Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Living a More Connected Life with Radha Agrawal

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

I think we can all agree we are in an epidemic of loneliness. Most of us are craving deeper relationships, a genuine sense of belonging, and a community that feels like home. In this episode of "The Language of Love Conversation," I sit down with Radha Agrawal, a nine-figure entrepreneur and community-building expert. Together, we delve into the art of forging meaningful connections and share powerful strategies for cultivating relationships that truly matter. We also get into how storytelling, rituals, and even a bit of aesthetic magic can transform your community? Radha brings these insights straight from her book, Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life. Collaboration and the strength of community can help us overcome life’s toughest challenges. Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll discover: The crucial role of social connections in our lives The growing epidemic of loneliness and its impact on mental health Practical strategies for fostering meaningful friendships The idea of "FYF" (Fuck Yes) friendships The CRAWL method for community building How social media can facilitate real-life connections The importance of aligning personal values and interests in building community Navigating the friendship life cycle and overcoming challenges How rituals can foster a deeper sense of belonging The transformative power of storytelling in creating supportive networks Don’t miss out—check out Radha’s book, Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life, for even more awesome tips. Connect with her on her website, LinkedIn, or Instagram. And while you’re at it, swing by my website for courses made just for you! @love.radha @dybrkr @belongcenter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the past 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Here on the Language of Love Conversations, I'm talking to some of the world's most influential and revolutionary experts, thought leaders, spiritual teachers, and celebrities about love, sex, and relationships from a mind, body, and spirit perspective. And that way, my goal is to awaken your mind, body, and soul. It's time to become fluent in the language of love. Radha Agrawal is a nine-figure entrepreneur, a best-selling author, and a renowned speaker in community building. She's a community architect, founded Daybreaker, which is a global dance community with close

to a million members that grew organically with no advertising. Her expertise is sought after by educational institutions like Boston University, major companies like Facebook, Adidas, AARP. She also co-founded Thinks Underwear and has successfully launched and invested in various other businesses and wellness and in the wellness sector. She is a powerhouse and her book, Belong, Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life is a beautiful roadmap for finding, calling in, and creating your tribe, whether it's just a group of friends or community on a purpose. I'm so excited for this Language of Love conversation with Radha Agrawal. Radha Agrawal, I'm so thrilled that you're with us on the Language of Love. thank you for joining us. It's so great to be here, Laura. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. I've been a fan for a long time as a sex educator and therapist, which is my background. I was so excited when things came out for so many reasons, ecological ones, emotional ones, international ones, women's rights reasons. So for those of you who don't know, this is probably not the right term of it, but it's menstrual underwear, basically. Yeah. And I've always been a fan of Daybreaker since I think since you guys started for years. And we'll get into all this in a minute. But for years, I kept saying to my friends, like, I want to go clubbing, but without the clubbing part. I have a dance party in our living room. And right as I was moving out of Chicago to L.A., I started hearing about this Daybreaker thing. And so when I heard

about your book and I've kind of been following you along the Daybreaker route, I had no idea that you are also the co-founder of Thinx, of the period underwear. So you're quite an inventive powerhouse. Oh my gosh. Thank you, Laura. I'm so excited to talk to you about this, but in particular, because my peeps here, I hear from so many of them, especially when I post things. I'm someone who grew up with tremendous social anxiety and my mother was extremely socially anxious, who was kind of passed on logistically and emotionally. And it wasn't really until my 30s that I started getting healthy enough inside myself and doing enough of my own healing to resolve that and to start making friends. And over the past, I would say, five to

10 years, I've really been so blessed to create this tribe of soul friends that have seen me through some of the darkest, most devastating times in my life. And so when I post things about it or people see me with my community, they're like, oh, I don't have that. I don't know. I don't know how to do that. And like, I have my few little tips. But you have this book called Belong, Find Your People, Create Community and Live a More Connected Life. I think it's a best seller. Am I correct? It is. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I read it and I was like, OK, this will be cool. This woman's really cool, obviously. Let me see what the book is about. But what I loved was that it's literally a roadmap, not just for like creating community. If you want to create

an organization or something, you have your own daybreaker dream. We're going to talk about what daybreaker is in a second, but it's also like a guide for how to make even one friend, much less a community of friends. Like it gets into everything you need to find your people, which is like, I'm so excited to share this with you guys, because I know you've been asking questions about this and there's this epidemic of loneliness that you Roddy know about better than I do. Maybe we should start there. Like what are the latest statistics? Yeah. So one in four Americans have zero friends to confide in. And this number has tripled in the last 30 years. And it turns out that having poor social connections is as harmful to your physical

health as being an alcoholic or twice as harmful as smoking cigarettes. First of all, thank you for highlighting the important conversation of belonging and ending loneliness. When I think about every social issue we face as a human species, it all ladders down to, I don't belong, therefore I will dot, dot, dot, harm myself or harm others, harm the planet, right? It's a gun violence, political polarization, the environmental degradation, like every single school shootings, you know, literally every single social issue we face as a species ladders down to, I don't belong. And so when I was looking at where I could support in creating a foundation or a nonprofit, I realized that actually underneath each of these problems that we're trying to solve is,

is our sense of belonging or sense of loneliness. And so I thought to myself, if we actually can end loneliness, then we can take down systematically every single social issue we face as a species. So it can then kind of get all of them at once. Amen. And that just gives me full body chills because like no in every cell of my being, that is true. And it's what's underneath everything. Right. Think about the wars. Think about every dictator. I think they didn't belong growing up. They became dictators, right? It's not Hitler. He was such an outcast. That's right. That's right. I mean, look at the presidential campaign. So there's a lot of, you know, not enough conversation happening around. I mean, now there is around loneliness beginning to, but we're talking about depression and anxiety for so long because pharmaceutical companies could make a lot of money selling anxiety and depression medication.

but you can't medicate loneliness. You can only solve for it through social connection and learning how to make friends, right? Learning how to rupture and repair, learning how to really choose the five closest friends you keep, you know, wisely. And so that's kind of why I wrote the book and why, you know, I started Daybreaker, why I launched my nonprofit. You know, all of my projects that I work on now are in one way or another connected to building community and making friends. That's everything. And you call yourself, which is a perfect title, a community architect. And you kind of spell out in the book how to build, literally design and build your friendships and your community and even an intentional community. So let's we're

going to go through kind of some of we're not I mean, it's all in the book and we'll kind of summarize some of the key steps that that stood out to me. But one of the places you start and this is relevant to anyone who just wants to make a friend, right? Because like you said, so many people don't even have one person. That's right. You talk about the importance of cultivating these FSFs, the five cents friendships and the fuck yes friends that you want as fuck yes friends, FYFs as possible. And usually those fuck yes friends are five cents friendships. But I think that's really important. I want you to explain it in particular with regard to social media because you know a lot of people are using I mean I'm guilty of that too

I'm so busy let me just have a quick zoom tea with you as well right right right talk about that for a minute yeah so I mean let me like first take a kind of a quick 10,000 foot view of sort of like our experience as a human right so we go through maybe seven or eight transitions in our lifetimes when we're moving from our home to college for the first time or just moving away from home as a teenager, when we graduate college, when we move to a new city to get a job, when we find someone, fall in love, and when we get married, when we have kids, when we get divorced, when we retire, there's all these moments of transition in our lives where we're starting over, right? And you move away from home, you go to college. And actually, just a quick share, a few universities,

Boston University, being one of the few others, have picked up my book to give like 5,000 copies for all their incoming freshmen, which is really cool. I think it's an amazing thing for colleges to do is to give their incoming freshmen who are so vulnerable, just because they're home for the first time, a roadmap for how to make friends in school. And no one knows how to do that. That's such a good idea. Especially, I have a now, my youngest is a sophomore in college and he He, for some reason, has never been interested in social media from like a statusy kind, but he's not on there. He'd rather be outside.

He's my only kid like that. But notice that his whole community, like the whole class are so socially awkward because they were sheltered, you know, they were sheltered at home. They didn't have social interactions and mostly, and now this is getting a lot more play, thank God, because they've lived their lives on social media rather than in person. That's right. And it's interesting. We're starting to consult now for a lot of college campuses to really serve these students who just are so socially anxious, socially awkward, don't know how in the building blocks of friendship, don't know actually that you make mistakes sometimes in friendships. That's a sort of part of life. And if you say one wrong thing to not be canceled, but to forgive each other, to learn the tools and the muscles of rupture and repair. There's so many different areas of socialization that we have obviously not, you know, kind of been in the dojo or been in the gym of life around, yeah, it's becoming increasingly

more important to A, address it and B, support, whether it's students or, you know, again, like I said, across each one of these transitions in our lives, the opportunity to kind of give people the courage and confidence and the tools for how to create your community at each of these transitional moments. So one thing to say about social media is I like social media for Daybreaker to share with my community when the next in-person event is happening, right? So it's like a really great way to just sort of broadcast to my community, my friends, my followers, whoever, that there's an in-person IRL event happening. So I will often use social media as a quick tool to get off as

fast as possible. And I love Hinge's tagline, for example, designed to be deleted. This idea that you come online, you meet someone and then you're taking it offline and you delete the app. That's the point. So I think social media, if we use it in the way that I do believe it was probably initially intended to be built. And again, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say i really do believe that they're the initial intention was let me how can i just get in touch with as many people as possible i have to message each person one at a time or pick up the phone and call them one at a time i can just let my whole community know that i'm doing a big picnic or a big dance party a big daybreaker event at this venue at this place and and let my whole

community know i think now it's because they've added the followers and the likes and of course were becoming more educated in that, in the psychology of, you know, and then the negative aspects of that, that were becoming more attuned to it. There's a lot more kind of social media tools, like, you know, 15 minute limits and things like that, that are being placed on there. I know, including myself, I will often just ignore it or just pretend it's not there, but there are new efforts being made to express the, obviously the, the downsides of social media. And I think particularly for a sense of belonging, right, it's we have to build a muscle in person to fall in love, to make love. Think about, you know, when you kiss someone, you're not going to just learn online.

You have to go and actually practice the art of kissing. We have to practice the art of talking, the art of conversation, the art of having difficult, I call it crucial conversations, right? Krush. I call it a krush, which makes it a little bit more joyful. Wonderful. There's actually a book called Crucial Conversations that I read that I really loved, but I kind of made it more playful and I call it Crucious. I'll call my friends now and I'll say, hey, Laura, can we have a quick crush? You know, something that you said that I just want to clarify and make sure that we're still on the same page or, you know, that it touched

a chord for me and I wanted to clarify it. So I'll call friends and it's actually fun to have Crucious. It doesn't feel like, hey, Laura, can we talk? Which is also very nerve wracking and very, you know, sort of fear inducing, right? Yeah, I have a lot of things like that. And also this idea of getting, whether it's for yourself or for a community you're building, like, you know, if it's just for finding one friend or for creating a whole community, getting really clear on your VIA is your acronym, right? Your values, your interests and your abilities. And we'll get into values in a minute, because I love how you break that down. And I think that's so crucial to think about. People don't think about when they're thinking about calling new community in

or friendships, and they don't get clear on what their values are. That's right. They don't get clear on what values they want in a friend, what values they don't want in a friend, what they need to kind of change to be a match for those friends that they want to embody that themselves, right? You get into all of that. But I think that this authenticity piece runs through everything you do, like even with the cruche, right? Let's have a cruche. Let's have an authentic conversation. Maybe you didn't mean to say this thing that triggered me, but it triggered me and I have this reaction, which is so who I am. And my way of saying it is that I have tons of shadows. Everyone I know has tons of shadows, but I'm only interested in being close to and working

closely with people who are just friends with their shadows. So when they come up or when they get triggered, like my joke with my friends is if I trigger them or they trigger me, the one who triggered at the end of the conversation will be, well, you're welcome. Yeah, exactly. Welcome for triggering you because that gave you an opportunity to, you know, it's kind of a joke. You're welcome that I was an asshole and triggered you. No, that's right. That's right. It's like all we do is keep meeting these triggers and composting them right and so yeah so so you know when i think about your values and your interests your abilities you know it really is about doing an audit once a year we change skin like our cells regenerate every seven years right so like who i

am today is a completely different skin than i wore seven years ago and so to really honor our values changing and evolving, right? And, you know, some people in the political world will call it flip-flopping, but actually it's just learning more about yourself until you're making an evolutionary kind of upgrade, right, based on these new key learnings. And so I really love kind of auditing and reevaluating my values, my interests, and what I'm good at, right? How I show my abilities and how I want to show up in my community. Once a year I do that, I'll write down a list of everyone that I feel close to and everyone that I want to continue deepening a relationship with, which is a really beautiful practice. And then I kind of sit down and I'm

like, oh, wow. You know, I remember the year I became a mother to my five-year-old daughter named Soleil. And I remember when I became a mother, you know, my values completely started shifting, right? From partying and socializing and just going to one festival culture and that whole thing, which I still obviously love, but really kind of beginning to value more education and family dynamics and family adventures and sort of activities focused on intergenerational connection. So my values changed, right? When I became a mother and my values changed when I turned 40, my values changed when, when, when, when, right? And so it's been a really fun way to track who I am over the last decade through these sort of changes in my values. Same thing

in my interests, right? My interests obviously change when you become a mother, when as you get older, my interest now on longevity, on breath work, on, you know, and really just understanding kind of, you know, just the way my body really works so that I could continue supporting her for years to come. And also my interest, yeah, continued to be in the world of the next generation and how I can really be in service of not just my daughter, but, you know, her entire generation, generation to follow is sort of a really cool new interest to be able to see beyond my own nose and into the next. Yeah. And then, yeah, exactly. And then your abilities is more sort of like, as you continue to live your life, what abilities are you cultivating in yourself

that you can then bring to your community, right? And so for me, I'm a natural gatherer. My home has always been a place where people, it's like Grand Central Station. My house is always full of friends. It's always a meeting place for dinners or for parties. And so I would say my interest or my abilities continues to be gathering and sending the invitations out. And while everyone's so busy with their working lives, I sort of tend to be the one that's like, okay, I'm super busy also, but let me just organize a big summer, July 4th weekend at my farmhouse, or let me organize a Halloween party, or let me organize X, Y, and Z. It's always been something that comes naturally to me. And so I'll just go and do that. And something I actually also

also say in my book quite a bit is that you'll never be alone you never feel lonely if you have the courage to begin organizing right so if you're waiting for an invitation it may never come but if you actually begin to put an idea together get a theme together of like what what is the the theme of the event going to look like what's the name of it how much you want to spend how many well, do you want to invite? And then just sort of begin with that courageous invitation. Then all of a sudden your life changes. And that's what happened to me. Yeah, I think, and I found the same thing. It actually helped my social anxiety years ago to be the one that was hosting, even though I would get anxious, like, oh my God, I want to think about that. But you know,

there was a little of that going on, but there was also a sense of control and there was also fear, like, what if nobody comes? But I was just like, all right, then I'll just enjoy myself, you know? Exactly. That's literally it. That's literally it. I mean, like, I can't tell you how many events that I've thrown where one, two people would show up and it was perfect. We got really deep and it was amazing. And I think there's such a social pressure also in terms of how many numbers show up for you to feel good about yourself, but actually the universe delivers exactly what you need in that moment. If it was one or two people, then it's perfect. And by the way, if you give them an amazing time, then they'll invite one of their friends. And then all of a sudden it goes

from two to four, four to eight and eight, you know, and then it exponentially grows. And that's sort of how we grew our dance community Daybreaker. Yeah. And we're going to get into that using that, I think as a model to show this kind of crawl method you have for creating. Yeah. You know, I started doing these grieving mama meetups. My, my middle son died tragically and suddenly three and a half years ago. And yeah, it's like, Oh, I know. And so I, that took me on a whole journey, but what about a year, I guess, after he died, I started like lifting my head up and looking around and being like, nobody has any fricking idea how to grieve, how to like, I've been in this portal of transformation. I've gone all the way into the bottom. I can feel this major

metamorphosis happening and nobody knows how to do this. And I was like, I'm just going to do a meetup. And I said, meet, I just put it out on social media. If you've lost a child, come to Tower 25 on Saturday at this time. And I didn't know why the hell I was even doing it. I think I was kind of trying to be of service. Like I was freaking out that like, just like I was with sex when I started becoming a sex therapist 30 years ago, I looked around and I was like, what? Nobody's talking. Nobody's comfortable talking about like, well, how could everybody's doing it, but nobody's talking about it. Like, how can that be? It was sort of the same feeling. And so I thought, all right, we'll see who comes. I don't even know who's following me. And when I saw these 15 women

And walking down the beach, I started bawling because I realized that that event I was doing was not, yes, it was for them, but it was really for me because I needed them as much as they needed. I've never been, I lead group therapy, and I do my own individual therapy, but I've never been a big group therapy participant myself. But now we do these monthly grieving meetups and I get these visiting healers to come. And we do circle time. Then we have our healing thing.

And my whole thing is like, you don't have to RSVP because you don't know how the hell you're going to be feeling that day. And whoever comes is meant to come. Sometimes three people come. Sometimes 30 people come. You never know. And each time it is so perfectly designed, like we'll be able to go really deep with the three people that are there and they're the ones that like really needed it.

Yeah. And they got to have that experience that they wouldn't have had if the 30 had been there and got to have that, you know, so each time it works out so perfectly. If you just rules to just segue into what we're actually working on right now, we just launched a nonprofit this year called belong center to end loneliness. And in fact, my chief community operating officer, Becca Bernstein, she came from Sheryl Sandberg's nonprofit option B, which was all about grief, all about supporting with grief. I don't know if you know, option B. I do know option B. I don't know them personally, but I know of the organization. So Becca ran grief circles for the last five, seven years and supporting mothers like you,

just humans all around the country. She ran, she was supporting 11 million people through option B And Cheryl has since wound it down. And so I got the gift of Becca. So we're launching Belong Center Circles, these community circles to talk about your loneliness, to matchmake you with the right values line communities so that anyone like your son, like anyone in our communities that feel like you're in a moment of transition, we give you a place to go before it's too late, These circles like AA, while they're incredible, it's once you've already become an alcoholic, right? And once you've already become addicted to substances. And so our goal with Belong Circles is to create a preventative place where you can go right when you're feeling the existential experience of being human, which is loneliness, and show up to a circle and share your experience and then recognize that, oh, across intergenerations, you're not alone. and then we'll give you the tools. A, you'll make friends at the circle itself

or our team will match make you with the right values line community. We have an app that we're launching as well where you get to really connect with people who align with your values, your interests and your abilities. And so it's really exciting. And help you get clear.

I want you guys to go into schools. Exactly. Oh, that's my dream. That's the next. We're going to do that. Love to go into LA high school. I want to go into the major metros first and then work our way just because I just feel like there's so much need for, believe it or not, in the bigger the city, the lonelier

it can be. Really? Matthew McConaughey. His famous words are, all right, all right, all right. Oh, yeah. So he started an organization in high schools, I'm just mentioning because you may want to partner with them, called Just Keep Living. And it's to prevent teen suicide.

And it's an after school club. And they've had me come and speak. They meet in person at all the different schools around the country, hundreds of schools. And then they sometimes have these big Zoom gatherings where they have a speaker like me. But I bet they would be interested in some sort of collaboration. I love that. If you know anyone there, I would love it. But I'll definitely reach out. I love that. Yeah, I think high school is a critical moment to support someone's loneliness or, you know, just young people's loneliness. Starting in middle school.

Exactly. Well, my book is illustrated for that reason. I really want to feel childlike when you move through it so that across any transition of your life, whether you're an adult or a young person, you could go through the book and it really feels like it's speaking to you. I love the... Did you make those illustrations? Yeah, I creative directed all of them.

I mean, I illustrated a lot of them, most of them too, but I also work with an amazing artist, Ryan, a friend of mine too. Also, it was like, I had a big deadline, so he came in and helped me finish. That's amazing. Most of us have no idea how to move through loss. There's no roadmap to follow

when you're trying to navigate grief. And I realized this when I lost my son three years ago. As a therapist who understood grief, A whole new level of pain opened up to me when I lost my 16-year-old son. And since then, I have been building resources that have allowed me to navigate through loss, not only in a healthy way, but in a way that has transformed me for the better. We can move through the most terrible loss with grace. And that's why I have created the course, Good Grief, Healing from Loss with Love.

You can find it on my website, drlauraberman.com, right there on the homepage, as well as free resources letting you know how to support others who are going through loss. None of us has to do this alone. All right, so let's get into Daybreaker and use that example to talk about whether you want to start a huge movement or just a group that is connected around similar values or ideals. This method that Radha spells out in her book, the acronym is CRAWL. I love all the acronyms, which is, and we're going to get into these, but let's use Daybreaker and even explain what Daybreaker is, which we haven't actually done yet, to kind of go through the key steps of C-R-A-W-L.

Sure. I'd be happy to. So first of all, I started Daybreaker 11 years ago, really as a social experiment. And the idea was, it's like at a certain age when you come into your mid-30s, all of a sudden you're sort of not interested in getting drunk and staying up until 3 o'clock in the morning anymore. You still want to party and get dressed up and put on the makeup and the glitter and, you know, just have fun, but just not at the expense of your wellness, right? And so this is a time in 2013 where the worlds of wellness and festival culture were exploding, but they were not really married together. So the idea was, what if we brought wellness and the festival culture, nightlife culture together and made a baby? And that's sort of what Daybreaker is. And instead of doing it at nighttime, it's a morning dance party. So you could be in bed by 10 p.m. That's what I always say.

And it's sober. Hoda talks about this all the time on the Today Show or on, I think it's Today Show. And she's always like, is there anything in the mornings? Yeah. We've been doing it for 11 years. And the idea was, again, yeah, would people be willing to dance their faces off before going to work on a weekday morning? Now we do them on weekends as well. but it turns out that lots of people wanted this and it just took off. And yeah, we've been almost

zero dollars in marketing. It's all been whisper sharing, I call it. And we're 11 years in, we're almost a million community members in 33 cities around the world. And it's all sober. Yeah. So it's a three hour experience. It's a sober dance party. The first hour is a yoga or a movement practice. And the second two hours is a dance party with like a horn section and fire spinners and aerialists and break dancers and all in the morning. So it's like you wake up and start your day with like this gigantic energetic boom. And it's a party and you dance and you feel healthy and you're also, you know, in that collective effervescence moment. So you're sort of, you feel that high from the contact of being with other people and just this incredible

way to start your day. And yeah, we've been doing it for 11 seasons now. This is our 11th one. And in fact, this fall, we just announced yesterday our next tour, which is the Purple Tour. And the Purple Tour is to bring red states and blue states together to come home to the fact that one team, one dream. And then kind of the tagline is party to the polls. So we're bringing poll dancers to polling stations all across America. We're going to make civic engagement a fun celebratory experience rather than like going to the DMV. And, you know, we are the big party that, you know, all the big get out the vote organizations are now pointing to working with dozens of nonprofits and get out the vote orgs to work with them to party to the polls. And we also have a bunch of

elected officials uh working with us as well to make sure that the elections this year which are so important are also a celebratory experience and so we all weigh in and it's not partisan so i think that's important yes yes yes our our purple tour is meant to be yeah non-partisan it's meant to be really bringing everyone together to dance and then we're going to march the polls together like pied piper with a horn section polling station next door and we're all going to get out the vote together. So it's really meant to be kind of a culture shift. We hope that this is the beginning of a big culture shift to make civic engagement something to be celebrated and fun and something to dress up for. So hopefully we'll be doing this for every midterm and every

general election. I love that. So when does that begin? So the first events start in September. It's literally 40 plus events in 40, 50 days. So we're doing almost one event a day, maybe sometimes more across the country to get the vote out and get people civically engaged and to remember that, yeah, just like we get to self-express on the dance floor, to self-express with our vote is just as important. And so it's our first time really merging the dance party with civic action and civic engagement. I'm really proud of it. Yeah. All right. So along those lines with daybreaker if like let's use that because you kind of used this crawl method to develop and cultivate daybreaker really i'm sure everything you create so c is for like your

core values which also includes your core restraints which i thought was interesting so talk about that for a sec yeah so so crawl like i i kind of coined this method for community building because, you know, there's so many millions of ways to build community, but I really distilled kind of the building blocks of community for anyone, whether you want to start a small community or a large movement, this would be the building blocks for them. And I call it the crawl method because community building is one of those things where you can't, you know, raise super PAC dollars to go and execute. You have to do it slowly, slowly over time. I mean, maybe obviously for an election, it's different, but certainly for a long-term community, it really is human to

human. So you have to crawl, you can't run. So the C in the crawl method is to define your core values, your constraints, and your core community. So your constraints, meaning if you're not into the morning, the constraint would be, then this might not be right for you. Or if the constraint is you need to drink alcohol to have fun and dance, then we might not be for you. Or the constraint could be, we play a disco house kind of music. If you're into hip hop or whatever, we might not be the right dance party for you. So the constraints allow for your community to look at the sort of space and say, oh, is this me or is this not me? And so that constraint allows for that filtering to happen in a way that makes it easier for the community to come

in or come out, that makes it easier for the community builder as well to know, are you deeply excited about this community or not? That's a constraint. Core values is really defining what are your core values of your community first, even if it's an experiment or a fun, just an idea, to really just ask yourself, close your eyes and take a breath and just ask yourself like what are the core values of this community what what does it stand for so for a daybreaker you know it's a dance party but our core values are wellness to be healthy right camaraderie to make friends self-expression to move your body to

practice being expressed mindfulness which is to be here now which dance helps you you know really support and and mischief which is you know to really go against the grain do something different to live life with a wink. So those five core values are the lens through which we look at all of our theming, sponsorship partnerships, just, you know, all the artists that we hire and work with that we lens them through these five core values. And then the core community piece is so important as well, because when you're launching a community for the first time, you don't want to just put out an open casting call and hope that people just show up because inevitably that's going to be kind of disorganized energy coming to your event right like you might

have kind of a curmudgeon-y person you might have like a high and just it doesn't all mix and match so really making sure that you invite your core community first so meaning you know what i did for daybreakers i put down an excel spreadsheet i wrote 300 names down of what i my fys my fuck yeah friends friends that would be like fuck yeah i'll wake up and on a weekday morning in the middle of the winter and dance sober before going to work. And so it's like the constraints are very high. The barriers to enter are very high for Daybreaker. But if you begin running down, you're like, oh, I can imagine if you close your eyes right now, you can probably imagine like, you know, 20 people in your community who'd be like, fuck yeah, I'll wake up for Laura and shout for

her. I'll wake up for me because I want to try something new. So those are the people that we put on this Excel spreadsheet. And it was a debate between me and my partner, my co-founder at the time. And we spent a couple of days like kind of, would this person be good? No, they're going to shit talk it, or they're going to like put it down or a friend, this other friend group. And it's not going to be good. And there's some of these friends that are your friends, but they don't really want to see you succeed. You know, you don't want those at your initial, you don't want those at your initial events. Like maybe they'll come through later, but those who are like smiling at your face, but quietly want you to fall down. They're the ones that I know right

away who they are, but I continue to welcome them in my community because hopefully they learn through osmosis, but they wouldn't be in my initial core community. And you talk a lot actually in the book, which I'm, I mean, my last book, Quantum Love was all about how to harness this piece toward, you know, to create the love life you want, but you talk a lot, my language about energy and how part of, you know, just in terms of friendships, in terms of community and cultivating and architecting your community, that you have to have a good mix of energy and you have to be aware of people's energy and if they're in those lower frequencies, I would call it, or spend a lot of time there. That's right. Relaxed energy.

Yeah. Right. I think it's like if you just have the type A kind of high octane, you know sort of like non-stop energy that can get exhausting for the community first of all you want to just kind of invite those who have a who have a positive fuck yeah attitude about life in general so that could be someone who's relaxed or someone who's hyper and excited right and so but the key is to have a mix and i put this axis in my book the xy axis right the relaxed to high energy and then the low to high. Yeah. Negative to positive energy. Right. And then you kind of plot everyone in that graph. Yeah. That was really, I was thinking, oh, wow, that's an interesting exercise for my, I think most of them would be in the positive because I've

weaned my inner core so much. I've, I've, I've called it, you know, a lot over the past several years, but yeah, that was really interesting. How you taking toll of the energetic frequencies that you're surrounding yourself by in your day-to-day life, but also in particular, when you're wanting to create a community of friends or a community of purpose, how important that is. That's right. And, you know, one thing to add to that, Laura, is, is just this idea that just because you, you know, kind of don't get along with someone, or you don't feel like the person, you know, sort of doesn't fully understand you doesn't mean that they're a bad person. And And it's something that in the past I would have sort of been like, I don't like them.

They don't like me, whatever. But as I kind of really became a student of community, I realized that you're just on different channels. Like if you're on a TV screen, you're on channel three. I'm on channel seven. Your channel is great. My channel is great. They're just different channels. And so we're allowed to not always be in the same channel.

And that's okay. It doesn't make you a bad person. But I'm just like, I'm just not necessarily going to call you an inner core community member, right? Yeah, you don't resonate. I always say we don't resonate with each other. We don't. But I love that not being on the same channel.

Frequency, yeah. Like one last thing to say about friendship in general, and I have this in my book too, The Friendship Life Cycle. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. And so like, so we go through these sort of periods where, you know, the gestation period you first meet somebody you fall in love with them as a friend and you you know you're like oh they're amazing you know so you go through that period but then it's like you know gestation

and then you kind of have this moment of frustration with them all right you always no matter what as you get closer to someone you're like oh you're a democrat i'm a republican whatever whatever it is or like you're this i'm that then all of a sudden you go from gestation of frustration. And then again, you know, young people don't have the tools to move through frustration to cooperation, right? So gestation, frustration, cooperation. Once you move through these moments of frustration, you can get to a place where like, oh my God, we're closer than ever. I love you. You're amazing. I feel even more safe. I feel even more trusting, right? So gestation, frustration, cooperation, creation, right? So then all of a sudden you go from

cooperation to now like, oh my gosh, Laura, you and I get along so well. We understand each other's blind spots, our triggers. Let's make a podcast together or whatever. I'm making this up, right? So then you get into creation mode. And I really do disagree with this idea that don't make a business with friends. If you actually move through a friendship life cycle in a very healthy way, then actually it's the best way to build a business, to be working every day with people that you love you know and so um and then cooperation creation um and then evolution is the last one which is sort of like inevitably you know we all change our values our interests our abilities change so the evolution of our friendship life cycle might change like let's say you and i

go through the cycle once we might go back to the gestation phase after the evolution phase and go back around and around and around this friendship life cycle but or you might evolve onto a different channel and I might be over here going around the same circle and you're going on a different circle and that's part of life and to just sort of like wave at the friend and just say oh my god I loved our cycle together and and enjoy floating in the universe in this wild pale blue dot that we live on and I'll be over here if you need me you know and so I really do believe in these life cycles of friendship as well yeah and and how important it is for our own mental health to not feel disappointed or sad or betrayed, to really recognize that that's just part of life.

Yeah. I think that's so important and that some friendships have run their cycle. That doesn't mean they're evil, bad, your enemy, but they're in a different cycle than you are on a different channel now. That's right. Okay. So we talked about core values and also really important aspects of that cycle of who is in your inner core in general. And then rituals is the R in crawl, right? So rituals, loved how you talked about how helpful it is. And I didn't even realize I do this at the Grieving Mama meetups. We have like an opening circle kind of grounding. And then at the end, we have a closing kind of process that we do where we squeeze, you know, we go in a circle, squeezing hands and saying something. And, and I was smiling to myself as I was reading

this. I was like, Oh, look at me. I'm doing all of these things and didn't even know I was doing this. But the ritual piece for Daybreaker, you know, you give them, everyone gets a hug, part of the hugging train when they come, rather than a bouncer or someone. That's right. That's right. And then at the end that everybody gets a card with a poem or a reading on it and everybody reads it together in community out loud and then they take it with them like and that gave me that made me think i want to do something like that yes a tangible exactly token that's right a totem yeah you did your homework i love it laura yeah you know it's rituals are the backbone the

foundation of our sense of belonging right when you think about how we assign the roles of the humans that we surround ourselves with, like doctors wearing a white coat, you know, like church, you know, like priests wearing the priest garb, like the train attendant wearing the train cap, the airline pilot wearing the blue with the, you know, the wings, right? So it's like every, we assign the rituals of life, that happy birthday song is a ritual, right? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner is a ritual, right? Like all of these sort of these things that make us feel human are rituals, right? And yet we just think that they're like, oh yeah, it's what we do. you have breakfast or dinner, but these are rituals that were started by some community,

by someone who decided that these moments to get together for mealtime was an important ritual to feel a sense of belonging, to connect with one another. And so without ritual, if you're just doing an event without any kind of specific ritual for that community, you will never feel a sense of belonging. You're just going to kind of come in, you watch the event, you're part of a thing, you know you might eat some hors d'oeuvres and then he'll leave and then it's over and you have absolutely zero connection to that community nor a sense of belonging yeah i thought that was really interesting oh yeah to me i'm an absolute sucker for rituals i think that rituals are the most important thing for any event organizer community builder a business owner ecclesiast

You name it, if you're trying to lead a community, you need to sit down and ask yourself, what are the most potent rituals that I can bring into this space that is unique to this space that makes me feel connected to this space, right? And so it's such an important part of the puzzle that so many experienced designers and or space holders don't think about nearly enough. Yeah. Okay. So now we're going to breeze. I know the aesthetics is important, but I don't want to run out of time and I really want to get to the W. So breeze through aesthetics for me. Yeah. So aesthetics is just, you know, we live in an Instagram filter world. Everyone's a designer. Everyone's a creator. We have all the tools at our fingertips, Canva, everything is right there. So aesthetics are critical. If we just, you know, most communities that I see, you know, they have websites that look like they're

built in 1992, no offense. And they just like the YMCAs and like all these different kind of community organizations, they just haven't caught up to the importance of aesthetics to actually scale a community. And so it's so important to be mindful of how are people receiving design and aesthetics and information, both not just in the 2D world, right, on a screen or in a billboard, but also in the 3D world, like how you design the experience itself, right? Can't just be, you know, four by four tables, whatever, with some tablecloth on it and some, you know, name tags, it has to be much more thoughtful. So aesthetics, both two-dimensional, three-dimensional are so important. We spend a lot of time at Daybreaker and at Blanc Center thinking about

how to make sure the aesthetics are unique to our community. And if you aren't someone who is, you know, I'm just thinking of people listening who are like, I have no sense of design. I, you know, that is not my strong suit, but I really want to do this. And obviously there's, you know, you can find templates on Canva and things like that, but is there any- Oh yeah, go to Fiverr, go to fiverr.com, F-I-V-E-R-R.com and literally look up design, you know, whatever, they'll charge five bucks an hour or someone from Indonesia or someone from wherever and five bucks, they'll make you an invitee, tell them what you like, find,

you know, just go on Pinterest or whatever and, or just tell them what colors you like or what you want, what you need. And, and you can just get someone, that's a great place to start. And of course, once you accumulate more money or whatever, then you can you can hire a proper freelancer. But otherwise, Fiverr is an amazing place. Upwork is an amazing place to just find kind of hourly designers. Yeah, that's good. That's good advice, because I know a lot of people are just like starting, you know, bootstrapping this. Yeah. And it's five bucks an hour. You spend 30 bucks on an invitation and you've got something really beautiful, you know. So the Y and the W.

Let's go to the W and the crawl method. Yeah. So the W to me is an important piece of actually just self-reflection. It's like the W is both like why, who, where, what, right? And the concept is, you know, why are you the best person to lead this community? Are you better as a number two, as someone who's organized and can, you know, is foundational, can really get all the kind of the underlying production of the gathering together, but you're not necessarily a front person. You might be a little more shy, not a great public speaker

initially. So, you know, to really just sit down and ask yourself, am I the right person to lead this community? Do I want to bring someone who's gregarious that can teach me how to be gregarious, not just stay in, you know, if I want to, you know, grow, continue growing into the leader that I am. Let me bring in someone who's gregarious who can help me lead the community for the first year. And I learn from them as I get my own legs under me for how to lead a community and not be too proud to do that. I think there's such a pride and ego around being the face. There's all these books about, you know, number two or like how amazing it is to be the right hand or someone just know your role and know your lane and life works out for you but as soon as you have too big

of an ego and you just want to just be the one always in the front or you know which I understand too like all of us want to be seen understood reflected back you know sort of loved cherished I do see that but it doesn't always necessarily mean that you have to be the front-facing person So the why is why are you the best person to lead this community? It's a real, yeah, kind of a, it's an important question to ask yourself. And then also, you know, why is this community viable over time, right? So let's say you start a community and you put all this effort in building this, the exercise out of making this community start.

Well, have you thought about your revenue models? Is it a ticketed model? Is it a sponsored model? Is it a membership model? Is it a retreat model? What's the model for your community? Is it a product or service model, right? There's so many different sort of questions around the why will this community be sustainable

over time? Because I've met a million community builders who are like, Radha, I want to build community. I want to do a next Daybreaker. I want to do what you do. This is amazing. But they burn out after one event because they're exhausted. They haven't figured out how to do it. They didn't make any money.

There's no kind of plan for understanding how this community will make money to value your time. So people just get burned out so fast in the community building world and the event creation world for that very reason. And it's so important to have that map in front of you, right? How do you, because like you came to Daybreaker already having built companies and been a company creator and understood all of that already and understood the resources you would need to bring together, if you're an average Joe or Jane or in between and you want to think about that, or even for me where I've run businesses before, but with the grief work I'm doing, I'm trying to figure out how to create a sustainable model where I can

pay all the facilitators and healers who up to now volunteer their time. I could pay them something. And most importantly, continue feeding into scholarships. Because the most important thing to me is to be able to give scholarships to people for going on retreats, in particular, the mamas. Because when mama's okay, everyone can be okay. Totally. Totally. So how do you figure out, and we don't have to get into my thing. I'm just using that as- Oh, please. No, give it to me. Yeah. I want to- How do you figure out if you don't have business training and that isn't, and you're more of a

kind of right brain thinker, just like the Fiverr tip, right? Is there a tip for like finding a resource, even a book or a course or something that could help you figure out like, okay, okay. Am I going to go for the sponsorship model? And how do I do that? And like, how do I find, am I going to do tickets and what do I charge? And you know, like what, where do you get that support? Sure. So, you know, obviously my motto is if you build, they will come. And this idea that, you know, step one is get my book. I'm really honestly, and just like, take your time to really go through the crawl method and put on your first event and then put on your second event, iterating on the first event, and then put on your third event, iterating on the

first two events until you get to a product, right? An event product that you're like, Ooh, this feels unique this feels one of a kind this feels juicy this feels like people are getting a lot out of it you're seeing really great feedback so i think step one is just start it doesn't have to start with sponsorship it's like for me i invested literally like a thousand dollars in the first daybreaker of which i got two thousand dollars back because i sold 25 tickets and literally never had a single investor for daybreaker we just grew from the small margin profits that we made from each event so a thousand dollars that we made now profit we we invested into you know two small events and then another you know and that became so it's like snowballed

from there right and so so a step one is i would just start by doing the what are your core values your core community invite do a thing like what are your aesthetics of your community why why is community different than any other community that's out there right and why would people be Like, for example, your grief mamas community, that is an incredible concept and so deeply needed. And so the first thing I would diagnose with you is what are the aesthetics? What is, you know, how are you, you know, what is your platform? How are you selling tickets? How many people are coming?

And based on all of this stuff, we can begin sort of deciding, okay, how do we scale it? Are we going to do circles models where we have, because maybe we want to cap these grief circles to 25 people. You can't have like a daybreaker event. You can have a thousand people at an event. So let's say you want to scale it to a thousand 20 person groups. Right. And then all of a sudden you have scales when you can get sponsorship, et cetera, et cetera. But again, if it's also a retreat event with high net worth or just like a high value customer, then you can get, you know, luxury brands, just different kinds of kinds of partners to want to get involved. If you're not a right brain person, I think step one is just if you build it, they will come. Just start with your superpower and then put the event out. Just step one is A, recognizing that no one is an average Joe. We're all unique. I'm an average Joe then. We're all just regular people trying to make a difference and just trying to solve problems is sort of also what I say of entrepreneurs like me. But I think step one is recognize that you're not average, you're not normal, you're not boring, or you're not run of the mill. You are deeply needed in starting a community in your community, in your city. And so step one is just recognizing that.

and then step two is okay give give your community idea name so you gave it grief mom what did you call it the well well the grief there's the grieving mama meetups but then there's the love mama retreat which is our big five-day retreat in the redwoods which i just did our first one where we last april where we brought 66 mamas into the woods for an amazing healing week of healing Unbelievable. My goal, and we were able to give 40 partial or complete scholarships, and I busted my ass to raise that money. So my goal is to- That's amazing.

Please fully raise the money, be able to give more scholarships, make that like at least an annual event, and then do these kind of smaller weekend retreats. I have one coming up in Chicago in October that will be different models. I'm just kind of playing with different models now. One day event, weekend event, five day, but they're all funneling into scholarships for this big retreat. This is beautiful. No, it's so important. And so, so I think, yeah, I mean, if you feel really crystallized on the name, then build a brand around or build a, you know, build a story, build a, I mean, your story is obviously

so compelling and every mama who's lost, lost a child will obviously resonate with your story. And so, you know, to me that already is a magnetizing, you know, the biggest thing, why the right person to lead this community? Well, you're the right person because you've lived it. And so you're magnetizing, not pulling in, but you're magnetizing people to come to you for that very reason because you're building it, you put it out there, you gave it a name, and boom. Like, for example, a quick share, when I became a mom five years ago, I didn't know, I was 39, I'd never changed a diaper in my life, I didn't know what I was doing. And so I just was too busy building my businesses and being my masculine that I had no clue about anything maternal.

so I started a whatsapp group called modern mamas and I just invited five moms that I'd known who were like running companies but also had kids and I was like how the hell are you doing this and then now there's like over a hundred moms on this whatsapp thread we've never really met in person we're actually doing our first like meetup but it's just all we're all busy moms but we just I'm like today I was like I have a stye on my eye what do I do it's not even for just for kids now and I got like 10 responses instantly put black tea on it do this try this guys right and all these moms all mother each other I should add you to it honestly yeah seriously and it's an amazing community of moms who just support each other and again I'm

just a brand new mom who like I'm not a mom expert or whatever I just started a whatsapp thread that that's grown into a thing that these hundred women are just like Radha thank you it's such a lifeline for me, you know? And, and so it's as simple as just putting a WhatsApp together and I called it modern mamas, you know, the description for like momming in a modern world, you know? And then now all these moms who were like, I wish I would've done that when I was pregnant. I wish I would've, it's just about starting. It's just about doing the thing. Yeah. I think that's so important. And, you know, even with the grieving mama meetups, I keep saying to them, when moms reached out to me from out of state i'm like start one yes and i'm all your book i was like

you don't you don't need me like my dream is to create a manual for you know to raise the money manual in the system and do a do a tour around the country and have these giant grieving mama meetups and then launch i'm like now you guys go yes so you should create a circles curriculum you should create a grieving mama circle curriculum i want to do on how to do that and i can once i we're just finalizing our Belong Circles curriculum. We can even do a partnership and in LA where we actually invite Your Giving Moments to Belong Center and do sort of like a meetup together. And you can even, because we're launching in 50 states, we can even do a grief circle in all the states, right? And partner with you guys. And so there's so many

ways in which collaboration, again, like you started a thing, you're doing a thing and I'm or anything. And I'm like, great, let's collaborate. And then it becomes a bigger thing because we just started, right? We just started somewhere. And so I think that's really the key, right? Yeah. So just start guys. Just start and then, and then don't give up after the first three events. Give yourself, yeah, give yourself, you know, I would say, you know, if you're really going to commit to it and take the time to the first event, just commit to a cadence, even if it's like every quarter four times in a year just like commit to this quarterly event for the year and see how you feel at the end of it right don't buy off more than you can choose so don't try to

do a weekly or even a monthly initially we we bit off way more than we were doing every two weeks daybreaker events in new york just that's a lot and we had to sell like 500 tickets just to break it was just like it was a lot you know and so we are now doing touring model instead of a monthly model. So we're doing, you know, 50 events, which is a lot, our biggest one for this tour. But usually we do about a 20 city tour. If people want to learn more, I mean, obviously I've already, you know, the book is the place to start guys. If you want to just find your people or come to date, but if you want to find your people and, or want to start something, a community on purpose, or just a community collective.

The book is called Belong, Find Your People, Create Community and Live a More Connected Life. But if they want to learn more about the tour you're doing, Daybreaker, the Belong Center that's going to be around the country, where do they go for that? Yeah, so by the way, our Daybreaker tour this fall,

we rarely get to offer it, but because we have a big nonprofit organization supporting it, our Purple Tour in all 50 states are free. Oh, wow. So it's a free RSVP. Yeah, it's amazing. So we get to really anybody who wants to come. We're, again, all over the country, coast to coast. So you'll be able to find one in your city. But you can go to daybreaker.com to RSVP for a dance party with us, a party to the poles. Or you can go to my website, radaagrawal.com to learn more about my book. Or you go to Amazon to buy my book or any bookseller. We'll have the links in the bio. And then belongcenter.org is our nonprofit. Amazing.

I can't wait to check it out when it opens in LA. Thank you. Yeah, we're opening literally in the next few weeks. I'm so excited. And I'm so, so thrilled to have been able to talk to you. And I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing in the world and who you are and that you were born. I'm just really glad that you're here.

Thank you. you're so sweet and likewise and like just like to hear your journey and to hear how joyful and how in service you are from from your own experience it's it's um it's inspiring so thank you yeah it's i'm committed to it it's i'm devoted to it because i i would have never thought I could survive something like this much less transform into a more powerful self-actualized pure version of myself like this shit burnt everything that didn't belong so I can only imagine you have three you have three kids three kids he was the middle one Sammy it's been a powerful journey that I'm devoted to taking other people on because that shit will take you down

another one. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. You're amazing. You're incredible. We'll hear from you. Yeah. I didn't even expect that part. I was just excited to talk to you. That's a big bonus. You're my rockstar, smashing all my guitars One day I will charge you for breaking my heart You're just like my sport car, driving fast, you go far When I'm sitting by you, we get high