Balancing Being and Doing

We were promised connection, but got audiences.

Since the birth of social networks in the early 2000s, businesses have tried to leverage one of humanity's core needs to strengthen their products: community.

In doing so, community became synonymous with platforms and tactics: content, groups, messaging, feeds. It was measured in metrics: engagement, followers and views. With all that online social networks gave us, their fundamental mistake was underestimating what belonging actually requires.

And without belonging, there is no community.

We need to reclaim what building community-led businesses truly requires.

To do so, let's go back to the roots of what makes community worth it and what makes it work.

In 2016, I joined one of the longest-standing and most impactful communities of my life. Back then, my friends and I were all interested in mindfulness, but had no idea what we were doing. Thankfully, one of my friends' parents was a seasoned meditator and facilitator. She invited us to come over on the first Monday of every month to practise mindfulness at her home.

What started as a small experiment became a decade-long drumbeat in our lives. I knew that I could show up every month and connect with people in a way I couldn't in everyday life. I listened and was listened to - deeply. We laughed, gained crucial life skills, and cultivated wonderful friendships. We organised simply but effectively, with an RSVP WhatsApp message a week before.

Over time, we started co-designing the experience and eventually began facilitating sessions ourselves. Thanks to Bridgette's tough but fair approach, we all implicitly knew what was allowed and what wasn't. Her deep passion for the topic and relational skills seeped into the culture of the group. Her beautiful home and pristine slides told us we were intentionally gathering, not just hanging out. People thought we were a cult for a while, but we didn't mind.

When you walked through those doors, you were made to feel like you belonged, you were in capable hands and that you would leave a little wiser.

We're interested in building community-led businesses, not passion projects. But the principles that made it work are the same ones that successful community-led businesses require.

A community's way of being

This community, like any community-led business, was run off two interdependent processes: a community's way of being and its way of doing.

A community's way of being starts with its founder and is shaped by its members.

Before a community has culture, it has a host - someone with a leading edge. The founder's values, sense of purpose, emotional patterns, relationship to power, conflict and status and assumptions about people all shape the environment members enter into. This becomes the starting point for the community's own way of being. Over time, the community develops its own norms, energy and culture, but in the early stages it is deeply influenced by what the founder models, allows and rewards.

This shapes whether people stay, contribute and draw others in. It affects whether community members get the outcomes they came for. A strong community can reinforce learning, create accountability, deepen belonging and turn passive consumption into real participation.

Bridgette's way of being, over the course of ten years, birthed and steered Mindful Mondays. This wasn't always easy for her. She was always preparing for the next session, carrying the programme alone for many years. People would cancel in droves at the last minute. Relationships got frayed around sensitive topics. Many times she would say it wasn't easy - but she loved it nonetheless.

Like Bridgette, community builders need to understand not only their own way of being, but how it is shaping the community's way of being. People feel this long before they can describe it. They can sense whether a space is shaped by generosity or performance, curiosity or control, steadiness or insecurity.

A community's way of doing

Your way of being is your community's source of connection. Your community's way of doing is its execution system.

It is how you design conversations, facilitate sessions, create rituals, set expectations, manage logistics, use platforms, measure health and translate insight into offers or next steps. This is what gives a community form and purpose. A good way of doing creates rhythm, consistency and clarity. It helps members understand how to participate, what value they can expect and how the community fits into their lives.

This is its source of credibility.

Most new community builders' first questions are about this. They reach for platforms, tools, channels and content rhythms. Part of this is how we have been taught to think about community. But the deeper reason is that real community-building requires more care, restraint and patience than a tech stack can provide. These things are also harder to measure and harder to delegate.

The two traps

There are two traps here: leaning too far in one direction and misalignment.

Being without doing can create a space that feels thoughtful and human, but struggles to hold shape under pressure. Doing without being creates the opposite problem: the structure may be polished and efficient, but something essential is missing.

Then there is the subtler challenge. A community builder may value depth, trust and real connection while building systems that feel transactional, noisy, or overly engineered. Members may not be able to name the problem, but they can sense when the culture and the structure are not making the same promise.