Club MEG ~ Session 1

A quick recap of what we focused on today for everyone, plus a copy of the coaching exercise we went through today for Club MEG members and founding subscribers only.

This being the first of our 12 group sessions, we indulged in some good old-fashioned meet and greet before getting down to business. No ice breaker games or anything, just straightforward introductions and a bit of sharing.

It was interesting, as always, to see where there’s some overlap in professional lives past and present, and again with writing lives past and present. It was fun to sit back and realize that just about everyone had shelter or rescue animals in the family, two of us live within two blocks of each other (and are the only ones without dogs), and two people had been very close neighbors, without knowing it, years before each moved out of the zip code at different times to different towns that are right next to each other. Neighbors again!

We discovered a lot more about each other in small doses — how many of us love travel, how many of us like to travel solo, who travels the world for months at a time, who loves road trips, and who likes to create worlds of beauty at home and close to home.

There was more, but it’s personal and private. Then we got out our pens and notebooks and went through the first exercise of Club MEG 2025.

What has all this got to do with identifying each person’s workshop goals and figuring out how to map the journey to achieving them?

I’m glad you asked. It’s called community building. And we do it for a couple of very good reasons.

First: Friendly accountability and genuine support do okay on social media platforms, but it’s not the same. Accountability and support become robust, meaningful, and powerful in a face-to-face group like this (even on Zoom). It’s important to anchor our connections early in the experience, because knowing you belong is the first step to knowing you can achieve your goal.

Second: Seeing your own experiences in someone else’s and recognizing you have intriguing things in common deepens empathy and builds mutual respect. You want to see the others succeed as you succeed. You feel it in your gut that protecting privacy, honoring confidentiality, holding a safe space, and providing useful, authentic, positive feedback are an essential part of the process.

With that last bit in mind, I’m going wrap up the public part of this post and get to the private part that’s only for the eyes of the Club MEG members and the Live/Write Balance founding subscribers.

Thanks for reading this far with us!