Built to Belong Read online

  Then Tesla entered the scene.

  Determined to create luxury electric cars that everyone wants to drive, they set the entire market ablaze. I’ll never forget the first time I sat in the passenger seat of a Model 3. Up until that point, I had never wanted to own an electric car. With one tap of the accelerator, my entire view was changed. I could barely catch my breath, it was so fast. I went around telling everyone how amazing it was for weeks.

  Tesla moved the electric car market forward substantially simply by existing. The more electric cars on the road, the more people experience them, and it pushes the entire movement forward. Additionally, Elon Musk has kept his focus on creating and innovating rather than competing, and the entire world has been better off because of it.

  In 2014, Musk gave up Tesla’s patents in the spirit of the open-source movement and for the advancement of electric vehicle technology. Essentially, he handed over his company’s proprietary technology and made the argument that patents serve merely to stifle progress.

  In a public blog post announcing the move, Musk shared, “Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers.”1

  If Tesla moves the industry forward and increases electric car adoption across the board, they and the world are better for it.

  The same is true for small businesses and for our personal lives. Sharing knowledge and increasing access to education raises the tide for all. Innovations made by one create opportunities for the consumer and the industry. There is so much to be gained when we are open to sharing and see the opportunity that exists in a collaborative environment.

  Success builds upon success. Opportunity creates more opportunity. Championing others brings about the best version of ourselves.

  They benefit from collaboration.

  Collaboration is where the real magic happens. In business and in life, joining forces to work with others to produce or create something of value brings about the best in us.

  Collaboration by definition is as simple as working together with others to achieve something. Think of it like a potluck dinner. Everyone brings their own special recipe so that the group can enjoy a meal together. The weight of responsibility is divided across the shoulders of a few so that the collective can benefit as a whole.

  In the wedding industry, creatives gather together on styled shoots. These fictional weddings serve as a space to test out new techniques, innovate on emerging trends, and learn from others. My friend Heather Benge created an entire community based on the premise of creative collaboration called Styled Shoots Across America.

  Frequently throughout the year, Heather organizes creatives together in different areas of the country to create spectacular styled shoots. Florists work with florists and photographers bounce ideas off other photographers. Hundreds of creatives join forces to contribute their talents to the event. And the results are astounding.

  The result? Ideas and trends that influence the entire wedding industry for years to come. Many of the images being pinned to newly engaged couples’ Pinterest boards originated from one of these styled shoots.

  Mastermind groups, brainstorming hackathons, and collaborative coworking sessions have all contributed to many of my own most successful initiatives. Business owners who adopt a mindset of community over competition are open to sharing their ideas, receiving feedback from collaborators, and growing together.

  They are deeply rooted.

  Relationships are like roots. They anchor us to what matters most and connect us to the sustenance we need to thrive. When storms arise, as they always do, and that wind starts howling, it is our roots that keep us firmly planted.

  Business owners who embrace this mindset are able to better weather the storms that come their way. People who champion this spirit are strengthened by the support of others on their journey. From personal hardships to global pandemics, we need our community most in seasons of struggle. The more we invest in others, the more we cultivate relationships, the stronger we emerge on the other side of hardship.

  Later in the book we will talk about my personal experiences of leaning on community in my seasons of struggle. The biggest takeaway to prepare for: when we are weak, our community is strong.

  BUILDING A STAGE

  Ain’t got a soapbox I can stand upon

  But God gave me a stage, a guitar and a song.

  —Ed Sheeran

  Many of you picked up this book because you’re tired of the narratives that pit us against one another. You are—as I like to think of it—in the middle of a bad breakup with our culture of competition.

  You keep telling this mindset “it’s over” only to pick up your phone the next morning and scroll your way into struggling with feelings of unworthiness all over again. I know. I’ve been there too.

  You’re ready to find friendships that feel like home. You’re ready to discover spaces where you belong and cultivate connection in your everyday life. And in order to do that, you must choose to pursue community over competition.

  You see, a competition mindset tells us to hoard our power. To hold on to our secrets with clenched fists and to fight tooth and nail to protect what’s ours. Winning and success are its only goal.

  Choosing community means choosing to give it all away—to use our power to empower others. To use our voice to give a voice to those around us. To work from a foundation of purpose, not in the pursuit of popularity or profit.

  Building Rising Tide Society taught me this above all else:

  The world tells us to stand on a soapbox… but most of us are called to build a stage.

  A stage allows us to elevate others. A stage is built to last, to teach, to share with people eagerly waiting to learn. A stage is meant to be shared.

  A soapbox, in contrast, elevates one voice alone. It serves as a single opinion, a cacophonous megaphone in a sea of conversation, radiating out into space with the goal of drowning out the rest.

  Whether you are leading a community, working toward a better world, or simply longing for connection in the chaos, you have a choice in how you want to build. You can elevate brilliant ideas and shine a spotlight on those who have something powerful to share. You can lift others up. You can encourage and affirm their strengths. You can champion camaraderie and connection.

  It all starts by looking our culture of competition right in the eye and saying:

  “It’s not me, it’s most definitely you. It’s over. I’m done letting you control my life. I was built for belonging and created for connection. I was made for so much more.”

  Then you lift your chin up and walk right out the door… into the next chapter of your life (and this book).

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PEOPLE FIRST, OPPORTUNITY SECOND

  When I was in middle school, my mother thought it would be a great idea to sign me up for competitive swimming. My father swam in college, and she initially told me that it would be a great way for us to connect and a chance to follow in his footsteps.

  Up until that point, I had only played team sports, and my experience with swimming was rather limited. I had spent my summers crabbing off the community pier and running through the waves at the beach. The idea of diving into the pool to race against other people was completely foreign to me.

  By joining the swim team, I earned some gnarly tan lines and chlorine-bleached hair that rivaled the frosted tips trend of the 90s. I also learned to strike a balance between “staying in my lane” while allowing the rivalry of the race to push me forward. That first summer swimming competitively taught me a lot.

  Unlike many other sports, in swimming your success can be quantified entirely in a single metric: your time.

  From one side of the pool to the other, the speed at which you move through the water is the ultimate indicator of performance.

  Improve the efficiency
of your stroke to decrease your time.

  Train around the clock to decrease your time.

  Shave all of the hair off your body and squeeze into one of those wet suit contraptions to—you guessed it—decrease your time.

  The true goal in swimming is not to focus on beating the other athletes in the pool, but instead to compete against your own personal record. Every swimmer in the pool is racing against the clock, not one another. Your success is propelled forward by competing not against others, but against yourself.

  For a highly competitive person, an Enneagram 3 achiever,1 who spent her life trying to figure out how she “measures up,” this was a powerful concept. Channeling my competitive nature away from external gratification and into internal validation enabled me to rise above unhealthy tendencies. By shifting from looking at others as my measurement of success, there was space to build confidence in my own abilities, while also cheering others on in the process.

  Under this framework, the sport was no longer a zero-sum game. If someone else won a race in the short term, it didn’t mean that I lost in the long term.

  Even in my worst races, there was an opportunity to walk away having gained something. Did I improve my time? Did I learn something new? Did I overcome a fear or strengthen a relationship with a teammate? Even in losing, I learned that there is much to be gained.

  For those who are naturally wired to compete against others, I have found that there is freedom in working to be your best rather than the best. Freedom in fighting not to do better than someone else, but rather in the pursuit of improving yourself. When you’re working to constantly evolve and grow, you remove the finite nature of winning and losing. You eliminate the duality of the game and begin to look at competition as something supportive of your own personal development.

  Swimming was one of my first experiences with healthy competition, and the reason it resonated so deeply with me is because it identified my personal triggers (comparison, always striving to measure up, using others as a benchmark for my own success) and provided a cognitive reframing strategy that empowered me to compete in a healthier way.

  Each of us has tendencies and motivations that could lead us down a path of unhealthy rivalry. In order to overcome them, we must better understand what those triggers may be, and that starts by defining healthy versus unhealthy competition.

  Competition is healthy when it:

  • Occurs on a level playing field with clearly defined boundaries

  • Honors a shared moral code, set of values, or agreed-upon rules

  • Unlocks personal potential and empowers participants to be their best selves

  • Creates a collective experience or unifying tradition

  • Strengthens resilience and builds confidence

  Competition becomes unhealthy when it:

  • Has no clear boundaries (pervasive in all aspects of life or transcends beyond the intended scope of the game)

  • Operates unfairly or on an uneven playing field

  • Is driven by scarcity, fear, insecurity, or a desire to diminish others

  • Creates division, polarization, and isolation; ignores the experiences of others

  • Leads to the destruction of self-confidence or self-esteem

  Healthy competition in athletics is often modeled through fair play and sportsmanship. In the workplace, it may look like celebrating a colleague who gets a promotion that you wanted or asking for critical feedback to help improve your performance when you fall short of hitting goals.

  In healthy competitive situations, when the game is over, we move forward in camaraderie—as one community. There is no residual bitterness or resentment. It’s okay to be disappointed about the outcome of a single game, but it doesn’t lead to anything malicious down the road. We leave our rivalry on the field.

  Unhealthy competition means that we will do anything to come out on top. It puts winning on a pedestal, driving participants to bend the rules and even their moral code in order to succeed. When money, power, or influence are on the line, the scales can quickly be tipped in a harmfully competitive direction.

  Sports: athletes ingesting and injecting performance enhancing drugs; manipulating athletic equipment in order to get a leg up (corking bats, deflating footballs)

  School: students cheating on exams or buying non-prescribed stimulant drugs to help improve their scores; parents bribing teachers or recruiters to help their children get into a better college

  Workplace: employees sabotaging others to win the favor of higher-ups; looking for shortcuts, hacks, and workarounds that go against ethical standards or corporate policies in order to make more money

  When winning is all that matters, human beings run the risk of rationalizing even the most egregious of behaviors for selfish gain. The difference between right and wrong becomes clouded in an arena of unhealthy competition. Do the ends really justify the means?

  Additionally, the motivators that shift us into ethical dilemmas or unhealthy realms of rivalry are only exacerbated when we become disconnected from the collective. In isolation, we are more vulnerable to act in a way that pushes our competitive nature in an unhealthy direction.

  When we spend more time scrolling and consuming the success stories of others than actually living in community with them through the reality of their situations, social media voyeurism leads us into a downward comparison spiral. The amalgamation of accomplishments that snowball one on top of another would threaten to destroy even the bravest person’s self-confidence.

  Add in the pressure that we feel to showcase our own successes publicly and the simultaneous fear of disappointing others or revealing our flaws and failures to the world and… well, you can start to see why so many people struggle to move past these mindsets that drive us into isolation.

  My greatest weapon against my own highly competitive tendencies is a little mental trickery known as cognitive reframing. Essentially, we transform our way of thinking by identifying a certain train of thought and consciously shifting it toward a different perception of the situation.

  Cognitive reframing can help us to turn our unhealthy competitive ideologies into healthier ones that enable us to thrive in and beyond the arena.

  FROM THIS: Be the best

  TO THAT: Be my best

  FROM THIS: Beat others

  TO THAT: Improve myself

  FROM THIS: External gratification

  TO THAT: Internal validation

  THE CASE FOR COMPETITION

  Are you trying to tell me that competing with others is a bad thing?

  I get this question frequently: at conferences, on podcasts, even when talking to the grocery store clerk, when I’m telling her why I’m so passionate about keeping competition in check.

  Simply put, the answer is no. Our natural desire to compete is not, in itself, a bad thing. It can actually be a powerful tool when harnessed correctly.

  On a physiological level, competition serves as a performance enhancer.

  In the case of my short-lived, middle-school competitive-swimming career, I can still feel the cascade of energy racing through my veins every time I hear “swimmers, take your mark.” That “feeling” is the body’s reaction to consciously becoming aware of the competition—a neurochemical chain reaction that occurs the moment you realize you’re not alone in the arena.

  The starting signal of the race triggers your acute stress response—more commonly known as fight or flight. As you climb onto the block beside the other swimmers, your sensory cortex identifies the impending competition and the signal is relayed from your brainstem to your adrenal glands, which respond by releasing epinephrine and norepinephrine.

  This gives your nervous system a major boost. A rush of what feels like electricity courses through your veins.

  A chain reaction is underway. Your heart rate increases and your blood vessels constrict, diverting oxygen to your muscles in preparation for the race. You pull your goggles onto your eyes and take a deep breath
. Your airway dilates to allow more oxygen to rush into your lungs, your sweat glands are stimulated, and your body signals to your tissue to begin breaking down fat to be turned into energy.2 You reach for the top of the block, and before you even dive into the pool, your body is primed to compete. You are ready for the race ahead.

  Competition can arise in so many different facets of our lives. From athletics to academics to career performance, when we are engaged in communal behaviors, we are primed for our competitive tendencies to bubble up.

  And again, just in case anyone needs a reminder, this is not inherently a bad thing.

  What if I told you that by simply being aware you’re competing against someone else, it could change the outcome of your performance? What if by simply being in the arena with someone else, you could be better at whatever it is that you do? Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as “social facilitation,” and they have been studying it since the close of the nineteenth century.

  In 1898, a psychologist by the name of Norman Triplett noticed that cyclists tended to have faster times when they were riding in the presence of another person rather than merely riding alone. Hoping to test this phenomenon in a controlled laboratory format, Triplett designed a competition machine by building an apparatus similar to a fishing reel and monitored children playing the game alone and in the presence of another child.

  The goal of the competition was simple: wind up the fishing line as quickly as possible.

  In his experiment, Triplett discovered that many children worked faster in the presence of a partner doing the same task than they did alone, thereby proving his hypothesis that performance is impacted by the mere presence of others doing the same task.3

  Since the discovery of social facilitation, many researchers followed Norman Triplett and built upon his initial experiment, and the findings are fascinating: