Episode 81: Key Takeaways from the Community Leaders Mini-Wellness Retreat, Part 1

As an online community leader, it has been challenging to juggle personal and professional tasks over the past two years. 

Many leaders feel overwhelmed with building, launching, and growing. I’m one of them. 

In this episode of the Community Strategy Podcast, you’ll hear the recording of the 2-hour wellness mini-retreat that I hosted with community leaders and fellow Find Calm Here Community members. You’ll hear tips, success stories, challenges, and how to avoid burnout and overwhelm as community professionals during this event. 

Carolyn Zick of Bad Axe Enterprises will help you find calm in marketing your online community. She’ll give tips and strategies to avoid burnout and teach you to grow your online business, scale your community, and inspire others. 

Carolyn is a multi-passionate business owner and marketing nerd. She believes that you can be intentional and impactful online while respecting your mental health. Find her in her online communities: Bad Axe Biz Club and AMIDST Creatives of the Midwest.

DoTERRA Wellness Advocate, Leah Light, shares specific oils to assist remote work.

Leah is a Natural Solutions Enthusiast who loves sharing the benefits of a natural lifestyle with others. Leah experienced health obstacles from a young age and always felt there had to be a way to address the root of the problem rather than only treating the symptoms. 

There are many approaches to and facets of healing. Essential oils are one of the tools you can add to your wellness toolbox!

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Transcript

Welcome to today’s amazing event, celebrating two years with the community launched back in 2020 bring together community leaders for a little mini wellness retreat, because we are here today to celebrate Find Calm Here. And hopefully, you can find some calm. Today, learn a little bit and enjoy meeting some new people. We’ve got some new people registered that aren’t members of the community.

So the members that are in the room here, please welcome the people here in our small community. During this session, feel free to ask questions in the chat 

I launched this thing I had great ideas and great intentions for it, and then it didn’t. end up being something that was financially successful. I had a four-hour virtual summit with 15 speakers on Crowdcast.

I like to do things to the, to the nines basically, and I didn’t have any paid members after that launch. And the next day after that I went and sat in a park and I was upset and I just laid there and was crying. I was just upset about like my life. I was like, what am I gonna do next?

And. At the end of that after like the next couple of weeks and, and months people reached out to me and said, they didn’t know, I failed. They didn’t know anything about the background. They just saw me massively going out and sharing my message and, seeing that I was really passionate, they said, ” Deb, I want you to help me.

Can you help me with my, I have an idea for an online community. And that’s where I started to build a consulting business, Carol and Ani, and a couple of other people know how hard I worked to try to figure out how to keep doing this thing called community because I realized that this business and this industry that I joined in 2020 was such a massive, amazing experience for me to be a community leader and bring others together online because it’s just, it’s just massively crazy how you can meet people on a zoom call and never meet them in real life.

And they can. Become your best friends and Carol and Annie and, and so many other people. Are that way. I keep pointing them out, cuz they’re like right in front of my screen and they were here from like day one. They were here before day one and we met what happened was, is the Find Calm Here. The community moved from a wellness community to a community for community leaders. And I actually led what was then called the Mighty mastermind. After six months we met every week to talk about community building. How do we make this community thing happen? How do we, how do we bring people together?

How do we create engagement? How do we have great experiences? And through that whole journey over six months from June, we met every week until December of 2020 with community leaders. And that experience allowed me to realize and understand the challenge that others have, not just the challenge that I had, but the challenge that others have and that they have such a great message and they get just get stuck in the tech of everything.

They get stuck in just a million things, the setup, or, you know, what my message is, who I bring together, why and what the value is and that, and how you can charge for it, how you can ask people to give their hard-earned money, to be a part of this. And so I launched the Mighty mastermind. January officially we had, that was a, was a really great success.

I learned so much from that, that we built what is called now, the growth seats where we each got to present our community ideas and our structures. And from that experience, I learned so much more about the community on top of the fact that I had been a community manager, and community leader, this whole journey now has come around to say that community leaders know that it’s important to support each other.

And that’s what we do inside the Find Calm Here community. What we know as a community leader is it’s about the connection and the community itself, and the people that we bring together inside the community, during the book clubs, during the accountability calls, and all the other events that we’re gonna start doing live interviews every month.

We all have a mission and a message that we wanna share. And we know that we wanna hold space for people so they can be seen, valued, and heard. 

Mindful Marketing with Carolyn Zick

I am going to pivot this over to Carolyn. She is gonna share with us mindful marketing for your community. We’re gonna talk a little bit about her experience with, leading her own community, which I’m a member of, which is amazing. Today is really about how you share your message mindfully?

So Carolyn I’ll let you tell the rest. 

Awesome. Intro. I am a social marketing nerd. I started my company’s bad acts enterprises in 2015. I love business owners. I love communities. That is where my heart is. Grew up with two parents who owned their own businesses. So in my mind, that was the only logical path forward. Right? Love the flexibility, bringing people together, all of that stuff, bad ex Enterprise is a social marketing company. And my focus is organic growth.

That is mindful, right? Like mental health, positive social media use because we know how detrimental social media and the internet can be to how our brains function just on a functional level, right? Not even to talk about emotional damage and everything else. So with social marketing and your community, you want your community no matter what to be a healthy space, right?

You want people to go there, whether you’re for wellness, whether you’re focused on something else, whatever you want people to go to your community. To be supported in some way. And you want them to go there with healthy behaviors. You don’t really want necessarily, I’m just making vast assumptions about everybody here, but you probably don’t want the angry basement-dwelling, keyboard warriors who are online all day, very upset about everything.

That’s not healthy in any community, right. Even for them, they should be doing other things to support their mental health. So how do you mindfully send the message, and spread the word about your community in a way that’s still really supportive of not only your mental health but your potential members, right?

Like you don’t wanna be encouraging people to be constantly plugged in. So super brief, obviously, I could talk about this forever, cuz I love communities., these are the number. That three things that you should be doing to develop a really mindful strategy, whether it’s for your community, for your brand in general, are gonna be fairly universal.

Okay. So first Deb kind of touched on this a little bit. You have to know who your members are. You have to know who your ideal client is, and you have to do your homework before you start doing any sort of community-building planning for marketing. Any of that, you have to be really real with yourself.

And sometimes it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit of, a soul journey. to be realistic about who you’re working with. So I’ve worked with a lot of different clients across a lot of different industries. For marketing strategy. And I’ve had several different instances where a client is completely convinced that they’re going to work with this type of person.

When in actuality, their products and services are aligned to somebody who’s very different and they don’t wanna admit that or make changes, right? They’re like, Nope, this is how I wanna talk about my brand. This is what I wanna do. I’m like, then you are consistently going to attract the wrong person. So for some people, it’s harder to let go of preconceived notions they have about who needs them, and who needs their community.

Who’s going to engage and who’s going to go through it the best way to do that as Deb will tell you. And she’s very skilled at doing this is to ask people you have to do homework interview, potential clients, interview potential members, know kind of what the transformation is that your community will offer.

Think backward about it, okay. Who would want to undergo that transformation or engage in that sort of growth and then find those types of people and ask them, and if you keep getting a negative response or like, they’re like, oh yeah, that I wouldn’t really need that? Adjust the sample, adjust the audience and keep going until you find who your ideal client is.

That’s before you do any marketing work, you have to know the people cuz that’s what the community is native to. We don’t care about the content. It’s about the people and if the right people aren’t there, it’s gonna be no fun and a problem. So the second tip I have for you today for mindful marketing of your community is to plan content that provides value like such a marketing buzz phrase.

And so not only does it provide value, this is where it gets very magical for your community. That model and the behavior that you want within your community. So we’ll use my community as kind of a case study for this. So I’m a social marketing nerd. Most of my social media presence is about different social marketing strategies and tactics.

I’m always asking questions. I’m always asking people to weigh in, to send me messages, to tell me a story about that specific topic that I’m sharing. Those are things when people get into my community, which is called Bax Axe Biz Club. When people get in there, they, it’s not optional. They have to do that to participate.

They’ve already been primed to know like, Hey, Carolyn’s going to listen. If she asks for feedback about something or if she wants to hear her biggest struggle, she’s gonna weigh in right away. One of the first things you do when you join my community is you’re asked what is your current biggest marketing struggle?

And when you answer that, I’m immediately either sharing a link to one of my YouTube videos or a resource that I know about. I’m replying to that. Cuz I want that first interaction that people have within the community to be a reward for the behavior. I’ve already modeled on social media, right? Replying to me telling me what’s going on in their lives, being vulnerable, as soon as they’re in the community and they interact with the behavior, we’ve modeled on social media.

I want them to get a reward. I want them to have a solution right away. Doesn’t always work. But sometimes most of the time it does and they then know like, right. Okay. So they’ve been commenting and replying. Maybe we’ve had a few messages. I’m like, Hey, you should join biz club. It’s free. It’s neat. And there are a lot of resources for you there.

They join. They have, a struggle that they share. They immediately get that little benefit. Right, right away. The third piece, if you’re figuring out, you know, I have my content figured out, I know who my ideal client is. I know what’s gonna happen within the community. So what’s that external marketing piece.

Where should I show up? Obviously, when you have your ideal client defined, it’s easier to figure out where they are online, and where to show up. But I would always suggest picking platforms focus on that have a longer lifespan for your content. Community is not something that happens in a day or two days.

It takes a very long time to build. If you’re committing to building a community, you’re committing to the long haul. Right? So if you say, make a few Facebook posts about it, maybe a couple of LinkedIn posts, things like that. The lifespan of a social media post is so small. It’s like a day or two. Now, if you make a YouTube video that has a really search engine optimized, cuz YouTube is owned by Google, a very rich title, very keyword, heavy description, and it solves a problem that you’re gonna solve even deeper in your community.

You will constantly be attracting those people over a much longer lifespan with your content. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t or don’t need an Instagram or Facebook presence or anything like that. Just be aware and be very intentional with where you’re putting your most time and effort and resources. 

Blogs, YouTube, and even Pinterest, because it is a search engine that content has. A lot more life than just posting on Instagram or just tweeting that are the three tips that I have. A good foundation on being really intentional with your community marketing.

For social media marketing, you hear a lot of times it’s all about creating content that could be like a full-time job unless you have a VA that does all that or social media marketer that does that for you. Gary V says post a hundred times a day, or if you hear other people that their thing is if you don’t have anything valuable to say, don’t say anything, what do you think from a social media marketing perspective? Are we like where, what we should be doing? 

Yeah. So number one, always think analytically, right?

A social media platform wants people in it long and wants people to stay on it longer. That’s unhealthy. It’s not good for your brain. It’s not good for your people’s brains. So how can you use it in a way that supports you supports your end-user for me, and most of my clients, the strategy that I suggest is to figure out a frequency that you can be consistent with.

So consistently doesn’t mean constant consistent means. If you’re like, I know I can have a one really amazing post per week, that’s just really rich with information with whatever. That’s just a really good post. I’m gonna do it. If you’re like, no, I could do it daily. That cadence feels really good to me. Go for it, but just keep it in mind.

It’s for. The long haul and more and more I’m seeing, you know, Instagram, Facebook, even with the rise of TikTok video is the content that gets the most love and pushed out the most. So to me, I’m like, if I’m making videos, I’m putting them on YouTube, cuz it’s backed by the most powerful search engine. So starting at the beginning of this year, I’ve really focused on that as a platform for my business.

And it’s amazing the level of attraction I’ve had for, you know, it’s not massive. I’m just starting out, but how do videos perform? Well, weeks after they’re posted and the reach that they get versus an Instagram post that’s like maybe two hours of performance. Two hours versus hundreds of hours of performance.

To me, I’m like, you know, my time is my investment. Sure. I could hire people to make content for me, but I have to interact with that content. No one is me. No one knows my business as well as I do. So I’m still gonna have to go in. If I have a VA posting for me every single day, I’m still gonna have to check in every day.

No, thank you. Knowing what you want, the amount of time you wanna spend on social media, like physically spend on it. Cuz even if you schedule posts in advance, you’d need to see if there was a comment check-in on those things. Know how long you wanna spend. Be really real with it. One thing I do is I grid out 24 boxes on a piece of paper and then I color in like, okay, you know, representing the 24 hours in a day.

I need to spend eight hours sleeping. I probably spend two to three hours eating. I wanna hang out with my kids for this long and I wanna knit for this long. And then, you know, you kind of work in and be like, okay, my working hours are these, how much of that time do I wanna spend with clients? How much do I wanna spend on social media?

I view it more from the human perspective, right? Sure. Posting it a hundred times a day probably would result in a lot of followers, but those are followers that are gonna demand constant attention from you. And that’s not, that’s not what you want. So I hope that answers the question. 

Thank you so much, Carolyn. What amazing tips there are so many people creating content, just for creating content’s sake, instead of why content is important, the purpose of it, and the thought behind it

So I think that a lot of people don’t take that time. 

you end up working against yourself too. Yeah. Then, when you are just creating content to create content, you’re wasting your own time. You’re wasting people’s time. They’re not gonna view you as important or high value, cuz you’re just putting garbage out whole.

But yeah, I’ll end on that. 

Carolyn’s in the, Find Calm Here community. So all the members that are here in the Find Calm Here community, please connect with Carolyn, in our space there, ask her follow-up questions after, this event inside there, and Carolyn is gonna be hosting a live interview with us for the community strategy podcast coming up.

Essential Oils for Remote Workers with Leah Light

Leah lives near me in Pennsylvania. She has this amazing ability to bring calm into a physical space and a virtual one, and just, she’s a joy to be friends with, she teaches me so much about essential oils and how to be kinder to myself. So I’ll let you introduce yourself, Leah.

Thank you, Deb. You know, I’m always so much in admiration of how you have an idea and actually make it happen and can really bring people together.

And Carolyn, that was really, really helpful information. So thank you 

for sharing that. Oh, one more thing I wanted to say, Leah, you had told me, do you remember what you said to me in 2020? No. you said to me in 2020, you said Deb, when I was talking to you about what I’m gonna do with, with Find Calm here, you said, Deb, I envision you being on a stage and speaking to people.

And I’m like, no and you are, and guess what? I was just in Orlando, speaking on a stage about the community of people. That is cool. Thank you for thinking that that was possible for me two years ago

awesome. Of course. yeah. So, a little bit about me. My name is Leah Light and I got into a more natural approach to life, because of different experiences that I had and different problems, basically that I had ever since I was a child.

And I didn’t want to just keep putting bandaids on symptoms. I wanted to really get to the root cause of what was happening and heal myself. And I believed that that was possible. And with essential oils, they’re like one tool kind of in your tool belt that you can use for different things. And I’m gonna jump right in because there’s a lot that I could cover.

And I picked some of the top things for supporting remote work. That’s what Deb has had asked me to talk about today and there, well, first is anybody here familiar with essential oils? Could you like to raise your hand a few? Okay. That helps me gauge. And if you’re not on video, if you wanna put it in the chat, you’re welcome to say that you’ve never used essential oils, or if you use them every day, or a lot of people are somewhere in between.

Okay. so there are three ways to use essential oils. And the first is aromatic, which is maybe the most common. And when you’re using an oil aromatically, what’s happening is it’s actually going into your limbic system, which is like our emotional center. So if you have essential oils, you can just take a drop in your hand and rub your hands together and breathe it in.

And that’s called the human diffuser. And I just put a drop of wild orange in my hands, and it’s like walking through an orange Grove field. It smells amazing. And scientifically it’s really cool too because what happens when we breathe in a citrus oil is right away. You can see on a brain scan that our serotonin levels rise and serotonin is like our feel-good.

One of our feel-good hormones. So that’s really good to keep us going and motivated throughout the day to use a citrus oil like that. And then let me see what else I made some notes from myself. Other ways that you can use oils. Aromatically are in an actual diffuser where you just put a few drops of essential oil and then water, and you can put a mist on.

And that’s really great to set your mood for the day. Maybe sometimes we all have things that, uh, we have to do that we don’t really want to do. It might be the more mundane thing. So you might want something to really like perk you up wild, orange and peppermint together is amazing for that because peppermint is really invigorating and like gets the oxygen flowing and a drop of each of those in your hands like that, or in the diffuser is great.

Especially if you’re, uh, one of those people who likes afternoon coffee or needs it, but you’re trying to cut back. That’s a good substitute. 

And then of course, aromatically, you can also use things to calm you down. Sometimes there are things that happen throughout our day that you can feel your nervous system start to rise. Maybe your heart rate rises or you start getting warm and sweaty, things like that. So lavender is all things calming. Pretty much everybody has heard of lavender, and it really is a very, uh, Calming plant that we can access for our mind, but also for our skin. I just got sunburnt yesterday and I beat red.

So I lathered myself up with some lavender and I was amazed when I woke up this morning. I don’t know why I’m still amazed every time, because I’ve used essential oils for, I guess, eight years, but they really, really work. You just have to open up the bottle and use them. And the other one that I wanted to talk about with calming is balanced because balance is a really great one for grounding.

It’s a blend and. Deb, I think likes balance a lot. Right? 

Deb. It’s one of my faves and actually, I have to get some more cuz I’m out. okay. 

but yeah. Balance is a blend that you can use morning, noon, and night to just center yourself. It is also known as the grounding blend. So whenever you need to kind of go back to the drawing board, maybe your day has gotten thrown outta whack.

You had your priorities when you got to your office in the morning and then things just come up and you have to like come back to the center and refocus. That’s a great one for that. Does anybody have questions or anything that they’d like to add? Okay. And then the second way to use essential oils is topically and what you can do whenever you’re using essential oils, topically is mix it with what’s called a carrier oil and we call this diluting.

And I always thought, whenever you dilute something, it makes it less strong. But actually, when we’re diluting an essential oil, it’s called a carrier oil. And my favorite is fractionated coconut oil, because it’s very, like non-greasy, you could use olive oil if that’s what you have, but then you’re gonna smell like olive oil and it leaves more of a film, like a greasy film.

And the fractionated coconut oil does not have a sense it absorbs really nicely into your skin and it helps you get more bang for your buck because you can stretch the essential oil further. 

With topical use, you wanna use that more whenever you have something like you’re really trying to work on I, or what am I like a focused concern?

Like if your shoulder hurts. You’re not really gonna think you wanna breathe in deep blue, but you wanna rub it where it hurts basically. So speaking of this is the deep blue rub, and this is the product that got me into doTERRA essential oils because this absolutely honestly changed my life because I’ve had chronic pain and fatigue ever since I was a child.

And it would be so bad, especially in my neck that I wouldn’t be able to turn my head. I’d have to like turn my whole body and call off work because I couldn’t even support the weight of my head. And using deep blue rub consistently is such a game-changer for me, because like I said earlier, instead of just sticking a bandaid on it, actually getting to the root of the problem and deep blue has frankincense in it, which helps to treat inflammation.

And I also love frankincense because of the co-impact sourcing story. doTERRA always is very, very mindful about what oils they’re providing for us and where they’re sourcing them from. And sustainability is the most important thing. So sometimes people will ask me, Leah, why doesn’t have doTERRA or why doesn’t doTERRA have Rosewood essential oil?

I love Rosewood or Paula Santo is a really popular one that I’m asked about too. And it’s because it’s not sustainable for the planet. And that’s what co-impact sourcing is. Means partially, but it’s also whenever I purchase a bottle of essential oil, it benefits me and it also positively impacts the people who grew the plants, harvested them, and distilled them.

doTERRA really takes care of the growers. And I really wanna go into more of that, but I don’t have time for that. But if you want to just go to YouTube and look up doTERRA co-impact sourcing, and a bunch of videos will pop up where you can find out about the different oils. And Franken sense is one of my favorite stories with that.

And then lastly, three minutes left is internal use. And this is only with doTERRA oils because essential oils are an unregulated market. So anybody could just decide that they want to start their own essential oil business. And they go and buy essential oil from a broker and they can label it however they want.

So they could label it and say, it’s a hundred percent pure. And that doesn’t mean that it is because they don’t even know what they’re buying. And oftentimes the brokers will put synthetics in to stretch the oil further and make more money. So with doTERRA, you can use their oils internally, but not every single oil.

You would be able to tell because like, this is a bottle of lemon, which I put in my water pretty much every day and right on the bottle, it has. The supplement fax label. And that’s how, you know, if it’s recommended for internal use or not. And citrus oils are really great. Like I said earlier for our mood, but also as a gentle detox.

So that’s why I like to drink it in my water because no matter how many toxic-free products we have in our home, like cleaning products and things like that, even if we’ve switched all that over, we’re always breathing in toxins from car fumes and everything like that. So just every day, keeping up with the gentle detox with citrus oils is really great.

And then also with that water is the most important thing. Pretty much every time I meet with somebody and we go over their health concerns, they know that they need to drink more water and it’s a lot easier when it tastes amazing. by putting some essential 

So feel free to reach out to me to discuss your health goals.

If you’d like to do that, I would be happy to chat with you one on one about that and come up with a personalized wellness plan for you. Thank you all. Wish I could stay with you, but I really appreciate being here for 

this time. Yes. Thank you so much for the presentation. Great tips essential oils have definitely been a game-changer for me, annoyed some of my coworkers when I was in the office space, but, I have my clear, calm with me right here today.

I had the diffuser going earlier. So yes, always recommend it, and Leah is very kind with her time. So if you wanna just chat about essential oil, she’s always happy to talk. So definitely reach out to her. And, um, I just put her contact information in there in the, uh, notes as well. So thanks, Leah.