114. Reframing Either/Or Mentalities in Small Towns

Well, hey guys, welcome back to the Growing Small Town Show. It's been a minute. We have been busy doing all sorts of things, and today I'm actually coming at you with a solo cast as we prepare for kind of our next round of guest interviews. So again, we try to commit to a biweekly schedule And sometimes that just doesn't happen. Here's one of those times. So today I am excited to talk to you guys about this, and as always, I look forward to your feedback on the topic. Today we're going to talk a little bit about mindset. Like, this is kind of my jam. This is the stuff I care about. This is the stuff that I think about because I am technically what I would call a reluctant economic development person. I don't gravitate towards kind of the traditional scope of work that this industry tends to value. The idea of, you know, how do we attract businesses to our community? And again, most of the time it's that idea of a bigger employer that can provide a lot of jobs and that that's the primary way to grow an economy, right? And then along with that comes infrastructure and city planning, kind of all the other in-the-weeds stuff that just, I mean, I'll be honest, it just doesn't interest me. It doesn't interest me that much. I stumbled into this work, and, you know, we could talk a bit about that in a second. But when I think about what I do care about, I said I care about mindset stuff. There are kind of two main feelings that I get excited about cultivating, I guess, in my community. I love the idea of what can we do to help make our communities feel warmer and more welcoming. And so there's kind of two big feelings that I like to generate. And so the first is juicy connection. Yeah. And so I'm saying juicy, it's like my favorite word to describe the feelings that I get when I meet somebody cool or when I have a really fun, delightful conversation with a friend or somebody that I already know and love. In fact, like, I'm so wired to crave the idea of juiciness that when I go into a room full of new people, I literally scan the room. I scan the room, I take a look around, and I'm looking for the juice. It's kind of like an X Factor. I can see it when the juice is there. And a lot of times when I'm walking into a conference or a situation where it's predominantly economic development folks, I sometimes struggle to find it. I don't feel like the juice is always there, but that isn't the point of this podcast at all. So I'm just gonna— I'm gonna step off of this one. It's just one of the two feelings that I really like to create if I can. The second is a brain or heart swell. So this is another specific thing that I personally love to experience. And again, this isn't about just me and how I feel, but because I'm the one charged with doing the work, I think how I think and feel does kind of matter. Because if the work doesn't align with what I think, feel, and want to create, then I'm not going to be that excited or that good. At making it happen. So a brain or a heart swell, to me, it's that moment when your brain recognizes an idea, like a good idea, as something new or helpful, and you can almost imagine how you're going to use it. And I guess this is kind of a, a way to articulate the feeling of what it's like to learn something new. Like, I just crave constantly learning something new. And a lot of times it's just stuff that's been presented that I've already heard, but the way the person's presenting it or the way it's being contextualized or framed out, it hits my brain different, and then it becomes power to me, right? Like, knowledge doesn't really matter unless we do something with it, right? We can get smarter, we can call it ourselves getting smarter by reading and consuming stuff, but until we do something with it, it doesn't really matter. So these are the two things that I love. I love to create more of those feelings. And Growing Small Towns was created to offer experiences to the humans in our small towns that facilitate those kind of feelings. So you absolutely could be asking like, what the hell does economic development have to do with any of that? Well, my belief, and this was mid-2019 when I formed Growing Small Towns, and then still today, truly with like an unwavering belief, is that people are the ones that make our communities the kinds of places people love to call home. It's people. So this isn't to say at all that like solid planning and financial capacity, and then there's all these other capital buckets, right, that are needed for a successful community. I'm not saying that they're not important. I am simply saying that without the kind of people who want to continually improve themselves, their work, their communities, I really do believe that the best laid plans are only going to fall flat, and then they don't cause us just to stall out or regress as a community. So I believe the best way forward is to help the community address that collective shit that happens between our ears. So like, personally, we all know that if we want to get better, a lot of the stuff that we've got to work on is an inside job, right? Again, that's stuff between our ears. Well, as a community or as a company or any organized group of people there's a collective space between our ears, if you will. And that's what I get excited to talk about. That's what I get excited to address through the work. And it's not easy. It's messy and it's chaotic. It's honestly kind of brutal at times. But dang it, like, this is the work that I get really jacked up to talk about. I love working with groups that understand this, that understand the key role people play in all of it. And I genuinely love people, even the people that don't love me back. So today, this whole episode is really about a mentality that I think I've seen that I think can hold all of us back in a lot of ways, but especially it can hold us back when we're trying to make our communities or the companies that we work in great places to be. So what I want to talk about is a set of either-or mentalities that I feel like I've seen play out and then try to offer some different ways to potentially frame it so we might not fall victim to these things is like actually a stumbling block to holding us back from making cool stuff happen. Like, everybody loves a good dichotomy, right? A lot of us love the idea of a black and white paradigm. Like, you either do this or you do that. And the reason is because it's easy. You just pick which side you prefer and you hang out there. I mean, all we got to do is like even just look at the political realm, right? Like, the reason we have these two distinct parties is because it makes things easier. You either you're the haves of one side or you're the have-nots, and you agree with the other side. And you can create camps and you can create tribes, right? There's this easy choice to make. We love that. But like with most things, most things I have, there's an emotional response or like an emotion that's required in part of the discussion. And rarely are things that simple. And then usually the best and most productive conversations land somewhere in the middle of a dichotomy like that. So here's the first one. And again, like, I've tried to articulate how these play out. I can't wait to hear back from you, like, if this is what you're seeing too. So here's the either/or on this one. It's audacity or pragmatism. And specifically, we're talking about ideas here, okay? So if it's an either/or, and these things are antonyms, like they truly are opposites of one another and we choose to use them that way, how will we ever create anything new? Seriously, like how do new precedents, new boundaries, new frontiers even, how do they get explored if the very thing that we need to step out and create them, which is audacity, is the very antithesis of what our leaders and other elected officials and people in charge desire, which is practicality or pragmatism. How do we make the bet, or in this case, like, the thing, the idea, the event, the thing that we're pitching, I guess, how do we make it simple and small enough that we can help to mitigate the risk of failure? And then, you know, further, which is what happens when we place small bets. So audacity, I think part of the challenge here is that audacity tends to be framed out in a certain way, and I, I want to reframe that. And I do, I've reframed this for myself, so this doesn't have to mean huge, enormous things. And so that's why I've always kind of hated— there's this phrase called BHAGs, okay? Like, it's a personal development, professional development junkie acronym that stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goals. I really don't care for that phrase at all, namely because I actually prefer my goals to have nothing to do with hair. To be honest, I hate the word hairy. I just kind of hate the whole thing. But I think that it's hijacked the idea of audacity a bit. And maybe we need to think of it a little bit different. So audacity is simply the boldness and the courage that it takes to dream of something different. That something different might be bigger, but it doesn't have to be. It could just be different. So pragmatism can't mean the opposite. It can't. It can't mean the opposite of audacity, because if it does, any new idea is going to be met with that eye roll and that accompanying condescension, right? Like, the way I view this is— and this is kind of— so I'm gonna call my dad out for a second here. He kind of tends to do this. He doesn't mean to do it, but imagine that you have a pair of glasses and they kind of slide to the end of your nose and you peer over them at a person while kind of maintaining that look on your face like, you are literally the dumbest human I've ever met. That's the feeling that you get when your audacious idea is met with somebody that believes pragmatism matters more. And it kind of implies that your idea, because it hasn't been tested before, at least in your turf, it's silly or it's not smart or it's not well thought out. And so if every new idea is thrown out of, like, just thrown out, like, out of hand, right? We say, nope, that's not going to work because it hasn't been time-tested or proven here. What exactly are we supposed to do with that? If every idea is met with that, you know what's gonna happen? Those ideas are going to go find a more hospitable host. So that's one of my favorite ideas. There's this book called Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, and we'll make sure that we tag that in the show notes for you. I absolutely love that book. It's about creativity and inspiration. That's entirely what it was written about. So yeah, she's the Eat, Pray, Love author. But this is a nonfiction book that really is one of those that shaped the way that I think about not just my work, but like how to move some of these things forward. Because I think that I tend to think and live kind of audaciously in the sense that I'm constantly thinking about new stuff, right? And I'm constantly met with that, well, that's not going to work. And again, the peering over the glasses look, you can just feel that, right? It just like hits you in your gut. So Big Magic, she talks about— Elizabeth Gilbert talks about Inspiration as being something that might hit us personally, right? Like, you get an idea, you get a spark, and you think, oh, this is awesome. And then if you don't do something with it, you don't act on it or activate it in some way, that's essentially the same as inspiration seeing you as a not gracious or willing host, and it will move on. It will move on to find someone or somewhere where it can get activated. And I kind of love this analogy, and I love being challenged in this way, because I mean, that's, that's the thing. So then what often happens, right, like we don't do anything with our idea and then somebody else steals the idea— and there's air quotes around steals, right, because they're not stealing an idea. You had the idea, you just chose not to act on it. That source of inspiration, it's like an energy and it's moving through the world looking for somewhere fitting to land. So how is this for a fun question? Like, so how do we, how do we address this audacity or pragmatism thing, right? Because again, I think it's both and. I don't think it ever has to be that it's either an audacious idea or it makes sense. But how do we deal with people that want to camp out on one end or the other? Well, here's a question. What would it look like, like in your community, if you're a community development person, or in your company, if you're in charge of thinking about this more broadly for a group of people that are organized to accomplish stuff in the private sector. What would it look like to focus on becoming the kind of place that's a gracious host for inspiration? Tell me that that doesn't, like, get your creativity flowing, because it does for me. And we could call them juices, but then we're just back to the whole juice thing, and it's kind of a weird word, so we're going to move on. But the first either-or that I think we have to reframe as a both-and is audacity. And pragmatism. Number 2 is this idea of the love and acceptance of what is, or a desire to make it better. So this one literally applies to everything we own or everything we possess, whether it's just like our bodies. This comes up a lot in bodies discussion, which again, as a female, I'm maybe a bit more primed to to this than like the men that are listening to this, but it could be your home, it could be your church, your family, your community, your companies, everything. It's all up for discussion with this one because there is so much rhetoric about this. And okay, I'm gonna go back to bodies for like just a quick second, but the idea of radical acceptance suggests that when you love everything about yourself just as you are, like, that's it, so you're good. And I think that there's— there couldn't be anything further from the truth in terms of the way I think about this, because I believe if you really love something, you'll invest in it, which means you'll look for ways to make it better. You will actively seek out ways to improve that thing. Wanting to make something better doesn't automatically imply that you don't love it. For me, it means that you do. And I've seen a ton of this in the community development arena. When I first started talking about growing small towns and like being asked to speak about it, people in my own community blasted me on social media for being honest about the struggle that I had about moving back home. The way I see it is if like we literally can't speak about the struggles we see or the opportunities that we see for improvement, I seriously want to ask, do we really love our community as much as we say we do, or is it simply blind acceptance of our flaws? Because when we blindly accept our flaws and we refuse to acknowledge where we could be better, I personally see that as a resignation, like a resignation that it's just good enough the way it is. And frankly, I don't accept that. I don't accept that for anything in my life personally, and so I really struggle to accept that in my community too. If I love something or someone, I champion their growth. Like, I believe that them getting a little bit better every single day matters. And I actually believe it's the only thing that does. This is tricky. I get it. Like, just because I believe it doesn't mean that you have to, because that's the beauty of humans, right? You get to do, you get to do you. I get to do me. We're very messy messes, aren't we? But I'm telling you, if you're listening to this and you feel this tension in your life, I am here to tell you that you can both love something and want more for it. At the same time. To me, that, that's actually just another demonstration of your love and commitment to the thing that you're talking about. So I think that, that this tension comes up a lot for people that are geared towards growth personally, because there are times where you just feel like, dang, when is good enough just enough? And sometimes there's going to be periods where you're not always striving, but I'm telling you, as long as I'm alive, I'm going to be striving because that's just who I am. And so to try not judge the folks that don't feel that way, but engage in more of a conversation about, about what embracing both of those things can mean, and in a way that includes all people, right? Because again, like, I really am wired, I want people to all be a part of it. I just don't want progress to halt because the ones that land on one end of the spectrum or the other are completely dominating the narrative and we can't make progress. So you can both love something and want more for it. Not only is that acceptable, I think that's a special way to actually show your commitment. Okay, number 3 and the last one. We are either the most uniquest ever, or we're completely non-special and we're just like everybody else. And I genuinely love this one. So my best friend has a kid who every time he is challenged by his parents regarding the choices he's making, and they're like, they're like trying to help him see that choice, like he's got agency, right? And choices, he's making choices, and these choices are yielding certain consequences. He defaults to the response of, "I'm just built different." And I don't know if that hits your brain as hilariously as it hits mine, because you kind of want to be like, "Oh, Lee Child, that's adorable. Yeah, sure, you you— okay, on the one hand, right, like, again, this is the dichotomy thing. You are absolutely the only person who is exactly you. That's true for every single one of us. That's the special part. Like, yep, we're all special because we're all superbly, beautifully unique, right? That's also the same for companies, communities, churches, right? Because no two people or two things that involve people can ever be exactly the same. They can't be because the human part of it. That doesn't mean that we're somehow super special, deserving of something special, or needing something completely uniquely tailored to us to implement, because likely that's not the case at all. So I think the way that this trips us up is when an idea that's been tried elsewhere— so again, bringing this back to community development— if we think about, we're discussing the merits of, let's say, a big city idea, so something that you saw in a bigger community, and you're trying to come back and talk about what it would look like in your town. A lot of times those ideas are immediately met with, "Well, that's not gonna work here because," and then you can insert whatever way that we believe our fair town is super special and super unique and different from the place that this thing's already happened. Okay? So when we start to believe that we're the specialest specials to ever be, we shut ourselves off to all sorts of cool things. Because these things, perhaps with like a little bit of modification, actually could be amazing for us, excellent for our community. So here's a few questions, again, like we can ask ourselves to ensure that we're not falling prey to the specialness syndrome that I've just outlined here, right? So the first set of questions is, how do we actually feel about the idea? What are the merits of it? How would it look if we had it done here? How would we be better for it? So all of these questions get us into kind of a dream casting or vision casting mentality. We're trying to stay high level and we're not identifying constraints yet because the challenge with constraint-led thinking is that you skip right over imagining a future where this thing could be here and then imagining together like a better future because of it. So we're staying high level at this point and we're not yet identifying constraints because the challenge with constraint-led thinking is that we skip right over the benefits involved with imagining the future where this thing makes us better. If you immediately go to, well, here's all the ways it won't work, you're not even giving yourself the space to imagine that brightness if it were something that we entertained. The second thing is to do a little bit of resource— figure out the resources that you already have. Like, what do we already have in place that would allow us to make this happen? What assets exist? Who besides us in this room would love this thing too? This is coalition building, right? So you first have dream vision, dream casting or vision casting, and then you've got coalition building. Because seriously, we can never underestimate what a small group of impassioned people can do. This is where coalitions don't have to— it doesn't mean we have to go straight to city council or straight to economic development or straight to whomever we've deemed as like the gatekeepers of all the cool stuff in a community. That's just not how it works at all in most cases. Really amazing things can happen if you get the right group of people together, and by right I just mean they care about it as much as you do. So this— we're either the most specialist snowflakes to ever exist and everything has to be perfectly personalized and customized, or, you know, we're exactly like everybody else. This is absolutely a both/and. Because yeah, you're unique as a person, you certainly are. As a town, you certainly are. But your very humanity is what makes you just like everybody else. Don't convince yourself that you're unlike every other person that ever lived because you're missing out on the good stuff if you keep telling yourself that story. So as I continue how to try and figure out how I fit in this strange world of economic development and community development, I— all I can do is to promise that I will continue to share what I see, what I hear, and what I'm trying in my own backyard. My approach to this work isn't always loved by a lot of people, and I'm actually— I really am actually okay with that. I'm always going to be people-centric and human-centered in my approach to how we do everything, because that's the growth that I'm after. I am after the growth of the humans in my community, the humans that I work with in their organizations. And yes, that means that we might do some planning, it might be real, you know, you might have to pull in some of these more maybe analytical disciplines to get this stuff done, but ultimately we do that by building better— it's relationship skills and it's communication skills. It's all the stuff that we need to be good humans. So if you're a person, you're listening to this and all you're doing is trying to make cool shit happen in your small town, I really just want you to know that, hey, I see you, and just keep fighting the good fight. Keep doing what you can, where you are, with what you have to make these things happen. And I want to know who you are. Like, I actually want to know you. I want to know what you're trying to do. I want to know what kind of roadblocks you're facing, because I really do believe that it's people like you that are going to change the world, not just your community, but the world at large. So I hope that this episode helps you kind of reframe some of these really strong dichotomies where people say you either have to feel this way or you have to feel that way. Let's try to get a little more comfortable with embracing all the awesome shades of gray that live in the in-between. Until I see you guys again, like I said, just keep doing what you can with what you've got right where you're at. We need you. You're the changemakers. You're the ones that are going to make it all happen. And I'm here for it. And we're here to support you in any way that we can. Okay? See you soon, guys.