36. Intentional, aggressive, and imperfect care

Who cares if you've made millions of dollars and helped thousands of people... if you have no one you trust to pick up the phone at 2 AM when your world is falling apart? 

We live in an individualistic, "mind your own business" culture that has created in widespread deep loneliness, and "connection for sale." I'm sharing my personal practice of changing this culture: I call it intentional, aggressive, and imperfect care.

Listen to discover:

• Why success, acclaim, and riches are worth nothing without deep relationships
• The dangers of "minding your own business" 
• The counterintuitive approach to caring that feels risky, but will change the culture of individualism
• How to bring this principle into your business and personal life

Choosing community over comfort changes everything. Let's do this together. 

Transcript

Hello my friends. Welcome back to Liberatory Business. I'm Simone Seol, your host, and thank you so much for listening.

Today I want to talk to you about something that I want to teach you, but something that has also been a big lesson for me. Something that I've been actively living into in the recent past and that I'm actively practicing and getting better at.

I think this has changed everything for me, and I think it's going to change everything for you. I'm calling it the principle of intentional, aggressive, and imperfect care. Because here's what I have learned: We all want connection. We all want to create community and belong, right? But in order to create high-quality connections, community, and belonging, there is a price.

That price is that we have to take some risks. We have to do some hard things. Sometimes we've got to go outside of our comfort zone, and we have to care in ways that maybe we're not used to in this culture of individualism. Because what dominant culture has taught us to do by default is, I think, the exact opposite of intentional, aggressive, and imperfect care.

It's taught us to be passive in caring. Like you only help if somebody asks you, and even then, only if it's convenient for you, right? It's avoidant. When there's something difficult happening, we don't lean into it. We lean away.

I really want this to be our collective rallying cry: intentional, aggressive, imperfect care. And before I get more into the details of what this looks like, I want to tell you a little bit more about why I think this matters so much.

Here's something that I hear constantly in my community of entrepreneurs, and maybe you've heard it too, you've thought it too, which is that entrepreneurship is lonely, right? Everyone feels like they have to figure everything out by themselves.

Leadership is lonely. Having a business is an inherently, fundamentally lonely journey where you just suffer through all these challenges in silence, alone, and people are craving community, companionship, camaraderie above all else. I hear this so much, and you know, all the stuff that we're busy with—"Oh, I've got to work on my business," whatever.

Who cares if you've made a million dollars if you have no one to call at 2:00 AM when your marriage is falling apart and you're sitting on the bathroom floor sobbing, scrolling through your contacts and realizing everyone there is either a business relationship or someone that you've grown too distant from to burden with the real pain of your life?

Who cares if you have 10 million social media followers if you don't have anyone to come pick you up from the airport? Not an Uber driver, but someone who wants to come pick you up from the airport because they love you enough to drive through traffic for you.

Who cares if you've helped thousands of people heal their lives and achieve their dreams, and you've had this great impact on the world that you dreamed of having? Who cares if you have all of that, but there's no one around you as you lie on your deathbed? No one's holding your hand.

I think about this a lot, probably more than I should. I'm lying on a hospital bed, and all I have are nurses around me who are paid to be there. Who is there? Who are the people who are going to drop everything to come sit with me? And I don't know everything, but I can tell you that that outcome is not going to happen when you have spent decades optimizing for everything except the one thing that actually matters when everything else falls away.

So what I want to offer you today is the way to not end up in that scenario, a way that disrupts both the individualism that keeps us isolated and the transactionalism that keeps our relationships shallow.

So I said intentional, aggressive, and imperfect care. Each one of these three adjectives is really important. I'm going to talk about the why of each one right now.

Let's talk about intentional care. Like I said, we live in a society where isolation and apathy are normalized, and practicing intentional care in this environment means you are not operating by the cultural default. You are not only caring when somebody literally has to ask it from you. You're not only caring when it's easy and comfortable and convenient for you. It means going out of your way to care on purpose—care intentionally—even when you're not sure if it's going to be welcome, even if you're afraid of being extra, even if you think it might be imperfect or awkward or inadequate.

This is the only way we can resist the culture that teaches us to mind our own business and look the other way. The opposite of this is passive care, or passive non-care. Like you see your friend posting something about struggling with something on social media and you think, "Well, I'm sure someone will reach out. Doesn't have to be me."

A neighbor mentions that their mom is having surgery. And even though you have no other reason to go over there, you go over there and ask how it went anyway, if there's any way you can help. It's about being present and purposeful and active with your love instead of just hoping that either your good intentions are enough or somebody else is going to take care of it.

Now, let's talk about the second adjective: aggressive care. When I say aggressive, I don't mean be pushy or dominating. What I mean is being bold. It's about being unapologetic about caring. It means being willing to take risks.

Aggressive care means you don't wait for people to ask for help before you offer it. You don't let someone struggle alone because you're worried about overstepping. You don't tone down your love because someone else might think that you're being too much. It means you notice a friend's having a hard time and they haven't even reached out to you yet, but you're going to reach out first.

That's aggressive care. Like you have someone that you're really grateful to because they did something for you and you're super grateful. Yeah, you could text them, "Oh, well thank you so much, blah, blah, blah." Or you can call them. It means coming up with concrete ideas for helping someone and suggesting it to them so they can say no. Like, "Hey, actually I came up with these ideas for helping you. Would it help if I did X, Y, Z?" As opposed to just saying, "Oh, let me know if I can help" and just sitting back and waiting.

It means you know your neighbor's sick and you say, "Oh, can I help with anything?" And they say, "Oh, no, no, I'm fine. I'm fine." And you're like, "Actually, I'm going to go home and make some soup and bring some soup over anyway." It means when you see someone you care about being treated badly, aggressive care means you speak up.

Aggressive care says, "I'd rather let this be weird than just let people struggle alone." It means choosing community over comfort.

I can tell you this is not always easy, but the rewards are so worth it. The relationships that you build by practicing aggressive care are so much deeper and richer and more meaningful than anything you could get from playing it safe, from just being polite and thinking, "Oh, I don't want to bother them," or "Oh, it's not my place," or "I don't know what to say. I don't want to be too much."

And the last one is imperfect care. I think this is the biggest one. Imperfect care means you expect this process to be a little messy. You're going to mess up. Sometimes you're going to say the wrong thing when someone's grieving. You're going to offer help in ways that don't actually turn out to be helpful. You're going to misunderstand what someone needs. You're going to be like, "Oh, I'm going to do this generous thing," and then realize afterwards that you kind of over-depleted yourself in the process.

And guess what? Nothing went wrong. All of this was supposed to happen. The messiness is part of loving humans, and humans are complicated. Imperfect care means you try something anyway, even when you don't know exactly what to do or say. It means you reach out even when it feels totally inadequate and you know it's not perfect. It means doing the thing even when you know you might mess up.

And if you do mess up, you're going to just apologize if it's appropriate. You're going to learn from the experience and you're going to try again. You're going to care again. It's about trusting that messy love is better than perfect love. Because guess what? Perfect love does not exist.

I really feel strongly that you need all three of these elements in your relationships. You need intentionality, you need aggressiveness, and you need imperfection. Because without intentional care, you just operate on autopilot and you miss so many opportunities to connect and contribute. If you're not willing to be aggressive, then you default to being polite, distant—in other words, disconnected. You never get to engage in the work of real love, which requires you to be bold from time to time. And if you're not willing for your care to be imperfect, you're not going to show up and you're not going to learn.

When you combine all three—when you're intentional and aggressive and imperfect in your care—I think that's when you really become the kind of person that other people can count on.

I've got to be honest with you, I am talking about this from the perspective of someone who is very, very far from being perfect with all of this. Just reflecting on myself as a human being, one of my biggest weaknesses is that I can be avoidant. I'm a highly sensitive person. I'm a quadruple Pisces, for those of you who are astrologically inclined, with Libra rising. I really, really don't like conflict or tension. I can ghost people. I can just avoid situations, avoid conversations rather than work through them.

So for me, my personal practice has been to risk the awkwardness, risk potentially having the other person be upset with me because I didn't say the right thing or whatever, which feels so awful to my nervous system. I hate it. I do anything to avoid it.

Another thing—and I don't know where this comes from exactly—but I do this thing where I go into a kind of freeze response when people around me are having really big emotions or have really sad or difficult things happen to them. So I'm really good with things that are not really big, but when it's really big, I kind of go into a freeze.

For example, a close friend of mine recently had a death in the family, and it was something that was devastating to my friend, and I just kind of froze. I didn't know what to say. And even though I cared about my friend tremendously, and my heart absolutely broke for them, my entire system froze. I think from overwhelm. I felt this enormous pressure built up inside me to have the perfect words to provide the comfort that she needed. Which is kind of ridiculous if you think about it, because how can you say perfect words to take away the pain of losing someone you love, right?

There's no such thing as perfect words, but instead of saying imperfect words, I just gave into my freeze response and I said nothing. And then the guilt of saying nothing made me feel shame, and then the shame shut me down, which turned into avoidance, which made me feel even more shame, which turned into even more avoidance. You can imagine the cycle.

I'm telling you these stories because I really want you to know that I'm coming from a place of being an active, imperfect practitioner of this rather than, "Oh, I have it all figured out and you should do it like me." The point is never to try to live up to this idea of being this graceful, elegant swan that just brings love and peace and beauty and healing wherever they go. I don't think that standard is real. At least not if you're actually being present and engaging with messy human realities.

The point instead is to show up with all that you are. Show up with your paradoxes. Show up with parts of you that might be messy because no one needs you to be perfect. But the people who do love you, people who need you to be part of their communities, they just need you to show up. They just need to know that you do care.

Since I started developing this concept, which I introduced and we really practiced as a community for the first time when I held my recent retreat in Detroit—that's when we really practiced it in community. And since before that, as I was developing this concept, I've been practicing this in small ways, and I think those small ways have resulted in such huge changes.

I started being more intentional about reaching out to people proactively in my life. Instead of just assuming that people know that I care about them, I started actually telling them. I started actually putting down people's birthdays in my Google calendar instead of relying on social media to remind me, which is what I used to do. When I found myself thinking about someone, I would make it a point to just text them and let them know, "Hey, I'm thinking about you," even though a part of me worried that it would be weird and random.

I started leaving positive reviews for restaurants, cafes, businesses where I had a good experience, where in the past I would've been lazy. I would've skipped it and told myself, "Oh, I'm not that kind of person that does that kind of thing," or "Other people will do it. I'll do it later." Well, taking 10 minutes out of my life to amplify someone else's business when I think they're doing a great job could be a huge help to those businesses.

Remember I told you about situations where my system could just freeze, and I don't know what to say, so I don't say anything? Well, I would take the time to find my bearings, remind myself it's not necessary to have the perfect words, that it's enough to express in some way that I'm thinking about them, that I care about them. And I decided that I would rather risk communicating imperfectly and inadequately rather than say nothing at all.

I have to tell you, all these small and imperfect actions built up to create connections that have added so much richness to my life. And it made me realize that these connections are truly what we live for. Because all of the money and the power in the world could never replace these things. Community is what sustains us.

I also want to encourage you to think about what it means to bring this principle to your business. That means stop thinking about your clients as transactions and start thinking about them as whole humans that you get to care for. Now, that doesn't mean you don't have boundaries or that you become available for everyone, whatever they need, all the time. It just means you approach your work with the understanding that you are dealing with real people with messy lives. And your role is to just care about them intentionally, boldly, and imperfectly.

I think that is a place where there's a lot of really beautiful care that can bloom, connections that can bloom, because we expect business to just be transactional. And when you dare to be more than that, I think there's a lot of opportunities for really beautiful connections to be created.

So, parting words: Here's my invitation to you—find small ways to start practicing intentional, aggressive, and imperfect care. Actually, for most of you who are listening, because my listeners are amazing people, you probably all are already doing this. It's not a question of starting this as if you've never done it before. It's a question of leaning into it more. Where can you be more intentional? Where can you be more aggressive? Be willing to be more imperfect.

In thinking about this, I also realized that practicing this kind of care is actually the default in my traditional culture, which is Korean culture. A really beautiful example of how this gets practiced in an everyday setting occurred to me.

A couple months ago, I was traveling with my family to the countryside and we went to this restaurant that specialized in beef soup. It was literally the only thing on the menu. So we all had beef soup, and when we got up to pay and leave, they just happened to be steaming a giant vat of fresh corn—this giant cauldron of fresh corn that they had just harvested from the farm next to the restaurant. As we were saying, "Okay, thank you so much," and we paid and were about to leave, they just bagged us a whole bunch of freshly steamed corn and just gifted it to us.

We didn't ask for it. They certainly weren't charging us extra for it. There was nothing that they were going to get from us, but they just had a lot of freshly steamed, freshly harvested corn, and they thought we might like to share in their bounty. That's intentional, aggressive, and imperfect care. It was just in a giant plastic bag, right? And of course we were super grateful. It was really yummy.

Another example is that my son has a nanny. She's a wonderful lady who has a sister with this little plot of land that she farms as a hobby. It's not her job; she just does it for fun. But every time she harvests—remember, this is not even my son's nanny, it's my son's nanny's sister, who we don't really have a relationship with—but nonetheless, every time she harvests, she gives a little bit to our nanny and tells her to bring it to us, to our family, just to be caring.

Some cabbage, some cucumber, some peppers, pumpkins—organically grown with care and pride. So why would this woman give us this fresh produce when we've barely even met her? Just because sharing is caring, and when you have a surplus, you share. Sharing and caring for no reason other than that we are connected to each other—it's baked into traditional Korean culture.

I just feel like that is so beautiful, and I bet that's how it was in a lot of traditional cultures before we got modernized. Now I'm realizing that all these examples of Korean care come down to food, but I guess that's how we express love. And I'm not complaining. It's like, "Here's some food, take some food, eat some food," right.

That is my culture, but I've also been influenced by American culture because I spent time in America. So I feel like I'm connected to a rich heritage of community care, but I also at the same time have to decondition myself from the individualism that I've been exposed to in America from a young age.

That's probably true for you too. You have some inheritance of intentional, aggressive, imperfect caring, and then you also have some inheritance of individualism—just look out for yourself, right?

So from your heritage, from your lineage, what are some ways you can reclaim those everyday ways of caring on purpose? Look into the traditions that you have inherited, look into what your family does.

I truly think the best place to start is to start small with small actions and just noticing, right? Being intentional about noticing what people need, how your small actions or words can affect them. You're going to make mistakes and that's okay.

But remember that you're not doing it alone. Every single action you take creates more connection, creates more togetherness, creates more belonging and community in this world. And I think at the end of the day, that's all we want and it's really all we need.

So go out and practice intentional, aggressive, and imperfect care, and I'll talk to you next week. Bye.