My people
Useful, and then dangerous if you take it all the way.
A lot of our work points outward. We talk to people, we write to people, we offer to people. And one of the biggest obstacles for a new entrepreneur, and plenty of seasoned ones, is the fear of being judged: what if this is the wrong message, what if I say it badly, what if they misunderstand me.
The usual answer to that, and one I do advocate, is: your people will resonate with how you say it. Not with whether it was grammatically perfect or the most compelling possible version of the story. Your people hear you through the imperfections, because what they are responding to is you. So discovering your relationship with your people makes you bolder; you stop editing yourself into silence, because mistakes stop being fatal.
It also teaches you things. What do I feel good saying? What do I get self-conscious about? What did I think was just mine that turns out to land with other people? You only find that out by saying things and watching who leans in.
And it works in the other direction. Attracting your people repels the people who are not yours, by the same mechanism. A business coach who is all about maximizing profit and not much about human relationships is not going to resonate with me, because my whole thing is happy money: be the happiest entrepreneur you can be. That is not a problem. That is the point.
Where it trips people up
Here is the part that gets left out.
The only perfectly-your-people is you. There is no other person on earth who is going to be perfectly your people, and if "my people" becomes the overbearing backbone of how you operate, where anyone who disagrees gets pruned, you will end up alone.
Because people have many facets. Someone can resonate completely with you on happiness being the point, and disagree with you about domestic policy. Or about geopolitics. Or gender rights. Or how to talk about religion, or family, or what we owe our childhoods, or nature versus nurture, or what happens after we die. There is an enormous amount to be opinionated about, and no one is going to match you on all of it. Not one person.
So as much work as we do on the my-people side, I think we need to do an equal amount on the other side: opening ourselves to other opinions and actually trying to understand them. That is the balancing act, and most people only run the first half.
It makes sense that we do. Before coaching, before entrepreneurship, most of us lived censored: self-censoring, ashamed, quiet. So when we find the people who resonate, we amplify. Good. But once you are in orbit with your people, the balancing work has to start, or your audience becomes an echo chamber and so does your head. Your life gets richer the more thoughts you can hold inside your mind, including the ones you do not hold.
Your people: how do they respond when you say something the way you actually say it? Name one moment where the imperfect version landed better than the polished one would have.
Who does your work repel, and are you at peace with it? Name the kind of person who should not hire you.
One opinion you disagree with that is held by someone in your world. What is the strongest version of their case? (Write theirs, not your rebuttal.)