The Bold and Brilliant Podcast with Tracie Root - From Gather to The Gather Community

Episode Summary: In this episode, Tracie Root shares the story of how Gather evolved into The Gather Community, exploring the lessons learned along the way—from transitioning from in-person events to creating an online community during the pandemic, to overcoming obstacles and building a supportive space for women to thrive.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How Tracie transitioned from a corporate career to becoming a coach and entrepreneur.
• The journey of creating an in-person space for community events in Santa Cruz, California.
• Challenges faced during the pandemic and the shift to virtual events.
• The realization that community is not about physical spaces, but about connection and support.
• Key lessons on building a community, taking bold steps, and navigating uncertainty.

Actionable Tips from Tracie:

• If you can imagine something and believe in its value, go create it—whether online or in person.
• You don’t have to know everything to take action—start with what you can, and figure it out as you go.
• Embrace the unknown and keep moving forward, even if you stumble along the way.

Memorable Quote: "Your bold and brilliant future starts in your imagination. Then you make decisions based on what you imagined, and you take a step in that direction."

Bold Moment of the Episode: Tracie’s bold decision to pivot from running in-person events to launching a virtual community during the pandemic, which ultimately expanded The Gather Community across the globe.

Connect with Tracie Root:

• Website: https://www.tracieroot.com/links

Join the Bold and Brilliant Podcast Community: Stay connected, share your thoughts, and be part of a community of bold, brilliant women! Https://www.tracieroot.com/podcast

Rate & Review: If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform! Your support helps us reach more listeners and keep the bold stories coming!

Thank you for supporting The Bold and Brilliant Podcast!

Find out what's up with Tracie by connecting on your favorite social media channel, and with The Gather Community by joining us at an upcoming online event or receiving our mailing list. Go to:

https://www.tracieroot.com/links

to find upcoming events, workshops, courses and more!

We're just getting started, so I hope you subscribed, and please leave a review so we can start building some podcast-momentum!

xoxo
Your host,
Tracie Root

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants: 0:00

Welcome to the Bold and Brilliant podcast, where women leaders share inspiring stories about the daring decisions they made to shape their businesses, their lives, and their careers. Today, I have a short solo episode for you, telling you the story of how Gather became The Gather Community. I'm Tracie Root. The founder of The Gather Community and the founder of The Bold and Brilliant Podcast. So let's dig in. I have been a coach since 2012 I was a project manager for a consulting firm working on site at large corporations in Silicon Valley I decided that I needed to take control of my personal health and wellbeing, and I found a coach to help me do that. This was my first real understanding of what coaching could do for a person. And while the health part. Of what I needed was really important to me. The things that resonated for me at that time were the focus on goal setting personal development, understanding your own mindset, and that you can decide what you want out of life. When the opportunity arose for me to become a coach, I stepped in with both feet within six months I decided to leave my corporate job and become a coach full time. I learned how to be an entrepreneur over the next couple of years, because that's not a light switch that you can just turn on and know how to. Work for yourself. If you've never done it before, within a couple of years, working with clients one on one and having a small team where we would do group trainings and activities. I realized that I wanted to teach specifically goal setting. Structure in your life, in your business, how to get what you wanted out of your own life. And I wanted to do this one on one with clients. So that's where I started my entrepreneurial journey of getting from there to here. Ever since then, I've been working with clients in these ways, helping them understand how their choices. Form their futures and also how to build community around themselves, because when we have community around us, we are way more likely to be successful in 2018. I had a thought that I wanted to start doing group. Activities in person, the first event that I scheduled was a vision board workshop. This was exciting to me because I love art. I love collage. I realized that I had been doing things like vision boards ever since I was young. My high school photo album included not only photos, but clippings from magazines, quotes from people, words. I would take clippings out of magazines and paste them next to my pictures. Things about, Hey, gorgeous, or you're beautiful, or achieve your dreams because this was really knit into my own DNA, I wanted to bring it to other people in a structured way where we could have fun creating art. That helped us believe in ourselves and what we could accomplish that 1st vision board workshop happened in 2018, and it was really hard in that moment to find a location for that class to happen. I live in Santa Cruz, California, where there's a lot of small business. There's not a lot of available space. It's quite expensive, as you might imagine, and to rent a room where I could hold this vision board workshop proved really challenging. Many of the spaces that I encountered were either really expensive as a base, like hotels, they were not only expensive, but they wanted you to buy their food, get catering, pay for water, basically. Other places that I found. We're like the back of a pizza parlor which is a perfectly fine place to have a pizza party, but not to create the kind of mindset and thought processes that I was hoping to do with my clients at this workshop. And same thing went for the local community centers. They were very kind of middle school gym vibe. And that's not really where we want to be imagining our brilliant futures. So I decided since my corporate background and education was in interior design and project management that I would create a room of my own and make it have the vibe and the amenities and be in a location that would work for the things I wanted to create in my business. I found corporate, some commercial real estate. I found a space that didn't work out. And then I found another space. I was determined to make this space work. There were things I needed to learn though, things like zoning requirements. I wanted to be in downtown Santa Cruz. I didn't know that in a downtown district, the city really wanted restaurants and retail. But I wasn't going to be restaurant or retail. I considered having retail just to make this process easy, but it wasn't the purpose. So I had to figure out how to explain the space to the city's zoning commission, where they would let me do my business at this location. Luckily, that all worked out. It was all very simple actually, but it was a mystery for a long time until I figured out how to go through the steps. We got approved in zoning. It was very exciting. Literally no one was there at the zoning commission, except for myself my husband my realtor the commissioner and their assistant, but it happened. I was very excited. We signed the lease and we began renovating the space. Now, did you know that when you sign a commercial lease, you don't start paying money right away? That was very strange as someone who'd only ever. Rented residential apartments where you have to pay not only rent starting on the day you move in, but a deposit before that. You don't do that for commercial space. It's very different. So that was also a big learning curve. This lease was ginormous. I had to have it reviewed by an attorney because I had no idea what I was doing. Thankfully, I had legal shield and I could have an attorney look at that. I learned so much as we were renovating, I learned about, what contractors would want to charge, what I could do myself, my family. I really created this space. We did all of it ourselves. Ikea cabinets installed the floor painted. We did so much for the space. Ultimately, we completed it just before our grand opening party on October 13th, 2019. Now, when I say that date in a live room where I'm speaking, people all go, Oh no, 2019, October. Well, that's right. Five months later, we had to turn out the lights, sanitize the door handles and wait because the pandemic lockdown had begun. I live in California. We were very locked down for a long time. Over the next couple of years, we tried to figure out how this whole thing was going to work. The space gather is what we called it. The space was only a piece of what I was trying to accomplish. I didn't know it in the beginning, but once we had to close down, I realized. The goal was never to have a room in a town. I mean, it was fun. It had a great vibe. I had a nice sofa. We had wifi, coffee, water, all the tables and chairs, all the things that you need to have a great event space. And we had networking and we had a music event and book readings and we had chamber like luncheon things. But when we couldn't do that in person anymore, I realized the truth, which was the gather was not about a room. It was about bringing people together in community to support each other in life and business. So when the lockdown began and we all were at home trying to figure out what was going to happen next. I opened up my zoom room and said, I don't know what's happening and you don't know what's happening, but why don't we come on zoom figure it out together and support each other. That was the first coworking session we scheduled in the beginning of the pandemic. I've been doing them every week ever since for four years, because gather, is not about. A room, the gather community is about bringing people together in support of their lives of their businesses of what they're trying to accomplish and and making sure that those circles. Of influence, those circles of connection continue to grow no matter where you are. Now it's 2025. It's been a long time since that lockdown happened and we are 100 percent back in person except everyone understands the value of connecting to people across the planet way more than they did back in 2019 and early 2020. We thought that certain things. Were in person. We didn't network on zoom, but we do now we have in gather community. We have networking. We have co working. We have workshops. We have multi speaker summits. All from the convenience. Of our own home offices on our zoom screen without having to pay for hotels and travel. There are hundreds of people that I've met across the planet that I never would have met had this not happened. That to me is one of the great gifts of the pandemic is being able to meet people. All across the world that I never would have met otherwise. And so why do I tell you the story about gather to the gather community? There's a few key things that I want to recap. One is a community is wherever you build it. It can be online. It can be in person. It can be a small group. It can be a large group, whatever it is that you want to create, you can. If you can imagine it and you feel like there's value there and people would get a lot out of it, go create it, go make it happen. You can do that. What else do I want to share about gather to the gather community? You don't have to know how to do everything in order to make things happen. There's so much that I didn't know about creating a room in a city. And there's so much that we didn't know. About how to navigate a global pandemic and keep our businesses, not only surviving, but thriving and growing. When we don't know what the future holds, it doesn't mean that we have to stop. It means we have to keep going and understand that the future is a mystery. It always has been. We just thought we knew what was going to happen, but now we know we may not know what's going to happen and that's okay. We're going to figure it out as we go. We're going to leverage the relationships that we have, the knowledge we've gathered, and we're going to take risks. We're going to be bold so that we can create that brilliant future that's in our minds. And that's really what I wanted to share today, that your bold and brilliant future. is based starting in your imagination and then you make decisions based on what you imagined so that you can take a step in that direction and then another that next step you might trip a little bit and that's okay because when you trip you might scrape your elbow but that's okay. Get back up, put a little sip of water on that elbow and take the next step again, because when you take bold steps toward your brilliant future, you are not only going to be moving forward in having that progress, but you're also going to feel motivated and self encouraged, and you're gonna be ready personally and professionally. And that's what it's all about. So thanks for listening today to the bold and brilliant podcast. A quick episode here for you from me to you to help you understand a little bit about why this podcast exists, why I do what I do and how you can connect with me and the rest of the gather community I hope you'll join us. I hope that you'll listen to future episodes. We're just getting started here. So be sure to subscribe on your favorite listening platform and we'll see you at the next episode. Thanks.