Episode 49: Find Calm validating your online community offers with Hudson Phillips

In this episode of the Find Calm Here Podcast, Hudson Phillips, the host of ScriptBlast, shares insights on how he discovered community, why he launched his community on the Mighty Networks, and how he’s learned so much in just a year of hosting this online community. 

His community ScriptBlast brings together screenwriters who struggle with navigating the ups and downs of the journey to help them write with ease and joy. 

As an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker, Hudson has produced the feature film This World Alone, released in May of this year. 

With this experience and as the Creative Director for Uplink Marketing, he brings over 25 years of design, branding, copywriting, and marketing experience to the communities he leads. 

 With his community-building experience, he also supports Village Canopy Life, an online community working to transform the lives of children and communities in rural Kenya. 

In this episode we discuss: 

2:37: Phillips begins by explaining what got him interested in community building: 16 years of struggling with breaking into the screenwriting world and not feeling like he had a safe space to talk about struggles. ScriptBlast started as a social media account, but already being part of a Mighty Network, he made the switch.

11:35: Deb and Phillip compare the passive nature of social media to an active community. Phillip touches on how by listening to his community, he was able to alleviate the pressure of creating content when what the community wanted was engaging events.

15:20: Phillip talks about ScriptBlast, his screenwriting community, and CanopyLife, a non-profit client community that runs an entrepreneurial school in Kenya. He also touches on re-assessing goals as to why the group exists when managing engagement expectations.

22:09: There are many factors that go into community engagement, as Phillip discusses people who prefer being silent observers and also the seasonality of summer months being quiet while people are busy and traveling.

Learn more about Find Calm Here 

Subscribe to the Find Calm Here Community Newsletter to learn more community-building tips, resources, and upcoming LIVE events to help you build, launch, and grow your community!

Deb Schell is the founder of Find Calm Here LLC, an online consulting agency supporting entrepreneurs, founders, creators, and speakers as they build, launch, and grow a paid online membership. As a community strategist, Deb helps clients find calm in the community-building process through the CALM Method of Clarity, Awareness, Learning, and Motion so that they can lead with energy, confidence, and purpose.

She brings together entrepreneurs who feel overwhelmed with

Transcript

Welcome to the Find Calm Here Podcast.

I am Deb Schell your host on this podcast.

I share conversations I have with community builders who offered tips on what, what's worked for them and resources that have helped them find calm in the community building process.

If you are a new community builder, this podcast will have tons of resources for you, so make sure you subscribe. Uh and if you're interested in learning more about the fine calm here community, I can chat with you and we can talk about how I can help you either launch, build launch or grow your own community with my consulting or join us inside the Fine. Come here community, there is a community newsletter. If you sign up for that, you'll get more updates on all of the awesome things that are happening inside the community and uh if you need support and accountability uh with a group of community builders, that's what we're all about in the Fine come here community you'll receive support and tools to help you have a successful launch, grow your membership and tackle any challenges with the support of peers in a safe space, that's affordable and enjoyable.

We've got to tons of things happening inside there, just launched the calm guides and that's to support you in any stage of the community building process. You have the com guide to launching the com guides onboarding and I just released the combo guide to tech integration. So uh certainly if you're interested any of those, please reach out to me. Uh let me know I'd be happy to chat with you about those. I'm excited to introduce today's guest Hudson phillips. He is the host of scrip blast an online community for scriptwriters who struggle with navigating the ups and downs of the journey to help them write with ease and joy. He's also an award winning screenwriter and filmmaker. Uh, he's produced the feature film, This World Alone, released in May of 2021 this year. And it's with that. And then the other experience as a creative director for uplink marketing, which he brings over 25 years of design, branding, copyrighting and marketing experience. He brings all of that insecurities he leads and so he also leads another community uh called village canopy life.

It's an online community working to transform the lives of Children and Children and communities in rural Kenya, welcome Hudson to the fine come here podcast. All right, thank you so much. I'm very excited about this. I feel like both calm and community are like key values to me. So, I have a feeling we're going to be very much on the same page. I think so too. I'm excited. So tell us a little bit about what got you interested in community building. Um, for me, it came out of my own struggles with screenwriting originally. So it was um, I was writing for, I'm going on probably 16, 17 years of, of what I feel like it's struggling to break into the screenwriting world and um, along that journey um where a lot of ups and downs and a lot of struggle and a lot of just feeling stuck and not feeling like I had a safe space to talk about some of those struggles, I'd be a member of an online community or facebook group and there was just so much negativity, so much, you know, kind of like blow harding, putting each other down and um I just, I needed something for myself to begin with, and so I started script last um really as a social media account, so an instagram account that just posted inspirational, honest feelings about the screenwriting journey.

Um and then a facebook group um and ultimately um that was the beginning of that community. Um but I found that the facebook group uh after a while turned into something I just didn't like anymore, it was very spammy, you know, I felt like I was curating more than I was encouraging, and so that's when I made the decision to find um an off platform community and launched um the script? Last screenwriting community on mighty Networks about a year ago. Okay, so that was the next question I was gonna ask you, When did when did you launch? Um And what platform you obviously said about the Money Networks, we've been talking to people that are doing different platforms, um and I'm going to have somebody who has done a circle, but I wanted to get take on. So when you launched a year ago, what made you choose the muddy network platform for your community, since you're like shifting off of facebook. Yeah, so it was, it was a lot of figuring things out. It started with just I want to build um the community that I that I really need personally. Um and that's really driven me in every decision that started with that.

Um and then once I launched the community, I learned to listen to that community and what they needed as well. Uh but the reason I decided Almighty Networks was I was just already a member of one. Um I was a member of this one, it was called um visualized Value, so it's kind of a marketing content creation community. Um and I just love the format of it, I loved how clean it was, I love how simple it was. Um I love that there were like, I thought it was a good thing, that there weren't a lot of bells and whistles, that it's just you go, you get the content you're looking for, you connect with the people that you want to connect with and then you hop off and I love just that the cleanliness of it. Um and also as a designer for my day job, I loved aesthetically, I just thought it was a beautiful platform. Um and so all of that kind of tied together. Um I probably did a, you know, one afternoon google search for other communities and looked at circle and things like that and uh mighty Networks just seemed like a no brainer for me. Yeah, that's kind of the same story that I did because I was in a community that was on the Money network for about 2.5.

I've been in there for like three years now as a paying member of this community and that community really transformed a lot of what I did with my life. I left my corporate sales job and decided to launch my own online community and business and all these things and it was with the support of that community that I really had the initiative to want to do that. And it was then really showing me how powerful an online community can really be. So I think that's what it seems like for you to is like when we need things, you know, we either have to build what we need in our own personal life, right? Build it for us selfishly for us maybe, and then hope that other people are interested in the thing asking questions is super important in the Discovery phase. So what was the, what did that look like for you when you launched? Did you do a lot of Discovery before? What was that? Like? I didn't I had a lot of content that I built up over the years. So script blesses exists as an entity where we didn't charge for anything for the first four years. Um and the reason for that is I just saw a lot of um kind of shysters in the community of just taking advantage of people, um taking people's money and not giving a lot of value in return.

There's a kind of a cottage industry and screenwriting where that exists. I just didn't want to be associated with that. So I was like, you know, I'm working a full time day job, I can do this on the side. Um I'm still doing writing on my own. Um so there wasn't a need for it to financially propped me up. It was really driven by wanting to give back to those that were first starting out and struggling with the same things I did. Um and then Mighty Networks was the first time I saw it as being, oh, this is valuable, this will make a difference. Um and I've seen that over the past year um just how many in my community have finished their screenplays um or the productivity has, has jumped through the roof or just finding a community to find a place to be honest. It's really been life changing. For me personally, it became the place that, you know, at the end of my facebook group. I just didn't enjoy it anymore and now I just can't wait to hop back on Mighty Networks and and update things in there. Um so it was great for me personally, and then for members, um the biggest learning curve for me was um I started really from a place of selfishness, I had a whole bunch of videos, I had a whole bunch of free resources, like written pieces, um and so I uploaded all that, so there'd be some robust content at the beginning.

Um but what I didn't anticipate was people really wanted real time interaction, so even the community that I first tested out, he did weekly zoom calls, um so I was like, well I'll just do monthly zoom calls because I'm kind of uncomfortable with that format at this point um and I learned that the community wanted more and more of that, so now we're doing a week on a weekly basis. Um Some of those may not be me talking the whole time and I just be us having a conversation, some of them might be a combination of things, some of them we just hop on and we all right at the same time and it's like an accountability window um where were all writing um and really getting a lot done um and that came out of, I had never heard of that idea before and never thought of that idea before, and someone in the community suggested that um and so we tried it and it's gonna be awkward, but it was, it was awesome and everybody loved it and so that's something that we continue to do as well um and all through that, you know, I'll check in with the group. I do a lot of d m ng with members of the group because I know a lot of people don't like to speak out in the forums. Um so I'm just trying to check in um have an assistant who's also a member of the group, so she's able to do a little bit of, you know, incognito research as well to see what other people are wanting to do.

Um So it's just listening and realize really what what people want. Um Again, even though zoom calls, I started out where it's like, I would do a lesson and then we'd have a conversation. Um and some of the feedback I got was like, hey, can we make these more interactive? Like I want to ask questions or interact or write my own opinions. And so we, we leaned into that as well and that's what those, those calls look like today. That's so cool. I love that you shared this like journey of like discovery of, like, I wanted to have this place and you thought a lot of people think they have to have so much content in the beginning. And when clients I work with, they get really held back by the all the things, you know, to that that go into building a community. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff, the work involved, but you don't always necessarily need to have a whole lot ahead of time and it's really about to make it really interesting, building it together with the community, makes it so much as you're seeing so much more successful, because, like, you could have a vision and, you know, as a host, you want to have a vision for the community, of what the goals are, what you're looking for, an engagement and contribution and um making sure people stay in and and are interested, but like, that has to come through asking them, and I'm telling you what they actually want, so, um it's such an interesting concept and I think, you know, I think you had said about the community's masterclass, but we talked about that and there's a lot of things that they're that they recommend, and I think it's one of those things where you just kind of take it a little bit at a time, you're like, okay, well let me see if this is something that would work, and the coworking thing came out of one of my other communities, so I think it's super fun to jump on a call if you had something that you're putting off, like, writing i writing is a good example, right?

Because if, you know, you have to write an email, you have to write something, but you're just like, I just, I don't I don't want to do it, then it's like, if you go to that coworking call, okay, I'm going to write this email in the next 20 minutes, you know, I'm going to get it done and you have people that are like, all right, Deb go get it done and then then at the end you can just chat with people, it breaks up the day really well as a solo entrepreneur to, I found like that personally, I just like those sometimes because there's things as a solo entrepreneur, like I could do that later and then I'm like, but if I go to the coworking, I'll get it done today. Yeah, yeah, it's good accountability. Um but I think the other thing it does when you're building a community with other people, they feel more committed to it, they're like, oh, I invested in this thing from the beginning, I helped frame what it is, I'm gonna stick around and I think it gives your members a little bit more ownership in it as well. Oh my goodness. Yeah, yeah, because then they're like, oh you're actually going to do the thing that I asked you to do, oh, we can actually do these things where I can meet these people or have speakers or have, you know, conversations and, and, and in a safe space.

It's a good point about the differences between social media and community because I find that to be some people are kind of interweaving interweaving those kinds of things of like, if you're a social media manager, you could be a community manager, if you're doing social, how is that different from community, and I think it's way different in a lot of ways and one of it is that you can get a private space and be there and have that know like, and trust factor and then be able to establish through your communication that this is somewhere where you can ask any question and there's no dumb question and you can ask, you can say whatever you want to say within reason of like hate speech, and obviously, but like you can just say the thing that you're stuck on and we will not like, be mean to you, we're gonna be supportive because your success is just as valuable as our success and we're working collaboratively together instead of competitively, and I feel like in the social media world it's very competitive and who's got this many likes and who's got this thing happening, and oh, there's somebody launching these five courses now and they're so successful and it's really this race to, like exhaustion, basically, at the end of the day, you're just like, I can't, you know, I'm a human, Yeah, he wants to have a life um and and it goes back to that calm thing and it goes back to why I really embraced this community and I love going to it, it goes back to, you know, everybody that's a solo preneurs um constantly, constantly having to create content and put it out there, it is exhausting.

And so that's what I found with this model with this community and I still do social media stuff, just not as often it's real passive. Um I try to reuse some stuff that I create in the community out on social media, but I think, I think social media is just, yes, it's, it's a whole bunch of strangers. It's passive there checking in with your content like two seconds at a time. Um there's no accountability, there's no pressure to uh you can just, you know, post whatever random stuff and then keep scrolling and it's like, you don't exist, whereas in the community there is that family, there is that kind of social pressure there, everybody that's in there wants to be there, they're not just randomly following a hashtag or something. Um but yeah, also in terms of content creation and how exhausting that can be, um that took a load off of me because like I mentioned before, when I first launched, I was like, I'm gonna do a video a week, and like, that was like, I bought a camera and I set up a ring light and I was recording a video and writing it and doing all this stuff and it was exhausting and I was like, I can't keep this up. Um so when I got the feedback of, hey, let's just do zoom calls, I was like, oh thank God now, all I have to do is as one zoom call a week and that creates the content that keeps people active in the group and we do some community things and we do some contest inside the group and all that kind of stuff, but in terms of creating content, it became that one piece of week um and that's all I need to do.

Uh and it was interactive and I'm learning while I'm in there in addition to, to giving kind of teaching lessons and stuff. Um and so yes, it was just, it's a sense of calm where I feel like um the internet in general, social media has just become a place that is so combative um and so negative. Um but yeah, it's, it's like a little spa day every day every time I can hop into my mighty network. Oh, I like that spa day. So tell me about so you have to communities that you, are, you co hosting both of the or leading both of those or what's your story, Their script, the script last um Screenwriting community is all me. Um so that's the one that's kind of um just a continuation of what I've been doing for years. The other one, our canopy life community is one of our clients at uplink marketing their nonprofit that runs a school in rural kenya on entrepreneurial school for kids to um learn how to be leaders in their community and to go back and start businesses and stuff. Really, really cool program. Um, and they came to us just looking for some marketing help and we presented the idea of a mighty network to them as a way to keep in touch with their donors.

Um, so when you agree to be a donor with canopy life, you get dropped into their villages, what they call it. Um, and that's where they post all the updates. That's where if you're sponsoring a kid, they give you all the information about that kid on a monthly basis and how they're doing and photos and all that kind of stuff. Um, so it's a very different model for them, which was really, um, kind of donor retention and um, in a, in a easier place to get across information um, in a more in depth way than social media or even email can. That's really interesting. I mean, I think of when you think of these kind of donor campaigns, I would think that I maybe get to um, learn about the child that I'm helping or the person that I'm helping, but I don't know that I would have ever connected with other people who are helping. And so I think that that's a powerful tool. Uh, 22 then see like what, not just one, like what your one donation does, but then the collective of what all of these people are, are giving and what that creates is really cool.

It is really cool. Um, I think they've, they've struggled with, you know, engagement in that community. I think because of that, because of how people look at donations and how, um, it's a community in a different kind of way that you want to see the impact that your dollars are making, um, or the impact that um, I think the people that are most active in that group are ones who have actually been to kenya have been on one of their trips that they take over there to show, to show people the school that are a little more engaged. But I think a lot of donors want to be passive to. Um, and so I think they got a little frustrated with, uh, those passive donors because they like everybody that runs a community. They want to see it hustling and bustling all the time. Um, and I even felt that with um, with the script last community, um, that it doesn't have the same kind of engagement that a facebook group does or an instagram account does, but because it is more, it takes more effort. Um, and so I learned to embrace and reassess my goals in both of those communities to say, um, you know, what am I really expecting out of this?

Why does this group exists? And is it serving that purpose for, for the script? Class community. Are people coming in and finishing their screenplays. Do they have a place to talk about their frustrations? Honestly, that's the reason we set that up and we're exceeding the goals at that now. That doesn't mean that they're signing in every day and having conversations, but that's okay because that's not the point of the group. They've got a million social media outlets that are much easier for them for that. Um and same thing with Canopy, are people signing in and getting the information they need, Are they getting the updates on their kids? And are they getting their donor updates of where their money is going? And yes, they're doing that. Even if that means they check in for, you know, 10 minutes once a month. Right. Um, so it is adjusting your expectations for what a community should be. Um and making sure that those goals are aligned to the goal of the community. That's so that's just a great play and the goal of um whatever it is, if there's a business model in, in in in connected with that too with the community model of how does the business connect to that? I talk a lot about that in my community, how does your business goal, connect with your community goal and then those expectations around um, if you're running a paid community, like a lot of our our people are doing um, you know, understanding, you know, what's reality in this situation because we all feel like we're gonna have this, we're gonna open this thing up and it's going to be so great and everybody, which it will be and everybody will be excited, however, the excitement is represented in different ways, right?

Um, and then life happens, no matter how much intention I have to come into your community, I might really want to get there, but life, you know, just gets in the way of me getting there and so you made a really great point around saying, it's not always about the comments and the likes and the cheers and the posts, and it's really about what is the intention of the community and are the members getting what they, when they press the buy button or when they press the joint button, are they getting what you promised them? And if you're doing that, if they're getting that, that's okay, that there's not a lot happening in that activity feed, because they're telling you in other ways that they're getting what they need, or maybe they're just not ready, you know, to do 17 steps or on step three, you know, I mean, of course, where there's a yearlong um course with 12 modules and people are in different parts of that at all times, and that's okay, and giving people the understanding of saying wherever you are is okay.

Um, just those kinds of um, awareness pieces that we talk about as far as really just yeah, lowering expectations, maybe as far as like all of the other stuff and then saying, well what really is the engagement because they are really showing up to the zoom calls. Well that's great then, you know, and maybe they don't want to post and there's a lot of, you know, some people are in the community for six months and then they're posting stuff. I think it took me a long time when I was in a community to really show up in that community as far as like posting or sharing anything. I was really more in the consumption and um just kind of watching and seeing what everybody else is doing. And um, I think there's just those that talks about the commitment curve and the different stages of community, right? Where it goes up and down and people are like, they get really interested and they're like in there and they're doing stuff and then maybe something happens and they drop, but then they come back and you know, there's, there's all these different roller coasters that we see as in a community and as a community manager of knowing to how they analyze that the data and then also the wherewithal to be able to ask the questions of the members and say, okay, are we still on the right mark with everything.

So just that reassessment, you know, checking in with like a 90, you know, a 90 day situation where if you set a goal and then you look at it from 90 days from now and say, all right, this is where we're hitting it or maybe not, it's not working. We need we need to change what we're doing or something else happens, you know? So it's just the biggest thing I think I've learned is the flexibility of just being okay with like all of these different aspects and knowing that things change all the time. Yeah, there's, there's um, a couple of everything's one is everybody's different. Some people are quiet and passive and they and they come in and they don't want to talk to anybody. They don't want to be on the zoom calls. They want to just come in and quietly click through content and consume things at their leisure. Other people are allowed and they want their voice to be heard and they want to be spotlighted and they want to be as big of a part of it as they can. Um so you kinda have to recognize that just different people interact in different ways and be realistic about that.

Um The other thing I'm learning now having coming up on almost a year of doing this, I think october will be a year um that there are seasons just to the year, Summers are gonna be slow. Everybody's traveling, everybody's busy. Um I got real depressed around june because I'm like, where'd everybody go? But I quickly learned that it's just people get busier during the summer, so they're not going to check in as much, but there are times of the year where people, because we're kind of goal driven, we help people write their screenplays, that january is huge and people in january, we're all over it because they're setting goals and I've heard the same thing that september, you know, the summer's over, you're getting back to the school year, you're taking your goals seriously. Again, that september is kind of that time as well. Um and so we'll see if things start picking back up and then, but that's true with with every industry and and with our own lives as well, there's seasons to it. Um and being able to recognize that in your community as well. For sure. Yeah. Especially when as a host, sometimes you as a host are going through things that you need to like readjust what you're doing.

I think a couple of people I've worked at there um they took a pause, they were doing like a course and then they just took some time to like really look at that course. Did that work? What happened with that course and taking time instead of like jumping in from one launch to another, launched into another. You know, I I think there's there's a really important for finding calm by, by taking a little bit of a slower approach and they say like social media is wide, whereas community is deep, so if you work with less people, but offer them more value as you're talking about, you can make more of an impact and so the foundation of a community is really about the vision of the host combined with the um onboarding successful, like successfully onboarding members where they have that know like and trust factor they, that you established that it's a safe space to the copy on your landing pages and on your welcome post and those kinds of things and then going further and making sure that checking in with them, are they okay?

Maybe they're only on section three of the course and everybody else is in six, so maybe there's something going on and the community manager can reach out and say, hey, is everything okay, is there anything we can do to support you? Just constantly looking at reevaluating? And that's what really what makes a community amazing from a host and a community manager perspective is that that magical moment when two people connected in your community and then they start something, whether it's a conversation or a partnership or collaboration on a project and you're just like, that's it, that's the thing, that's what I wanted and now it's like actually happening. And so that can be, that whole progression of community seems to me is like the essence of wake, it's really challenging, right, as an entrepreneur to start something, especially if you've got a lot of other business hats on at the time and so to really be able to have that, to stick with it through that long journey and you're seeing Justin even a few months or even in the last year you're seeing so many flexible, you know, things just changing, so I think, you know, building a foundation, it just is the most important thing if you really want to dive deep and really make an impact and so it sounds like you've really done that you've really been able to with your script, last community really have the insight and you know, thought process there, so it sounds like it's really amazing place for people who want to write a script.

Yeah, now that's really, that's really good uh good advice and um a lot that I'm thinking about right now as we're coming up on a year of just what needs to change on that, on boarding, like we don't look like we did when I first launched it and what needs to be adjusted and what needs to be, you know, redone. Um and I'm thinking a lot about that right now, even hearing you talk about, you know, courses, so we have a few courses but they're not long term, they're kind of like you can drop in if you want. Um So I'm exploring, you know what, if we did small groups and we did um uh courses that have, you know, dates on them where you know, watch this one here and we're gonna talk about it here and being a little more structured like that, so there's lots of things, I'm entertaining um and wanting to try and wanting to learn um it sounds like I need to join your group and maybe a few others and seeing what other people are doing and really providing some options from my community as well. I think it's a fun thing, like you're saying you're co creating basically this experience with them and so yeah, there's a lot of options where you can go, but if you know, okay, as a host, what you want to do is the most important thing before you ask everyone.

I also kind of think it's super important personally and I just have a few people going through like a lot of people are having challenging times and that doesn't mean that community managers or community hosts don't. Right, so we're all human beings and so sometimes you need that pause to really understand, is this the right direction? Do I want to do a course? Do I want to do cohorts? Is that is that something that I want to commit to? I can tell you from running Masterminds masterminds take a lot of work. It's a lot of work, you don't just show up once a week and just, you know, say, hey everybody, it's, it's like there's a lot of prep that goes into that and I got, I did a survey, I got a beta group together, we did a 90 day cohort for focusing on how to launch their mighty network. We all set goals at the beginning of january and I was included in this group, I was kind of the participant, not necessarily the host, I was guiding the conversation with giving them assignments or giving them tasks or giving them um resources that they asked for.

Like they asked for a marketing workshop, they asked for a community engagement workshop, so I put content together and I did those things for them. And at the end of that time period we had a, what I call the growth seat and on the growth seat is where each person got to highlight their community launch plant or relaunched in my case, it was a relaunch of fine calm here because a year ago I launched fine calm here in june and it went flat and I didn't know what to do with it. And so I took a pause and I was just trying to like re strategize around it and then I did the re launch in january, but the whole structure of my relaunch was based on this cohort that gave me feedback as I presented during my growth seat, here's what I'm thinking, if I do this and then this is what the content is going to be and this is what the, you know, activities would be and they gave me so much great and this is my ideal members because I switched from, I switched from a community of it was started out as a health and wellness community, actually, is what fine come here, started as I had, speakers had over 30 virtual events last year with speakers to talk about how to find calm.

But at the end of the year I was like, exhausted and tired and not feeling calm and feeling like what happened to this year, and just to like, just to say that I came back, I took a pause, I had that small group experience. They worked with me for 90 days, at the end of the 90 days, each one of them had launched plans, they were ready to go, they knew what they wanted to do, and they got feedback from us to be able to help guide them and having a more successful launch. and then those people ended up like staying in my community and now they're helping other people that are now coming into the community and helping, you know, create that engagement there. But the feedback I got from them was, they wanted more worksheets, they wanted more homework, they wanted more structure when I was trying to make it a little more flexible and I realized that if I did a mastermind like that, again, I'd have to, you know, the pricing would have to be really to a point where I felt comfortable and I'd have to have people that knew that, but I knew wanted to do it and I didn't have those things, and so I was like, you know, I'm just, you know, I'm just gonna do, I did something else differently, but yeah, it's really about what do you want to do and then going to the members and saying, here are the options, I think we could do, it would be really cool of these two or three options, what is most interesting to you, and then, like, giving yourself some flexibility, you know, before you're giving them the here's all the things, you know, and giving them like A, B and C, maybe a C, you know, or something like that to do.

I think it's a really good idea because then you're coming at it from, okay, this is what half the time I have to commit. And I'm thinking based on your experience from last year, you kind of know the time frame of what things take as far as time in the day, hours in the day for you and your personal life, so, so you kind of have an aspect of, okay, I know I can commit five hours a week to this community or, or whatever, um and then from there then you can establish, okay, here's what we'll do. Yeah, and I think that's a great plan, so I'm excited for you, I'm excited for whatever comes next for script. Last thank you. Yeah, it's funny, we do a lot of these exercises in the community because a lot of what we look at with screenwriting is kind of goal setting productivity, but also mindset, um and also figuring out who you are and what you want to go after with your career, because that's gonna guide so many things along the way. Um So we do a big thing about, you know, finding your values, you know, what really excites you, and so, like I mentioned before, you know, community is one of my, you know, collaboration connecting with other people, um also calm finding a sense of calm for myself and not being overworked and so with the community being essentially my third job, so I do writing, I do marketing and and also this community, um it really needed to be something that I could actually um that was uplifting to me and that I wanted to do every week because time is limited, um and I'm gonna have to squeeze it in, I'm gonna have to want to love to do it.

Um and I think that's what my initial plans when I launched was just too ambitious um that I couldn't keep it up and then, so what happens if you make ambitious plans, you can't keep up, then you feel guilty you feel like you're letting people down, you feel like everybody sees you as a failure. Um So and like on the one hand, it feels like um lowering expectations uh is a negative, but I think it's very much a positive thing because really you're just establishing um what you can consistently do overtime setting boundaries, yeah, setting boundaries around what you need and how you can find calm so perfect, perfect way to wrap up the episode. Um tell us if anybody wants to learn more about these two communities, tell us where they can find out about um either one, yep, you can find um for those of you who do we have a lot of novelists as well, so those that do novel writing or screenwriting at members dot script blast dot com. Uh And you can find me on social media at at scrip blast dot com. Um And then um canopy Life is village dot canopy life dot org, where you can find out more about canopy life and what they're doing over in kenya, that sounds so amazing.

I have to check out that community because it sounds really like they're doing amazing things, leaders, helping leaders, helping them become leaders. It sounds amazing. It's really, really cool, really neat organization and that came out of, we actually share an office building with them, which is how we first connected with them. So it's, it's a whole cool full circle story. They're local to global. Global. Local. Global. Is that new hashtag if you've heard of the hashtag local, it's like global and local, because now we can actually connect with people on a global level, but yet it feels like a local level because of the impact you can have with, communicating with people now in this new space. So very cool. Thank you so much for being on the phone. Come here podcast for everybody listening. We've got some really great episodes like this one coming up. So please subscribe, make sure you're checking out your itunes at podcast app and getting the most recent episode, and we will have the links for everything in the show notes that you'll have that.

Thanks so much. I hope you're finding calm in this day morning, evening, afternoon, Tuesday At 12 or whenever it is, wherever it is for you. I hope you're finding calm until next time. Take care. Bye.