At Chilcotin Holidays, we have a community of people from around the world and it evolves with new people arriving and people leaving. The challenge to live among a group of people is to deal with everybody’s different expectations and values. Facing so many different opinions can be very confrontational, suddenly your own values seem to be so fragile and you might even come to the point where you adapt your expectations to the group. This shows the strength a community can develop.
Amazingly our differences here are very valuable, as we appreciate everybody’s skills; by adding them up, we create our communal strength. According to that nobody is left behind because each individual empowers the group; this way our difference develops our strength and our expectations become a common goal that everybody is able to reach. No matter where you are from, how old you are or what happened in your past, we’re all driven by the same desire: learning as much as we can from each other and growing in our personality.
We all speak the same language here: English, no matter where we are from. No one should have to witness a conversation they can’t join because they don’t know what the others are talking about. We teach each other new words every day and our English improves so much, which is another big advantage for all of us. Then we pass the knowledge around, we share everything we know to anybody who asks the “right“ questions, who invests in themselves, so we start investing in other people too. Investing means that we care and want to facilitate other people’s goals. In our community, another person’s success is acknowledged by all of us and we are sincerely happy about it, because we know that the whole team has been involved. At the same time, somebody’s failure is assumed by the individual person first to be shared with the group afterwards, because here it’s a failure of the whole group. We all function as a team and if somebody fails, it’s mostly because the whole team had a weak moment at some point.
In our community we help each other on our transformational journeys, we care for each other’s personal growth and look after everyone. We create our own world with our own rules and the ones who don’t fit in the team usually leave on their own accord. We all have different roles here, but because each situation varies, we don’t stick to the same role for very long. Roles such as “mentor“ for example are to be developed by each single person at a certain point. There are no specific leaders in this place, because we encourage everybody to be a leader when the time has come.
As in every community, shared values and morals are the base of the good vibes that float in the air. But sharing issues and disagreements plays a big role here as well. Being able to speak out loud what is going on and, by doing this, not letting situations get even worse is essential for us and our self-sanity. But also for the business it’s crucial, because at the end it’s our whole team that makes an effort on running the ranch.
Community also means a lot more than sharing bathrooms, tents, food, desks and work. It means adapting your desires and needs to anything the group can facilitate. When you first enter a new community, it’s common to have too high expectations. According to that there are two options; either you complain about everything and flood the environment with negative energy, or you make an effort and share your ideas of improvements with everybody. Making an effort for the group is the first step of adapting and leadership. From this point of view, each group member is a group leader at the same time. If you don’t take initiative for the group, you will neither be seen as a group member nor as a group leader. Taking initiative doesn’t mean to boss other people around, it mostly means to do things yourself! If responsibility is required, you take it. This way, you as an individual support and strengthen the community. And only if every single group member takes the same roles, all together can function as one whole. So keep in mind, living in an empowered community means starting with yourself!
Christophe, Elke, Fenja, Celina, Melvin
August 2017
