The Connection Goldmine: How Entrepreneur Retreats Rig the Odds of Success in Your Favor
Laughter around the dinner table, someone to call when you get the big news, helping hands when you move — these are some of the joys of having a strong community. But there’s another one that entrepreneurs should take special note of: building community is the fast track to success.
As the old adage tells us, it isn’t what you know, but who you know. That’s as true today as ever before, maybe more so.
And yet, despite high levels of social media use, we have fewer friends and true connections than ever before.
Why is that such a terrifying statistic? The benefits of a community are extraordinarily vast. There is a huge amount of scientific literature on the health benefits from having a strong community. Lower rates of depression and better health outcomes are great, but it also lowers mortality rate — expanding your lifespan.
And when you have a network of people connected to your career, you end up having many more opportunities in your career and life in general.
Okay, so a community is great. Now, how do you build one? Entrepreneur retreats are proving to be a new tool to supercharge connection and start building meaningful, powerful friendships.
The Right Group
When you build your network, you want connections. And connections can only really happen if you have:
a shared experience
time
Entrepreneur retreats cultivate groups of people that are like minded in many important ways, while also maintaining the diversity that makes communities really thrive. The people you meet are similar in that they dream big and fight hard for what they want. But they might also have wildly different life experiences.
Retreats also give you one of the most important (and for some reason under appreciated) factors in building a true connection — time. Research suggests that it can take adults a little more than 90 hours together for an acquaintance to become a friend, and we need even more than that to become close friends. Retreats help you build up that time fast in high quality, intentional settings.
Keeping Things Going
But communities are living organisms, and they need to be cared for to flourish. Once you’ve made connections at a retreat, it’s important to keep things going.
Even if you’re an introvert, there are many ways you can engage with people. The most powerful of all is the invite. Attending and hosting events is always a great chance to invite someone in.
You also want to bring people into the bigger picture. Deep conversation and meaningful support are skills you can learn and develop. If you do, you’ll add more value to your connections, and the community that grows out of this can give you support right back.
It all begins with that strong foundation you lay at the retreat, but the process continues long after you return home. If you take that process seriously, you will enjoy an enormous amount of spiritual, psychological, and physical benefits. And you will tap into the biggest resource you have as an entrepreneur — human connection.
