Dear Brian

As we come to the end of our 23 days of traveling the English and Scottish Coastline, my mind has been pondering the experience of staying in 19 different campsites and how the experience links to life and business.

Usually, I create sentimental attachments to places and people. It is a joy and a burden. That feeling of saying goodbye can really hurt. I love people and create attachments to places. However, when you are moving on every day, I cannot let my heart break that many times.

While we travel the last 340 miles back home, I have been thinking about this. Firstly, my mother-in-law was ‘emotional but not sentimental’, and I admired that in her. She had the ability to grieve and move on, losing two husbands and adjusting her life many times, moving to new counties, finding new friends, often driven by financial concerns. Her ability to be happy in her soul was inspiring, she trusted the next place, the next people, and her ability to thrive again. This thought came to me many times while traveling.

The other thoughts I have been thinking are about how touring in a camper van is a bit like networking. We arrive, assess the usefulness of it, shake the hands of some strangers, exchange polite conversation, get as much as we can from the moment and then move on.

Of course, I am being very deliberate about my assessment, but this came to me this morning as I thought about how much I appreciate the sense of belonging to my family and to our Business Community, BIP100. We feel them with us, even when we are hundreds of miles apart.

Being part of a community is being part of a family, I love building them as my core values are love, togetherness and family, to me ‘community is the manifestation of my family values, brought to the business world’. It is very different to joining a Network. We don’t make fast judgements, we take time to settle in, we seek to support others, not just have our own needs met, and we come together with the individual challenges and celebrate the joys within.

Community is about a sense of belonging, Networking is an action, a verb, something some do to find business. The interesting thing is that ‘networking’ is achieved within a community, but it is one of the outcomes and actions, it is not the only thing.

As you progress through August, I would love you to ponder on how you get a sense of belonging, togetherness and love around your business and if this is something lacking, get in touch. I believe we can all create a sense of community around us, it is about a mindset, and then taking the right actions with the right values in mind to achieve it.

Wishing you a fabulous week and I look forward to sharing my Ponderings again with you next Tuesday.

With love