Your Personal Community Share this page:

Your Personal Community

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Do you have a “community” outside of family and close friends?  Think about all of the organizations you may be involved in – church, women’s or men’s organizations, golf or other sports, craft groups, library, etc.  Which do you genuinely enjoy spending time participating in and which do you do attend simply due of obligation?

If you want to cultivate quality relationships, think about practicing quality before quantity.  It doesn’t matter how many “friends” we have on our social media pages, how many “likes” our posts receive, or how many addresses we have in our e-mail account.  What matters is which relationships we want to cultivate for long term growth.

How do we determine which relationships are best for us?  First, ask yourself what your personal core values are.  A core value is something you believe to be important in the way you live your life, such as honesty, kindness, or integrity.  Everyone’s personal values will be different.  Yours influence your behavior, form your beliefs, and are reflected in other traits such as commitment, dependability, honesty, reliability, loyalty, etc.  Satisfying relationships most often include people who share the same core values.

Now how do we determine our core values?

• Think about your past and when you have been most happy, fulfilled, or proud.  What happened during that period to make you feel those ways?
• Consider the values of those whom you admire and wish to emulate.
• Prioritize your top two or three values in order of how important they are to you.

Once you have done the above, how can you go about developing personal communities of your own?

• Attend events that you are interested in such as art classes, book clubs, cooking classes, etc.  You will meet people at these events who already share at least one of your interests and common bonds can begin from there.
• Many of the people or groups we meet have the potential to develop into a strong and rewarding relationship if we allow it to.
• If rewarding relationships are important to us and we want them to grow, then we need to carve out time to make that happen, as they rarely occur on their own.  If we want to become an integral part of a group, it is important to focus our attention on them and not just on a haphazard basis.
• Actions speak louder than words, so working closely to ensure the well-being of your group is important to its development.
• Be welcoming to potential new members of your community who also feel a need to nurture and grow their personal communities.