instagram
4. Podcast Hub

What’s Next

Tonya talks with Stacey Morgan, an Army spouse of 25 years, mom of four, speaker, and author of The Astronaut’s Wife. Stacey shares how launching her husband into space reshaped the way she approaches fear, leadership, and going first. Together, they explore what it means to build connection and lead with courage in communities shaped by constant change.

[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?

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.

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.