Cultivating an Intentional Community

Valerie Friedlander 0:00
Hello, my friends and welcome to another episode of Mindset, unlimited. Mindset tips, tools and inspiration for women leaders. I’m your host. Valerie Friedlander, ICF certified coach, sociologist, intersectional feminist artist, mom and nerd. Today we are talking about cultivating intentional community, the shifts that create deeper connection and belonging. This episode is so special. I am interviewing two amazing sisters before I share about them and the specifics of what we talk about, I do want to highlight the reason why I really wanted to have this episode, and to have this conversation may seem apparent, but I’m gonna say it anyway, which is that we are in this time of decomposing our usual way of doing things. We have kind of peaked out our individualistic, hierarchical, supremacist culture, and it’s eating itself. And given that it’s spring, you’re thinking about gardening when something is decomposing, when you’re putting your compost into the garden, it’s designed to grow new things. We decompose stuff, we’re going to grow new things. And to do that with intentionality, we want to plant the seeds that we are choosing to plant, we’re going to tend those plants, and that is what building, cultivating intentional community is about. We need to learn how to build deeper connections and create belonging, and that’s really difficult when we have been conditioned in all these other more toxic to our system, both individually and collectively, when we’ve learned all these ways of being, and we’re unlearning them while trying to do new things, and it’s overwhelming and complicated and all of that, and it can be really disheartening, and we need hope. And I think that having these kinds of conversations and exploring ways that we have done this in other spaces, ways other people have done that in the modeling of it, ways that we can practice this way of being with each other is critical to being able to do our own planting and our own gardens and in our own communities as we’re in this period of decomposition. So all of that said, I want to introduce two amazing women, sisters, Amy and Nancy Harrington, who founded the passionistas project out of a deep desire to empower women around the world, they are eager to share their knowledge about building community, creating safe spaces for women the power of storytelling and navigating professional transitions. Both co founders walked away from high profile jobs in Hollywood to work together. Amy was the VP of post production and visual effects for all feature films. At Warner Brothers working on movies like The Matrix and Harry Potter franchises, Nancy left the ad agency where she created Oscar campaigns for Miramax. Their career as celebrity interviewers has included chats with Julia, Louis Dreyfus, Rita Moreno, Lily Tomlin, Laverne, Cox, Carol Burnett and more now through their global passionistas project, sisterhood podcast and power passionistas summit, they strive to inspire women to follow their passions and join forces in the fight for equality for all, some of what we talk about in this episode include building trust in relationships with other women, redefining leadership from hierarchy to a circle of self and CO leadership, developing community agreements rooted in consent, care and shared responsibility, and practicing the power of asking, receiving and mutual support. I am thrilled to share this episode with you, and now without further ado, let’s get started.

Welcome Nancy and Amy. I am so excited to have you on mindset unlimited today.

Amy Harrington 4:22
We’re so happy to be here.

Valerie Friedlander 4:26
There’s so many things I want to chat about. Specifically, we’re going to look at intentional communities, because you all have one, and it’s so beautiful. And just the sisterhood there is incredible. I think that’s something that we really need more of in the world right now, as we all are navigating some pretty rough waters, and as we get started, I like to ask folks to share a little bit about themselves and what is a limit that you used to take for granted that you have since. Unlearned.

Nancy Harrington 5:02
Excellent. Well, I’ll start. We are sisters, Amy and Nancy Harrington. Little bit about ourselves. I won’t go into too much of our history, because I’m sure you covered that in our bio. I don’t want to bore people, but we, we grew up on the East Coast, near a small town near Boston. It came from a very creative family and ended up in the world of entertainment because of it. And we left our jobs together at the same time and went on a long, long journey and twisty roads and ended up in the world of celebrity interviewing, which ultimately led us to our first our podcast called The passionistas project, and we decided that we wanted to shine a light on women who don’t get the spotlight very often so, and that has led us to building our community, which I’m sure we’ll talk about later. Limiting belief. What is a limiting belief that I have? Drawing a blank, um, Amy, you go first.

Amy Harrington 6:04
Right. I’ll go first. I’m gonna give you a word Nan for yours, because I know it’ll help you, which is leadership. Okay,

Nancy Harrington 6:16
See, this is why. This is why this works.

Valerie Friedlander 6:18
I love it.

Amy Harrington 6:19
This is all about being sisters. I think one of the limits that I had put on myself is that I, early in my career, worked in a very male dominated world where women were competitive with each other, or they didn’t want to really like be the girls in the room, so they wouldn’t hang out together, and they really kept the like focus. I know I personally kept focus on like. I don’t want them to think of me as a girl. I want to be one of the guys. And so I didn’t really make connections with women, and really for a long time friendships with women, and once I broke through that, and now I’m surrounded by women all the time and collaborating with them and seeing how beautiful and supportive and nurturing that is, I’m always amazed now when I’m in a conversation like yesterday, we had a phone call with a guy, and it was a business He kind of call and it was like, Oh, the energy of this is so very different and interesting. And I love men, and I’d like to working with men, but it is there was a limit on my connection to the feminine side of operating that I now am so grateful that I’m in touch with.

Valerie Friedlander 7:41
What helped you overcome that? I’m just, curious about about that, because that comes up a lot. I work with a lot of women in male dominated spaces, and that there’s so many layers to that resistance that can come up. So I’m curious what helped you.

Amy Harrington 7:55
I mean, first was removing myself from the situation. I left the studio system. I had been a studio executive, so I was and I was a younger woman with all these men who are at least 10 years older than me. So I just, you know, really made a conscious decision, like, I’m not going to be a girl, I’m just going to be one of the guys. And when I left that to work with Nancy, because Nancy and I decided, okay, we both are leaving our careers and we’re going to do something together, being around Nancy, obviously, who’s my you know, other half of my soul that started to open me up, but I still had that, like, those barriers of like, we can’t trust that person, we can’t let that person in and it took a long time to chip away at that, and I really think it wasn’t until we started the podcast and we started meeting these women, because the other thing we were doing was celebrity interviews, where you’re, like, making these really amazing conversation connections with these people. And we were doing intense, like, three hour celebrity interviews, and you feel like you’re connecting. And you know, never gonna talk to this famous person again. But with the women we were interviewing, they’d be like, Let’s have coffee next week. And it was like, Oh, they want to be our friend. And the more I spent time with them, and the more I heard these stories, and the more I cared about them, it was like, whatever stuff I have built up, I’ve got to push through it, because I want to be in their lives, and I want them in mine. And so I really just consciously started doing that. Until now, it’s just second nature. Like, now it’s like, oh, there’s an opportunity to be and I’m an introvert, but it’s like, oh, there’s an opportunity to be around a bunch of other women. Yeah, let’s go. Let’s do it, you know? So,

Valerie Friedlander 9:46
Yeah, yeah, awesome. Okay, cool. I have, I have more questions, but I also want to make sure that Nancy gets to share.

Nancy Harrington 9:55
Well, as Amy suggested, and she read my mind. You’re witnessing our sister power in action, because it is a you. Was a huge limit for me. I never understood that I was a leader. It wasn’t until very, very recently, like within the last six months, probably, that I understood that I was a leader. I, like I said, I’ve always been self employed, so, you know, it was just me, myself and I and I’d hire people to help me, but I didn’t think of that. I never had people that I managed, or a crew or staff or, you know, so and then, as we started to build the community, and, you know, we have women’s equality summits, and we have all of these things that innately is leading, but it never occurred to me that that’s what it was. And someone pointed out recently, someone called US leaders recently, and I kind of bristled, like I don’t think of myself as a leader. And when I said that to her, she was like, of course, you’re a leader. You know, you’ve built this amazing community. And she also reminded me that leading you can just lead yourself. I mean, you lead yourself through your daily life, you know, and that as a sister, I help lead my sister on my other siblings, and that there’s a lot of leadership just innately in your daily life. But certainly, by building this community, I have become a leader and and I’m proud of it, and I’m I’m happy for it, I’m grateful for it. So that was definitely a limit that I had to break through to get where we are.

Valerie Friedlander 11:31
Yeah, so I’m curious, what did you think, like, if you could go back to when that that period of going, Oh, I’m, I’m not a leader, like, what do you think your definition for leadership was? And what do you think it is now?

Nancy Harrington 11:45
Yeah, I think it was like someone who’s in charge and you have a staff of people, and you, you know, you’re leading a corporation, you’re leading a country, you’re leading, you know, you’re leading a band, whatever. Like, I just thought it was somebody who was in charge and sort of dictated to people what to do. And, yeah, I’ve done that all my life. I used to produce theater. I used to own a theater company, like I had, I had a cast and I had a crew, and, like, so it just it to me. It was, it was this vision of someone in a higher up place, and I didn’t think that I I was at that level, I guess is probably what it was.

Valerie Friedlander 12:21
Yeah, so I’m hearing, like, essentially, like control, like you, you were imagining it was somebody that that was like a dictator. Then said, All right, go here, do this, do that, and that there’s this hierarchy in leadership where, if you’re the leader, you’re the one on top and telling everybody else what to do.

Nancy Harrington 12:39
So like a pyramid of leadership, as opposed to a circle that we’ve created where we’re at the center of that circle, but and the people are around us, it’s like, completely different kind of leadership.

Valerie Friedlander 12:52
Yeah. Oh, and such a powerful shift, which actually kind of sparks me. I mean, that’s the that’s the difference that I tend to look at of like, the difference between like the masculine style, I would even say toxic masculine. I’m not sure that. I necessarily think that it’s like innately masculine, because that’s a whole thing too, but to think that’s that toxic style of masculinity that’s so predominant in our culture, compared to the shift that we’re encouraging of being more feminine and more inclusive and more circular.

Nancy Harrington 13:32
Absolutely.

Amy Harrington 13:33
Yeah, it’s beautiful. And I think part of the way Nancy and I built our community is, you know, a lot of online communities are built around a person, a figurehead. I’m the coach, or I’m the, you know, I’m the expert on this. And from day one, we’re like, we’re not coaches. We don’t want to pretend to people that we’re experts on all these different topics and business development and personal growth and social impact, like we engage in those things, they matter to us, but we’re not going to tell people what to do. And so from day one, it was like, this is about giving a space, creating a space, and bringing in power, passionistas, who are who are experts on certain topics, who can impart their wisdom, but really making it about the community, leading each other, sharing with each other, so that it’s never about us. We have to be at the center of the tone of it, but it’s not about like today, we’re going to tell you how to, you know, lead your life. It’s like, that’s not our style. It’s, it’s about, how can we collectively support each other?

Valerie Friedlander 14:50
Yeah. What inspired you to shift from doing these celebrity interviews into creating this community?

Amy Harrington 15:01
Well, you know, we started around 2016 there was an election, and then there was the ME TOO movement, and the time’s up movement. Things were really shifting in the world. We were hearing all of these stories of women that had gone through trauma, and they were amazing stories. They were powerful stories. They needed to be heard. But we also wanted to tell the stories of women that were empowered and and do it following their passion. So that’s when we decided to do the podcast. So that was 2017 we sort of solidified this is what we’re going to do. And by 2018 we launched the first episode, and then that led us to our women’s equality Summit, where we, you know, we were hearing all these stories, and we wanted to do something more, and realize that the women that get the stage least often are the women in the margins. So we decided we were going to bring together women from marginalized communities, give them a topic and let them tell their story, and then have a round table so that they could come together and see what they had in common, but also embrace their differences. And it was a really beautiful thing. And we loved doing this summits and then. But we also kind of felt like every year we’d do the summit, and there’d be all this great momentum and these amazing conversations, and then we weren’t nothing would happen after that. We’d we’d vow like we’re going to keep this conversation going, and then it kind of wouldn’t sputter out. And so we we knew there was some a piece missing, and we weren’t sure what that was. And we actually spent a year working with three different coaches to figure out what the next step was. And we finally realized that what everyone told us that they had, but we have they wish they had, was our sisterhood. And we realized that, you know, well, what’s sisterhood? It’s companionship, it’s loyalty, it’s someone who’s there to lift you up. It’s someone who’s there to celebrate when you win, and someone to have fun with. And so we, we thought, you know, well, we can provide that. So that’s when we started the community that we we launched it just a little over a year ago, online and and it really has become that. And, you know, we it’s a beautiful space where women are just supporting one another. And so, yeah, that was our long and winding road to the sisterhood community.

Valerie Friedlander 17:33
Yeah, well, so you hit on a few things that that stood out to me. And first, if you don’t mind my asking, What is the age gap between the two of you?

Amy Harrington 17:43
I love this question. I’m a younger sister, and there’s five years between us.

Valerie Friedlander 17:49
Okay, yeah, see, I have a younger sister who is six and a half years younger than me, and so I just asked that because, like, my younger sister worked for me when when I was in corporate, and she needed a job. And I was like, oh, she’d be great in this role. And my mom was like, Ooh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea for you all to work together like that could cause problems, because we weren’t. I mean, six and a half years difference, we weren’t exactly close when we were little, she was just annoying.

Amy Harrington 18:18
I was never annoying.

Nancy Harrington 18:20
[Laughter] No, actually, Amy and I have been best friends since born. The family folklore is that I asked for her to be born because I didn’t want my mother to be lonely when I went to kindergarten.

Valerie Friedlander 18:34
Oh, that’s adorable. I also asked for my sister. It was just and I thought she was fabulous. She also just came with a lot of other things that I was like, Oh, this is, like, a there’s more here

Amy Harrington 18:48
As sisters will. So did you hire her? And how did it work?

Valerie Friedlander 18:51
I did hire her! And she was amazing. And I want to say it was probably some of the best times in our relationship, because, like the two of you, we just got each other, we just were on the same page. And it was also, like, one of the few times since I went off to college that we actually lived close to each other, and so being able to, like, be there for each other, I was a new mom, and so she was there helping out, and she was my nanny before I hired her. So it was a whole thing, but like, what you’re describing, and I know this is not true for everybody and all siblings, I just want to acknowledge that that that’s not always true, but I’m a big fan also of chosen family. I have a lot of work and experience in 12 step and having those spaces of chosen family is really powerful. And I do have a chosen family in my life, and it stood out to me. I don’t know if you all have read Mia bird songs book, how we show up, but in it, you all, I think you all would love it. And in it, she talked. About our relationships and how so we’re so conditioned around the nuclear family in the US at least, and how important it is to be expanding our community. But what that looks like is, you know, the one relationship that we sign a contract, essentially without actually signing a contract. We sign a piece of paper, is a marriage, but and so it’s the only one that we think of like we say vows and we make agreements and stuff. But how important having agreements are in relationships and that like commitments, like you’re actually making a commitment to other people and saying, you know, this is this is what I am going to do. This is how I’m going to show up. And these are the expectations that you can place on my capacity, essentially, and how powerful that is, but how out of the norm that is. And I’m curious. I mean, I know that when you have a community, like having community agreements can be really helpful, like you’re participating in a community. And I’m thinking about when you have people who are so conditioned by individualism and transactional relationships, what are the challenges that you found in building and holding a space, a community space, knowing that that’s like, the context most of us are coming into a relationship with a space from what are the challenges and like, how Have you engaged those challenges to really hold that space the way you intended to?

Amy Harrington 21:45
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I think first and foremost, we have really tried to set a tone that being kind to each other and being open to listening to each other’s stories is critical and the basis of it, and it’s not a reward based system like social media where, oh, if I post this, no one’s going to see it, because it didn’t get a million likes, and so it’s going to get buried by some algorithm. It’s a place where anybody can come and say anything. And I think we’re very fortunate because a lot of the women who have come in, especially recently, are being brought in by women who are already there, so they understand, like their friends, they’re going to their friends and saying, I found a place where you can be yourself, where you’re not going to get, you know, a lot of spam, where you’re not going to people aren’t going to jump down your throat if you state your opinion. So they’re coming in knowing that the the mission is to be kind to each other to be yourself like Nancy and I are super vulnerable in the space which isn’t really our go to if you look at our social media, we’re not the like vulnerable. This is what happened today, in my personal life kind of thing, but in the sisterhood, we really aren’t, aren’t pretending to be anything that we’re not. We’re not. Like, here’s a photo of my perfect, you know, house with everything in its place. And, you know, everything’s great. So it allows other people to do that too. And I think really at the root of the success of it is we do have this social impact piece. So yes, people come and they can promote their businesses, and we encourage that. We also aren’t like you can only post to promote yourself on this space, in this space on Tuesdays at noon. You know it’s like, we want you to thrive. We want people. We look at it as not promotion as much as it is. You have a gift to offer these other women. Share about your gift. Don’t be super salesy. Don’t you know, pitch everybody every two hours. But if you have a workshop coming up that might help somebody here, let them know about it. Put it in our calendar. Put it on the share anything wall. We that’s why you’re here. We want to to, you know, benefit from your brilliance as much as you’re benefiting from other people’s brilliance. So there’s that component of it. There’s also the personal growth component, because everybody we know, and especially the women in the community, are just trying to be better. You know, live a better life, reduce their stress, figure out ways to be more inclusive, all those things. So personal growth is really an important component of it, and then the social impact part, we made sure to include that because when we started. And it was a small core group of women. We were like, What makes you know they’re very different women, but what makes them what do they have in common? Every single one of them was doing what they were doing, starting a business or doing a podcast or starting a charity because they wanted to help other people. And they’re the kind of people that, when you get on a call with them, they say to you, before you get a chance to say to them, What can I do to help you? How can I support you? And so I think, by the nature of having that social impact piece, it encourages the women who come in to be the kind of people who want to be loving and giving and are they’re compassionate and empathetic. So it’s kind of a built in thing. We’ve had very, very few incidents or instances where there was an uncomfortable moment or people were at odds about something like it, really, I can think of two things, maybe where there was a conversation or a comment, but there has been nothing where people are mean to each other or attacking each other, because everybody’s coming into it with the right spirit. So we’ve just tried to set a tone, you know?

Nancy Harrington 26:24
Well, said.

Valerie Friedlander 26:28
Yeah, that makes a huge difference. And, and so I’m, I’m curious within that, because this is one of the things that I’ll see come up, is caring, giving people. But what is it? What do you see? And if you’ve needed to like, kind of support around this receiving. Because so often the people that you know I work with, a lot of people who are really, you know, high achievers, really compassionate, want to have a social impact, and they’re willing to give to all these people, but they’re burning out because they’re not, not just because they’re giving. Because, I think that’s one of the things we kind of mix up, is that we think, Oh, we’re burning out because we’re giving too much. But oftentimes, what I’m finding is that it’s not about the giving too much, it’s about the wall to receiving.

Amy Harrington 27:18
Yes, totally.

Nancy Harrington 27:21
We actually, last week, just had a event in conjunction with Deb Drummond 262, she also has a women’s organization that’s mostly business focused, but it’s very aligned with what we do. So we decided to team up, and we had an Ask party, and that’s exactly what we talked about is that women aren’t good at asking, they’re really good at giving, and they’re horrible at receiving. So this ask party is a beautiful event, because every woman in the Zoom Room gets to ask one thing, but it can be a personal thing, a business thing. They’re asking for one specific thing, and everyone in the room has to respond to her with either a suggestion or some advice, or, Oh, I’m going to connect you with this person. Or, in some instances, I’m sorry I don’t have anything to contribute to that. I’m going to pass. But they at least have to say that, and it’s a beautiful thing, because every single woman involved has to ask, has to give, and has to receive, and, and it really, I think, opens us all up to that. Because I do. I think women are horrible at receiving, you know. And, and you’re right, it is. It’s the burnout. Isn’t about the giving, you know, but, but the receiving is the part that I think we’re the worst at and asking. We’re bad at asking, too.

Amy Harrington 27:38
And I think for for me, one of the things I learned in this last year, even that helps me receive more, is people like to give they like for you to ask them for their help, their advice, like, if you do it with the spirit of, you know, in this kind of space where everybody’s there just trying to, like, live a better life, be kind, it’s like, Oh, you want To help. It makes you feel good to help me. Or, Oh, you have this resource that you would like, that you spend all this time and energy creating, and you want me to benefit from that. Like people actually like it when you turn to them and say, I would like to ask you for this, or I need your help, or whatever it is, I think we’re all conditioned to think like, I’m a burden. It’s a burden. It’s a burden to ask for something. It’s like, no, it actually the kind of people we are talking about, the kind of people that you attract, and we attract, they actually like to help people.

Nancy Harrington 29:53
I actually think it was a turning point for us in our business, when we started asking for help. Yeah, you know, because we, in the beginning, we just made it seem like we knew everything. We had all the answers we were, you know, and then we realized, no, you know what? We need help. We need support. We need, you know, we need people to pay us, because we need to keep going. If we don’t, if we aren’t making an income, we’re not going to be able to keep it going. You know. We need connection. We need advice. And once we actually started asking and showing that we were vulnerable too, I think was a turning point for us.

Valerie Friedlander 30:27
Yeah, definitely. And I mentioned before we started recording that I’m doing a training around attachment and somatics around attachment. And one of the things that really came forward for me, because I I had that asking piece, I had done a lot of work around it, because I remember being in an Al Anon meeting, and that idea of, like, you know, if you like giving, what makes you think other people don’t like it too. And, I mean, I think there’s an attachment component to that, of like, feeling like a burden. Oh, my parents are always too busy. And one of the things that that has been said one of the trainings, Gabor Mate spoke, and he was talking about how trauma isn’t just like what happens to you, but it’s also what doesn’t happen that should have happened and and so like our society is not really designed for supporting child development in a healthy way. So that was, like, one of those things that that it was like, oh, okay, I’m clearly functioning off of this idea that other people don’t want to give and I would be a burden. Which, okay, we could go back, but we don’t need to. What we need to do is go, Okay. Well, how true is that? And then, of course, that goes to, like, my own ideas about, like, whether I’m allowed to say no. And so then assuming that other people aren’t going to say no if they don’t have the capacity, and then I am going to be a burden, because if I don’t say no when I don’t have the capacity, then, like, then people feel like a burden instead of like, I feel like I’m giving, and it feels good to give. So, like all of that,

Amy Harrington 32:04
I have a revolutionary thing related to that.

Valerie Friedlander 32:07
Oh, yes.

Amy Harrington 32:09
So we, we have interviewed and collaborated with this woman. Her name is Dia Bondy. She’s amazing. She’s a communications coach. But dia, in her spare time for her hobby is an auctioneer, and she does, you know, charities will, you know, bring her in and she’ll do the auction off the husbands and the muffin baskets and whatever. And so she came up with this methodology called Ask like an auctioneer. Because I think the other thing is, we’re also afraid, right, of that rejection. Like, I know I don’t like to ask because I don’t want someone to say no to me. I feel like, oh, they don’t like me enough, or, Oh my It’s not valuable to them, or whatever it is. Like, I don’t like to hear that. But Dia’s whole strategy is, when you’re an auctioneer, you ask until you get a no. You want the No, the No is the goal. So you might, you know, will you pay 200 will you pay 300 you know you’re going and going and going and that final No, no one’s going to go to 1000 means you got the 900 but you might have only got the 200 if you didn’t ask, like an auctioneer, if you were just going for the yes, then you might just undervalued the thing. So the concept that the no is actually what you want to hear changes your mindset around the word no so incredibly. It’s so powerful, but it’s like, okay, or that’s their limit, okay, but I still got these four things,

Valerie Friedlander 33:43
Yes! Our mutual friend Becky mullencamp started a group about 100 rejections. And it’s that focus of, like, I am trying to get 100 rejections. So the focus is on, and usually I I’m like, let’s focus on what we want, not what we don’t want. But like, if you are focused on, I want 100 rejections, and yeah, you do end up asking like an auctioneer. But one of the things that I really love about the group that you have, and it kind of speaks to this, is I had done so much work around this, this asking, and all of that dynamic. And then when I became a coach and I entered the entrepreneurship realm, and the online entrepreneurship realm in particular, it has really activated this like transactional relationship dynamic, because asking for help was constantly, yeah, I’ll help you for this much money. And Cher Hale, who was a guest on this podcast last season in her sub stack, she wrote about the death of mentorship and how mentorship has really not been there, which I see as that space of, yeah, I did this. I will show you what I did, versus the idea of like, yeah, you want to know what I did. You know, pay me for. It. It’s like the online business coaching layer that I have run into so much and I know I do want to say, like there are online business coaches who don’t function off of that model, and there are a whole lot of them that do. They’re nice people, but because that transactional style is there, it’s created this resistance to receiving and asking in me, like I can feel the vibration in my body and and that’s a whole thing. So anyway, to wrap back around what that’s one of the things that I love about your community is that the the tone that you’re setting and the space that you’re creating is very much about sharing and and you keep saying that word, and I keep meaning to come back around, and it was storytelling. It’s like, this is my story, and people can pick it up, and they can put it down, and it’s all. It’s received like, no matter what, like whether and that whole ask party idea, I mean that tone somehow vibrationally, it shifts that transactional feeling for me.

Nancy Harrington 36:09
Well, I think that comes back to the masculine, feminine energy thing that you were talking about earlier. I think there is a big difference in women being nurturing and not as transactional. They’re they’re willing to share and uplift and help, and yes, at the end of that, there might be an ask. There might be like, if you got something out of this, if I helped you, and you want to do more than I have XYZ that you can, you know, but it doesn’t start with that. It doesn’t lead with, Oh, you have a problem. You pay me X amount of money and I’ll help you fix it. It’s, How can I help you? What can I share with you? And it is a nurturing environment. I think, I think that’s a big part of it,

Amy Harrington 36:54
Yeah. I mean, I think when we consciously decided to, really want to make this space inclusive. And through the summits that we were doing, we we really decided to focus those on women from marginalized communities. And when we built the sisterhood, it was like we first and foremost, need to make this a space where women who are marginalized can come whether that’s LGBTQ or black women or women over 50. You know, whatever group they feel like they’re kind of the box they feel like they’re put in. They don’t have a place to go where they can feel safe, and it’s key to us that the marginalized among us in the sisterhood know that they are protected and they are safe. So I think that that is kind of the the thing that makes it less transactional. I think, honestly, it’s a business model flaw. I law, because we’re not just saying like, hey, we want all the seven figure entrepreneurs to come in here. They’re welcome. We know women who are working massive corporate jobs who feel just as lonely as a solopreneur because they can’t really talk about how they feel at work, because they have to have this mask on that everything’s perfect, and they have everything under control. So those people are welcome, but it’s really about like, you know, you feel like you can’t be yourself somewhere else, and you feel alone. You feel like you don’t have a support system, and you need one. So come here. And because people are coming, because that’s what they need, they’re not trying to be salesy. They they’re not trying to get something. And the amount of women in our group are like, You know what I’m doing this workshop for free, because I think this is really important information, that everybody haven’t and you know, our social impact content is always free because we’re like, if it has to do with making the world a better place, everybody should have access to it. The ability to connect is free because we want everybody to feel like they can make connections and they can make friendships. There are workshops, there are other stuff, you know, anthology books. There’s stuff beyond that that we put a price tag on. But the core stuff, the like, what do you need to get through the day? Stuff that’s always going to be free for us. And I think that, again, sets a tone. And I think the people who, if they are a little too salesy, they kind of, we naturally get weeded out, because it’s like people aren’t responding to it. But I agree. I used to hate the I we used to do a ton of, especially during COVID, a ton of those like, oh, sign up for this one hour webinar and we’ll teach you about going live on Facebook. And so you’d. Sign up, and the whole thing would be like, the sales pitch, and then by the end, it would be like, here’s this $5,000 course, and it’s like, you didn’t teach me anything, but the people who in that hour would actually give you valuable information and, like, just give it that to you for free. And if you need more, you can do this. It was like, All right, I’ll sign up for that.

Valerie Friedlander 40:21
Yeah, yeah, the relational dynamic. And that’s something that you said when you talked about the auctioneer thing. The first thing that came to mind also had to do with community, and that is when you’re only relying on a couple people, that becomes a bit more burdensome, right, like or your spouse, or, you know, a friend. But when you have community, then you have more shared labor, and it’s more, you know, like we’re sharing, but we have to break free of that, that way of of thinking about ourselves as well. But you know, the other thing that you said that right at the beginning, Amy, where you were talking about the journey that you went on to being able to connect with other women, and that block to, I don’t want to be one of the girls. I don’t want to be seen as one of the girls, which then turns into the like, girls are dangerous, right year round, and our brain makes all these wild associations that we don’t even realize that they’re making because it’s like, oh, I don’t want to be seen as this. But now suddenly it’s morphed into like, Oh, girls are you know, could be could be dangerous. Oh, my brain made these connections. But you expressing that journey to being able to connect with people. It’s like that that didn’t shift right away, but you put yourself in these positions where you were able to start to change the associations that were happening internally to you, to be able to actually be in a different space. And that is powerful. And I think that’s really helpful to for people who are listening, who are interested in community building, who are interested in mutual aid, who are interested in connecting in a way that they haven’t connected before, to receiving care as much as giving care and that sort of thing is you don’t have to feel it first. You don’t have to be there first. Just place yourself in those positions where that that invite you to start making different associations. And the passionist says project sisterhood could be a great place to start practicing that. So I’d love you know, as we’re getting toward the end of this, if you could share just a little bit about, I mean, we’ve talked about it the entire time, but like, Where can people find you? Where can people find that? I’ll have links in the show notes, of course, but like, a little bit about what connecting with that is.

Nancy Harrington 42:52
So the easiest way to find us is the passionistas project.com and once you’re there, there’s a link to go to the sisterhood, where you can join the free membership. It’s very easy. If, once you’re there, if you feel like the upgrade to the premium membership is what you want to do, then that’s fabulous. And we encourage it, because there’s a lot of amazing content and but yeah, from our website, you can find us on social media, you can email us all the things. So that’s the easiest way. The passionistasproject.com

Valerie Friedlander 43:26
Fabulous, and we’ll have a link in the show notes. So as we wrap up, I like to ask two questions. One is, what does it mean to you to be unlimited?

Nancy Harrington 43:42
I think it’s just that we have the capacity to do whatever we want to do and and it’s all inside us already, we just have to let it free.

Amy Harrington 43:54
Yeah, and for me, it’s freedom, is the word that popped into my mind, like the freedom to follow your passions, to live your dream, to connect with the people that really support you and that you you feel connected to. And you know we were. We were very, very lucky kids. We were, I don’t remember ever feeling like we were told if we wanted to do something, we couldn’t do it. And so I’ve always lived my life that anything is possible, and I think that as you go older, the world starts to put limits on you, and you’ve got to just try and ignore that noise and remember that. Remember all the amazing things you’ve already done, and if you did those, imagine what you can do next. Yeah.

Valerie Friedlander 44:47
And then finally, when you want to tap into an unlimited feeling, what song do you listen to?

Amy Harrington 44:58
There’s a it’s a musical piece. Your thing, I’m going music theater.

Valerie Friedlander 45:01
So many of my guests are musical theater folks. It’s fabulous. I didn’t even know that all the time, but like, yes, go for it.

Nancy Harrington 45:10
You stole mine.

Valerie Friedlander 45:14
You two are adorable.

Amy Harrington 45:17
There’s a song in Pippin called Morning glow, and it it starts really quiet, and it’s dawn and and it builds to the Sun is in the sky and the music is booming, and it’s a very inspiring song, and I highly recommend it.

Nancy Harrington 45:35
What’s funny is you only stole half of my answer because I was going to say Pippin, but I was gonna say corner of the sky. How to find my corner of the sky?

Valerie Friedlander 45:49
Okay, I have a playlist for all the songs that folks say give them that unlimited feeling. And it is such a such a diverse grouping of songs. It’s amazing. So there’s, there’s something for everybody in in that playlist, so that’ll be linked in the show notes too. It’s just fun. So thank you. Nancy Amy, thank you so much for joining me today. It has been a pleasure getting to know you better and hearing all the wisdom that you have to offer and all about the passionistas project.

Nancy Harrington 46:25
Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure.

Amy Harrington 46:27
Thank you. Thank you for being a part of it.

Valerie Friedlander 46:29
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode, and if you did, I have a little request, which is, please leave a review for the podcast. It doesn’t have to be long. It could be just a couple words. In Spotify, I think you can only just click stars. So dropping five stars is super helpful because it tells the platform’s algorithm that you’re enjoying the podcast and then encourages it to share it with more people who might be looking for a podcast like this one. So if you could take just a moment and do that, I would be super appreciative, and everything that we referenced in this episode is linked in the show notes, so be sure to check that out, and I will talk to you all next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai