Find your people. Link arms. Rise together.
Everything in Business Is About Relationships
What if you could build a successful business with just a handful of meaningful relationships?
What if you could spend less time marketing yourself, more time doing the work you love, and actually get paid better for it?
I’ve spent the last decade experimenting with how to thrive in business without social media, and one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned is that we need way fewer people in our orbit than we’ve been led to believe.
We need to find our people, show up for one another, and create more opportunities to collaborate.
In this article, I want to share a little of my own journey, what I’ve learned about building real community, and how you can start creating a more relationship-driven business and life.
My hope is that by the end, your nervous system feels a little more at ease, you have a fresh perspective on what’s possible, and you feel inspired to reach out to a few of the magical humans in your life to see what you could create together.
1. Find Your People. Link Arms. Rise Together.
I live on a small rural island on the west coast of Canada called Salt Spring Island.
When you live on an island, you depend on the people around you.
And we live in this society right now where everybody is in their isolation chambers. They’re creating from a silo, and they’re all shouting with their megaphones on social media hoping somebody hears them.
Nobody’s actually doing the necessary listening to figure out, well, what do you do? What are you up to? Who do I know I could introduce you to?
And when we shift our perspective from needing that megaphone to actually just talking to one another, we need way less humans in our orbit to manage and to serve, and we can actually be paid a lot better.
We’re living in a crazy time.
And it’s a time on planet Earth where I really strongly believe that now more than ever, we need to find our people and link arms and rise together.
You don’t have to do this alone.
There are actual systems you can build for linking arms with other people. And there are so many different ways that you can scale your business through just a handful of strategic partnerships, alliances and creative collaborations.
You can do the good work that you’re here to do, be paid better, and find more playmates to do your magic with.
‘Cause it’s honestly way more fun when you co-create with other magical humans doing cool work in the world.
And I’ve experienced firsthand just how much can happen when you start making relationships and community a priority in your life.
2. What Happens When You Start Building Real Community?
I left social media a decade ago, after my son was born, because I saw the writing on the wall of what that beast was becoming and the way it was dividing humanity, and I wanted no part of it.
After more than a decade of building a following and fan base and doing all of my marketing on social media, I kinda went back to square one.
And the thing that happened after I left was really surprising.
It wasn’t like all of my friends from social media started calling me and messaging me and saying, “Hey dude, I saw you left social media. Where are you?”
Or when somebody was sick in my family, it wasn’t like people brought us soup.
And so I really felt like I was learning how to relate again after so many years of being in this social matrix.
I ended up starting a local men’s group called Manventures, and I ran that for seven and a half years.
It was accidental. It came out of my loneliness, and it was such a cool experience.
Every Tuesday for seven and a half years, we met and whatever guys showed up, we decided on what the adventure was gonna be the following week.
Some of my greatest memories from my grown-up life have come through that crew.
Play Chi Ball ended up evolving from that men’s group. My Majik Kids audio entertainment company was sprouted from that men’s group because one night 12 men got into my studio and we all wrote children’s stories, and that was one of the first stories we published.
And so a lot of good came.
When one of the guys had a baby coming, we would go chop their winter supply of firewood. We would do work parties, barn raising parties. It has been what it truly means to build real community in the real world… and we can all do this.
Even today, on Tuesdays I give my time to the local farm that one of those men runs and help them do packing and cleaning and land work… or whatever’s needed.
Because showing up feels really good. To show up in real life for people we care about and for projects or causes we care about is to live with true meaning and purpose.
And we have that freedom.
When we take back our time, we get to reprioritize.
So here’s something I’d love for you to think about:
If you were to redesign your life and just get rid of social media, if you were to really imagine what it is that you want for your social life, for your business interactions, for how you wanna show up in community, for how you wanna show up in friendship, for how you wanna show up for your clients, like truly present, what does that look like and what changes for you?
And what changes do you need to actively and consciously create?
Write down what you would change if you were truly going to create a space of belonging in your life for you and those around you.
And if you don’t have that, if you’re in one of those isolated moments in your life and you don’t really feel like you have your people around you, then what could you do or what could you create, or what could you start offering or hosting in your local area that could start to pull some of the people to you that would help your life feel more fulfilling?
‘Cause that’s what it’s about.
When we’re fulfilled, we become more magnetic. People gravitate to us. We have more pull and less need, and that’s what helps our business thrive.
It’s one of the things anyways.
‘Cause what the world does not need is more social media, more platforms, better algorithms, and all that shit.
What it needs is more social connection.
And that realization has completely changed the way I approach business.
3. Everything in Business Is About Relationships
How do you succeed in the game of business if you’re not gonna try and remain relevant on social media?
This one word is the word I used two years in a row at New Year’s. I was like, “I need to figure this out.”
And the word is relationships.
That’s what it’s all about.
Everything in business is about relationships.
Relationships to each other, relationships to our clients, relationships to partners, to fellow collaborators, to other business leaders, relationships to the earth, relationships to money, relationships to what our soul is being called to do at this moment in humanity’s story.
It’s all relationships.
And what social media does is it pulls us outside of our relationship to ourself in the present moment.
It pulls us into all of these illusional relationships with people we have no idea who they actually are, and in doing so, we miss the relationships that are right in front of us.
And what social media does is it gives us this idea that we constantly need more relationships, that if we don’t have 10,000 relationships that are following us on the internet, then we’re failing.
If we don’t have 100,000 relationships, then we’re never gonna make it.
And it’s simply not true. It’s bullshit.
We can honestly build successful businesses with one or two handfuls of relationships that we are present to and tending regularly.
Think about this for a moment:
Who are the people already in your life that you could be showing up for more fully?
Who are the people you love working with, the clients you love serving, the collaborators you love creating with?
What would happen if you put more of your time and energy into tending those relationships?
Because the quality of our relationships has so much to do with how we show up for the people already in our lives.
4. How Are We Showing Up for the People Already in Our Lives?
One of the things I’ve learned over the last couple of decades is the value of tending the relationships with the people who have already expressed an interest in my work.
Take your email list, for example.
These are people who asked to be on your email list. These are people who have wanted to hear from you.
The people that stay on your list, those are the ones who are leaning in when your email shows up in their inbox.
Those are the people who are gonna hire you for your services when they have the problem that you specialize in solving because you’re present in their life.
And I think it’s the most important thing for all of us to remember, is how are we showing up?
How are we showing up to the people around us?
How are we showing up in our communities?
How are we showing up to the people on our email list?
How are we showing up for the clients who are already paying us money?
And the better we show up, the more present we are, the more people want to engage and lean back in.
Sending a text message.
Calling out of the blue.
Letting folks you care about know you’re thinking about them.
It’s honestly really really easy and satisfying to do.
Open your phone contacts, scroll the list and start tending relationships.
And another one of the ways we can start showing up differently is by reaching out to the people around us and exploring what we could create together.
5. There’s a Certain Kind of Alchemy When We Create Together
If you have people in your life that you love that are doing complementary work to you, book a meeting with them.
Be like, “Hey, what could we create together?”
Maybe it’s a weekend workshop. Maybe it’s a day-long workshop. Maybe it’s a three-month program. Maybe you do a membership.
It’s leaning in with curiosity and the desire to see if there’s a win-win there.
If we’re all constantly searching for the win-win, we can come up with beautiful ways to make things.
And there’s a certain kind of alchemy that exists when we get into a collaborative space with other people.
It’s like we make something that we could not ever make on our own because everybody is bringing their own magic to the cauldron.
And so I would say if you’re not good at it, write out your ideas and your vision and what you wanna create on paper and just bounce it off people without any attachment whatsoever.
Maybe they shoot you down, but you just never know until you go.
And it just takes a little bit of practice.
Ultimately, we’re all just making it up as we go.
And the reason I’ve been so successful in collaborations over the years, one, I’m super open and collaborative and I don’t need to be the boss man.
And two, I’m typically the guy who comes with the idea and the vision and I’m looking for playmates to make a thing ‘cause I prefer a collaborative experiences because it’s just easier and more fun and better, and I’m okay to share my pie.
6. Your Invitation: Start With the People Around You
So here’s what I’d love for you to walk away with.
You don’t have to do this alone.
You don’t need thousands of followers or hundreds of people in your orbit to build a successful business.
Start with the people already in your life.
Think about the people you love, the people whose work you admire, the people you would love to collaborate with, and the people you could be showing up for more fully.
And then do something about it.
Book a meeting with somebody you would love to create with.
Reach out to an old friend.
Invite somebody to go for a walk.
Start a group in your local community.
Open up some time on your calendar to have real conversations with people who might need your help.
If you’re looking for more coaching clients, get live with people.
The best thing you could do is just get people to come talk to you for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and for you to show them how much you care and that you’re an expert and that you’re listening to them and that you’re here to help them find the solutions that they’re looking for.
Do it as an experiment. Watch what happens.
And as you start building those relationships, pay attention to what happens in your life and business.
Who are you meeting? What opportunities are opening up? What new ideas and collaborations are coming to life?
You might be surprised by how much can happen when you start showing up for the people around you.
So find your people. Link arms. Rise together. And go make some magic in the world… cuz damn, does it ever need it right now!
Inspired!? Have a Question?
Reply to this email or below!
Much Gratitude,
BRADLEY T. MORRIS
Founder | Creative Director | Strategic Partner | Coach
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