This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into extraordinary communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a small strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoy this post, you can learn more about our services and reach out here. We’ve also published a community-building handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. Order your copy here, and subscribe to our podcast “Get Together” for more stories from extraordinary communities.

You can listen to Kevin talk through his experience coaching community leaders on our podcast, The Get-Together! 🎙🐲

Five years ago, an exec coach friend told me:

“Leadership doesn’t get easier. You just develop the tools to tackle bigger challenges.”

This quote was top of mind today. I’ve been reflecting on the ~30 conversations I’ve had this year as a coach to community leaders, organizers, and managers. Nearly every work day for the last seven weeks I’ve spent an hour, usually 1:1, with community leaders working through their big challenges.

The experience has lit my brain on fire. I made a resolution to do more coaching because I wanted to help more people get their people together. These coffees and Google Hangouts quickly evolved into my daily source of motivation. Every day, my business partner Bailey sees me with my post-coaching buzz. The leaders I meet gain clarity from talking out strategy and structure. In turn, they inspire me with their commitment to other humans.

They’re out there — building communities of women, creators, moms, scientists, artists, activists, models, POC, Asian Americans, educators, meditators, founders, employees, LGBTQIA, gamers, designers, developers, musicians, athletes, baristas, and more. Sometimes as an organization, sometimes as individual people people.

Here are three reflections, notes to myself, as I grow as a coach.

1. Jamming with others is a lot more fun than talking at them.

After identifying a challenge to go deeper on, the questions continue. Different communities have different context and different cultures. How can I assume to know the best course of action? I might believe in certain principles (like the power of shared ownership!). Yet, these leaders spend 99x more time with their people than I do.

What I can do is channel their brain power to lead us to an answer. So I guide, prod, and push, but still don’t assert. From these sessions, I’ve come to viscerally understand the difference between hearing great advice and reaching your own epiphany.

I believe the latter honors one’s experience, builds capacity, and downright feels better.

2. Leaders need different support at different times.

What someone needs in a coaching session depends on who they are and where they’re at:

So I’ve had to wear different hats as coach:

• Sorter: “I’ve bucketed the strategies you’ve mentioned for attracting new folks into 3 categories. Is there a fourth that’s more collaborative or community-driven?”
• Decider: “Sounds like you’re flip-flopping on which fundraising strategy to spend time on. How about we define criteria to help make this decision?”
• Focuser: “You have a lot of interesting ideas to get people talking in the Slack community. How might we focus? What’s the primary thing that members will come back for?”
• Stickler: “Can I push you on your desire to ‘keep gatherings small.’ Why is that? It seems to be in tension with your overall mission.”
• Extractor: “We agree you must make this fundraiser more participatory. Let’s jam. What are some ideas for how to achieve that?”
• Backer: “Zoom out. You should know that this community you’re cultivating is rad. Thank you for the work you do.”

I hope to get quicker at reading what support leaders need. If I deduce what role I should play early in the conversation, I can push our conversations more confidently — not only arriving at insights faster but also exploring them at a deeper level.

(What’s your experience as someone who’s either given or received coaching? Are there other hats?)

3. My challenge is to scale my impact.

While coaching an hour a day this year has already introduced me to more NYC communities than last year, I feel the weight of my limiting factor: time.

To do more with my finite hours, I mulling over:

1. How can I streamline my coaching process? Minimize/eliminate not-so valuable activities?
2. How do I prioritize who to spend 1:1 coaching time with?
3. How do I multiply my efforts to help people get people together?

I’ve already implemented mini-improvements (e.g. Calendly lets folks book time slots with me, cutting down on back and forth e-mails). But I believe the highest return will come from what I believe is at the heart of all community building: sharing ownership.

Can I work with others to support more community leaders? Perhaps that means getting cohorts of leaders together. Maybe collaborating with or training other coaches? If you have ideas on how I might scale up/evolve, please holler!

I’m not sure where this coaching thing leads, but I know I love it. A fun byproduct has been just making new friends. I’ve gotten to participate in new gatherings/activities/efforts in my city. So thank you to every person I’ve jammed with, friends who provided intros, and folks who have been supportive. If you, or someone you know, are interested in meeting up, learn more about my coaching here.

—

P.S. If you have recommendations on coaching resources, training, tips, please share with me at kevin@kiwimonk.com!

This post is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into extraordinary communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a small strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this post, you can learn more about our services and reach out here. We’ve also published a community-building handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. Order your copy here, and subscribe to our podcast “Get Together” for more stories from extraordinary communities.

Reflections on Coaching 30 Community Leaders/Organizers was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi friends!

To kick off the new year, I’d love to connect with and coach 2–3 more community leaders/organizers who are cultivating a community they care about.

I’ve had the pleasure of coaching/advising a few incredible folks who get people together over the last few years.

From helping Jess and Brie scale their meetup to gather female changemakers in multiple cities, to strategizing with Hadley on how to shepherd the Edcamp education movement, to helping Jiwon prioritize as she launches accelerators for female and immigrant founders…

These experiences helping organizers problem-solve, strategize, and persist in their journey to harness people-power has been among the most fulfilling of my career. 🚀

I definitely didn’t have all the answers. We discovered them together. Learning by helping others learn has been rad, and I’d love to spend more time doing so.

So, are you building a community? Do you know someone? Need help getting organized? Let’s talk!

Here’s what I’m looking for

• Extra points if you’re based in NYC. I like face to face and want to invest in my city.
• Preference to folks bringing together a minority/POC or marginalized community.
• I especially like working through ops stuff — structure, process, systems. (But not only that stuff.)
• 👍 if your group has an in-person element. All-online isn’t my jam.
• Kudos if you’ve already gotten started. The less hypothetical the better. I was an engineer. I need pieces to play with.
• Doesn’t matter whether this is a side project or full-time thing. You could be hosting a neighborhood meetup or at the helm of a global network of lawyer activists.

(You should still consider reaching out even if you don’t neatly fit into this criteria.)

And here’s how it’ll work:

• Likely free/pro bono unless you’re running a profitable business.
• We’ll meet up/Google Hangout and go from there.

If you’re interested send me an email (kevin@kiwimonk.com) with a few sentences about you, the community you’re building, and what’s on your mind.

Please share this note with anyone you think would be keen. Thanks for listening and doing what you do. Happy new year!

— Kevin

P.S. You can learn more about me and my experience at kiwimonk.com.

We walked into the office of our first client. Taped on a conference room door was a handwritten sign: “Reserved for People & Co.” It was official. We were a real company.

In November 2016, I started People & Company with Bailey and Kai.

Our aspiration is to help organizations bring clarity to the murky work of building a community.

With every client, we tease out:

• What’s the goal for this community?
• Who do you serve? Who are your “hand-raisers?”
• What stage are you in? Are you trying to spark a fire or stoke the flames?
• What’s your strategy and how do you measure progress?

In our first year and a half, we’ve worked on community strategies for users, volunteers, and advocates. We’ve spent time with all sorts of passionate people—surfers, CEOs, caregivers, retail employees, and educators from Singapore to Conshohocken, PA. Fortune 500 to startup nonprofit.

Along the way, we’ve had two hospital trips, countless chicken wings, and a healthy number of team surfs. 🏄🏾‍

In short, chapter one of People & Company has been fun, challenging, and a daily reminder of the power of people.

Reflecting back, here are three things I learned.

1. Trust the process. If the process isn’t working, call someone to make it better.

Austin Kleon perfectly captured the roller coaster feeling of working through a project with this diagram (that he stole from Maureen Mchugh).

Like Austin, we’ve had our share of “Dark Night of the Soul” moments.

As an external partner, we’re brought in to figure out how to help a community grow amidst looming obstacles.

We use our framework, Spark✨ — Stoke🔥 — Scale🚀, to deduce the stage of development a community is in and what we do to fuel the fire.

Still, navigating an organization’s challenges can sometimes feel like a maze where there’s a person at every turn saying, “Don’t go that way, we already tried that.” 🙅‍

Which makes sense. If the answers were obvious, you wouldn’t hire us.

If I could teleport to 2016 Kevin, I’d tell myself three things:

• First, buckle in — don’t lose your cookies at the first sign of trouble.
• Second, trust the process — do that next interview, take that second meeting. Forge onward with faith.
• Third, if you’re running in circles, bring in fresh eyes. Phone a friend. (Thanks, Sarah, for that one time.)

I can’t emphasize enough the power of a killer outside opinion in your darkest moments. In Mindset, Stanford Professor Carol Dweck writes this about fostering a growth mindset:

“Process includes more than just effort. Certainly, we want children to appreciate the fruits of hard work. But we also want them to understand the importance of trying new strategies when the one they’re using isn’t working. (We don’t want them to just try harder with the same ineffective strategy.)

And we want them to ask for help or input from others when it’s needed. This is the process we want them to appreciate: hard work, trying new strategies, and seeking input from others.”

2. Doing Research = Kickstarting Relationships

I thought I was a social butterfly, but then I met my business partners.

All three of us are serious friend-zoners — we each have our own way of slipping into the friend zone with strangers swiftly and undetected. And we take pride in meeting and connecting with new people.

At first, I thought this was just our personalities. It turns out it’s also a secret to how we operate.

Paul Santos, a client and friend who runs Wavemaker Partners in Singapore, reframed my thinking (paraphrased):

“Your community work is about building relationships. Your framework is: meet someone, get to know them, figure out how to do something together. It’s building relationships at scale.”

When we do research — when we have conversations with engaged users/fans/customers — we’re not only absorbing insights. We’re also kickstarting important relationships with an organization’s most passionate people.

We call these folks hand-raisers. They’re the people who raise their hands to take on a bigger role for the cause. They’re a community’s potential leaders.

Cultivating relationships is an aspect of our work that we’re good at and don’t take lightly. We feel we have a responsibility to approach our interactions with a community’s hand-raisers with care and friendliness 😀.

Why? Because the P&C thesis is that people who care are more powerful than people who don’t.

Organizations underestimate what’s possible when you equip and empower your core constituents. Hand-raisers are precious gems. They’re any community’s greatest asset.

As Bailey puts it, “Great community building is not about management. It’s about cultivating leaders.”

3. We are people first.

At a consulting internship in college, my boss told me:

“You can’t make partner unless you have ten table-pounders. Ten leaders at the organization who will pound their fists on the table in your defense at a meeting.”

This last year and a half with Bailey and Kai has reminded me about the significance of going deep like that with select people.

At P&C, rule number one is: “We are people first.” Our personal wellbeing and the wellbeing of those we care about is more important than this company.

In the short time together, our team has shared homes, met each other’s family, cooked dinners, won and lost clients, thrown gummy bears at CEOs, cried, laughed, fainted, danced, bowled, bled, tried new foods, surfed, and even started a fan club for a large bony fish.

You can watch the sizzle reel here.

The hardest times bring you closest, and frankly we faced two terrifying experiences in our first year and half.

On a work trip, Bailey passed out next to me on a train from Boston to New York because of a heart condition. The train halted, paramedics came onboard, and we rode in an ambulance together to a hospital in rural Connecticut.

We are people first.

In December at our team retreat, Kai was hit by a car while walking on the side of the road. What the f*ck? One minute we’re ordering drinks at a tiki bar, next minute, we’re hailing 911 because our friend is lying on the ground unconscious with his head covered in blood. He was knocked out of his shoes. I saw his skull exposed from the wound.

We are people first.

Bailey has since zapped away the extra electrical pathway in her heart thanks to the marvels of modern medical technology. Kai has healed from the 18 staples in his head (with a rad scar). ⚡

Those heavy experiences solidify for me that while People & Company has work to do — clients to (find and) serve, processes to iron out, and projects to realize — what we’re here for is really the people beyond the company.

When all this ends, our relationships are what we walk away with. Taking care of each other, our clients, and the people we serve is what makes this work meaningful.

So, what did I learn?

It’s simple. Treat people like people.

That’s what it takes to build a community.

Thanks to Bailey, Kai, and Yoko for feedback, edits, and all that other good stuff.

Three Lessons from the First Year and a Half at People & Company was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the spirit of asking better questions, we propose a simple experiment: the Question Time Capsule.

What question should we ask you one year from today?

• To participate: Leave a voicemail at ☎️ (917) 740–1092 with your name, phone number, and a question we should ask future you.
• How it works: Entrust us with your question. In 365 days, Bailey and I will dig it up, dust it off, and call you to deliver your question. 👋
• We won’t share it: Your questions and contact info will be stored safe and sound in our archive of question time capsules.

We’re accepting submissions for one week until Nov. 4th, 2017, 11:59pm ET.

For our friends outside of the U.S. who’d like to join in, you can email a voice memo to questions@people-and.com.

Can’t wait to catch up!

P.S. Not sure what to ask your future self? Think about dreams, habits, dream habits, highs, lows, the future, friends, family, pets, inequality, AI, climate, the Knicks, skinny jeans, intelligent life in the universe, your hairstyle, or anything else that’s important to you.

What’s this about?

My first formal job interview was during my sophomore year of college.

I don’t remember much of what I said, but I recall wearing an oversized suit and asking many questions about my interviewer—his family, his story, the role, the company, the culture…

An hour later he shook my hand and remarked, “Thanks for your time. You can tell a lot about a person by the questions they ask.”

It seems the number of questions we ask each other is declining.

We used to ask strangers for directions. Now a GPS tells us the route. We used to ask people for recommendations. Now apps predict what we’ll want. I don’t have to ask what you did this weekend because I’ve already seen your stories. And if I want Mom’s recipe for đồ chua, I don’t have to call her; I can ask YouTube.

I know it sounds hyperbolic, but boy, sometimes it sure does feel like we’re on the fast track to a lonely, Wall-E future.

Despite this trend, every project at People & Company reminds me about the power of asking the right questions. We try our best to help organizations put people first — to rally their advocates — and it always starts with listening.

In the past year, we’ve asked investors about reading habits, pet sitters about their love for animals, and teachers about how they prefer to learn.

I’m confident that curious conversations reward us with empathy. And empathy leads us to make better decisions for and with each other.

Hence, Question Time Capsule. I want to ask better questions. Maybe you can show me how.

P.S. I ended up getting the job.

More importantly, my interviewer taught me that every interaction is an opportunity to ask good questions — the kind that teach us both about who we are.

Questions about these questions? Say hi@people-and.com. 👋

What Should We Ask You in a Year? was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This interview is part of our research on extraordinary in-person programs. Know someone we should speak to? Say hi@people-and.com!

My friend Gary Chou approaches facilitation as a self-described game show host — designing challenges, monitoring airtime, and keeping things moving.

Operating out of Orbital, the studio he founded in the Lower East Side, Gary co-teaches a unique course called Entrepreneurial Design with Christina Xu at School of Visual Arts MFA in Interaction Design. In the semester-long class, students are challenged to make $1,000 by launching an original idea. “Rather than teach students to be entrepreneurs, the course aims to teach them to be entrepreneurial in their pursuits.”

Since meeting Gary, I’ve been eager to absorb his wisdom. He’s got a lot of it. Gary and I spent an hour on the patio at Orbital (I’m a member!) digging into how to craft a challenge and the importance of networks.

Here are the highlights from our chat, adapted for written text. You can also hear it from Gary himself on Soundcloud.

Kevin Huynh: I feel you play this role of host or facilitator a lot. What has been the evolution of that in your life?

Gary Chou: Before I moved to New York, I did that more socially, less so professionally. I’d host concerts in my living room with friends, many of whom are audio gear-heads. We’d livestream concerts, people would bring food, and it would be a really fun event. I had an apartment on the top floor of a commercial building. Since it was the only residential unit, we could make whatever noise we wanted to.

Then I moved to New York in 2010 and joined Union Square Ventures. My role was to facilitate a network amongst the people who worked in the portfolio companies that didn’t necessarily have any reason to trust each other outside of the fact they took money from the same investor. I needed to be intentional about how to allow for them to interact and engage. In that case, I was playing host.

What I learned over time is that I was doing design except I was working within the medium of spaces and bodies rather than bits and pixels. In a lot of ways, running these programs has made me a better designer because when you’re working in the digital world, you’re so far removed from feedback. What you get is data in a log file somewhere.

I was doing design except I was working within the medium of spaces and bodies rather than bits and pixels.

KH: Yeah, you get to see footprints.

GC: It’s very easy to lull yourself into thinking that the thing that you’ve designed is working exactly the way that you thought it should because the data that you’re measuring is coming back positive. But when you run a program in a physical space, if it’s not truly working for everyone, it’s incredibly obvious. So the stakes are actually higher. It’s harder to design programs that are in person.

KH: Tell me about your “game show” framework. It’s something you talk about a lot, and I love it.

GC: Over time, I have learned that you want to think of everything as a game show. In a game show, there’s a finite period of time, and there are segments. Each segment is designed for a certain type of behavior and interaction.

Are we creating a program where I’m just getting up and talking at a bunch of people? Or are we creating an environment where people are engaging with each other? Are you engineering ways for every single person around the table to be required to speak? And also to listen?

KH: So you’ve been teaching this Entrepreneurial Design course for a few years. What have you learned from these students and their $1000 Projects?

GC: You’ve probably heard me talk a lot about how success for creators is a function of whether or not they have access to the networks that they need. That is such a simple, straightforward concept, but I don’t think I really landed on that being a worthwhile thing to talk about until 2015.

Success for creators is a function of whether or not they have access to the networks that they need.

KH: So you came to this conclusion about the importance of networks. You started thinking, “Well, if success for these creators depends on the networks they’ve built, how do we help them cultivate this network?”

GC: Exactly. And then I f*cked up.

KH: How’d you f*ck up?

GC: For the longest time I’d been trying to kill the $1000 Project because I thought that all it did was get people to focus on money rather than on networks. If access to networks is so important, we should be teaching people to build networks. So, we created an assignment that literally was, “Hey, go build a network!”

What happened was the whole class struggled with it because it’s effectively the equivalent of saying to a comedian: “Tell me a funny joke.” It was in this that I started to understand, “Oh, the network that you create is the byproduct of a thing that you do, it’s not the thing that you make.”

How do friendships form? How do relationships form? They form through a common experience of some act. You don’t go to someone and say, “We will be in relationship together,” right?

KH: “You and me — destined for friendship!”

GC: Yeah. That just doesn’t work.

That’s when I learned to actually appreciate the magic of the $1000 Project. The $1000 Project was really great because everyone has an idea of how they could make $1000. It’s a very accessible challenge. Because of that, you can get moving.

It’s not about teaching people how to run a race with perfect form. It’s about getting them to start running, and then pointing them in a direction that would be relevant for them.

It’s not about teaching people how to run a race with perfect form. It’s about getting them to start running, and then pointing them in a direction that would be relevant for them.

KH: And I imagine the students start to trust each other and form their own networks.

GC: Yeah. There are all these little nuggets: someone designed a logo for someone else’s project; someone helped someone else with their accountability or someone helped them with their writing.

By the time we review what they’ve learned in the course retrospective at the end of the semester, they start to piece it together, “Oh yeah, I actually needed this person’s help to prototype,” “They were my end user,” or “They were in the photo that I used for my project.”

This is the whole point: creating things is a multiplayer game. The moment you deny that you’re going to have a really, really tough time.

KH: If I was starting a new program to help people do something outside their comfort zone what drops of knowledge would you share with me?

GC: My friend Karin Chien, is an indie film producer and she has this philosophy of producing: it’s not just important to think about the stories that you want to tell, but who you want to tell them for, and who you want to tell them with. You want to be intentional about all of those things.

I found that to be very true across a lot of the different work that I do. If you’re not intentional about who you’re really doing this for and with, things can get very foggy along the way.

KH: Why do you do this stuff?

GC: As a teacher, you can’t do your student’s work for them. You can’t be like “Hey, move aside, little Joey. Let me show you how you this is really done.”

Creating things is a multiplayer game.

There’s a joy in that because what gets produced is often well beyond my capability. And that’s kind of neat.

For most of my career, I’ve worked on failed digital products for companies, sites, and services that are no longer alive on the internet. That’s kind of depressing.

But I’ve had the opportunity to teach. Whether they have come through Orbital, SVA or our other programs — seeing that you’ve helped change the angle of direction someone is moving in by one or two degrees, that taken over a long period of time is pretty powerful.

KH: Thank you Gary. I appreciate your time.

GC: Thanks man.

Gary shows us what it takes to shift perspective

The story of the $1000 project resonates with me because I started my career in much the same way. I created a Kickstarter to raise $1000 for a social art project to distribute hundreds of disposable cameras around the world.

Nervous after hitting launch, I remember getting my first backers. It moved me to tears. Seeing my friends — my network — rally support made me want to put more things in the world to see what would come back.

Listening to Gary reflect on Entrepreneurial Design and the lessons gleaned from his other programs make me appreciate the careful, ongoing dissection of what students take away from each course. In the case of the $1000 Project, the money and creative output are only the tip of iceberg.

When he sets the stage and pulls the right levers, the game show host gives participants a chance to experience something that permanently shifts their perspective. And even a small change in direction, followed over a long period of time can lead to a drastically different destination.

You can listen to the my favorite soundbites from this interview with Gary on Soundcloud.

A jackpot of thank yous to Gary Chou for shooting the breeze and answering my questions. Check out these links to learn more about Orbital, Entrepreneurial Design and Communities of Practice. You can poke Gary on twitter @garychou.

Gary Chou helps students rise to the challenge. was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into extraordinary communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a small strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoy this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here. We’ve also published a community-building handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. Order your copy here, and subscribe to our podcast “Get Together” for more stories from extraordinary communities.

Last month, I interviewed my friend, Shaun Evaristo, about his approach to teaching dance. I love to dance, but Shaun’s on another level. A Bay Area native, Shaun’s a dancer, a choreographer, and the founder of the LA-based Movement Lifestyle (mL). If you follow the world of urban dance, there’s a good chance you know mL.

I spoke to Shaun because my work has never strayed too far from bringing strangers face to face. Recently, I’ve been researching what makes for a compelling in-person experience. After a Shaun class, I’ve seen dancers high on life, others gushing with gratitude, some even in tears.

How does he move people to that point? How does he approach teaching and designing his classes?

Enjoy my favorite tidbits from our interview below. You can also listen to Shaun’s answers on Soundcloud here.

Kevin Huynh: So how did you start dancing?

Shaun Evaristo: When I was 5, I was watching Michael Jackson, you know.

KH: Like all of us.

SE: Yeah, like everybody else, right? Watching Michael… copying him. I think my Mom has photos.

Then I vividly remember my Mom watching the Filipino channel and watching people dance in groups. I thought, “I could do that.” So I started a dance group with my cousins. I called them—I was 10, they were 7 or 8—and said, “Hey, we’re going to make a dance group. We’re going to meet every Friday at my house, and I’ll have my Mom cook spaghetti.”

“Hey, we’re going to make a dance group. We’re going to meet every Friday at my house, and I’ll have my Mom cook spaghetti.”

KH: That sounds like the best.

SE: Right? Mom’s spaghetti. It was just the chance to be with the fam, and it really did happen every Friday. Then as we got older, we had more friends and more family that wanted to join in.

We would perform at events, like a local fiesta, family party or someone’s cotillion. Then we started getting a reputation. “That’s that Filipino group that performs at cotillions and stuff.” We had this little rep inside of the Bay area among our friends.

It wasn’t until I turned 18 when I got serious with dance. In high school, someone found out that I danced, and I was like, “Shit. I just want to dance, I just want to do my thing.” So I hid it from everyone. But I had a high school rally where someone asked, “Can you choreograph our thing?” and I was like, “Oh, shoot! I guess I’m gonna try. This is what I do.”

So when I taught this group of people from my rally, I realized that everyone was having fun and enjoyed it. That made me so happy. I could teach people my routines, and they can be happy from me teaching this thing that I made up. It brought me so much joy, that I decided that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I looked and asked questions like “where can I make this my career?” I found out watching music videos that Los Angeles was the place to go.

After building a reputation with his first crews Gen2 and The Company, Shaun eventually moved to LA at age 18 where he learned the ropes teaching, auditioning, and choreographing. By 2008, Shaun was teaching regularly, flying in and out of Asia to develop other artists. Later on, he’d tour with performers like Omarion and Justin Bieber.

With his brother, CJ, Shaun started Movement Lifestyle to represent dancers. The company has since evolved into a NoHo studio, clothing brand and store.

KH: You had some foresight to name the company “Movement Lifestyle” and not “Movement Management” or “Movement X.”

My business partner Bailey loves the idea of an amphibious vehicle that can go anywhere. mL is a management company at first, but it might turn into something else, so we will name it appropriately. We know this name represents what we want to represent, and we’ll take it wherever it needs to go.

SE: Yeah, that’s sort of what happened. I didn’t want to use the word dance, because there are lots of people that aren’t into dance, and at the end of the day what I’m doing is movement.

I didn’t want to use the word dance, because there are lots of people that aren’t into dance, and at the end of the day what I’m doing is movement.

Everybody has their own version of what that is and how they live it. I’ve always thought, whether you are a DJ, a designer, a painter, or a dancer, you have to move to accomplish what it is that you want to do. If you can live this lifestyle, then to me that is the embodiment of us. Movement is a lifestyle.

It goes beyond dance. It’s just that dance is where I come from so that is what mL is rooted in. Nike started with running, so mL is born out of dance. I’m so proud to say that. Now as we get older, I could see us starting to branch out.

KH: How do you go about choreographing a piece to teach?

SE: I like to say, “Always give yourself 10% chance.”

You create up until 90%, and then 10% you leave to chance because that’s the exciting part. If you go all of the way to 100, then you have curated up until that point. You know exactly what’s going to happen every single time.

Always give yourself 10% chance.

That’s just going to get boring. I love to lead it up to 90, and then let the wind take it from there. I always leave that 10%.

Sometimes I go 15 or 20…

KH: Haha. 50/50!

SE: Haha. Let’s go! But how awesome to really push in and dial in as much as you can with whatever you’re creating, and then to cut yourself off and say, “I’m just going to leave the rest to the wind.”

Then that 10% leaves you the ability to take it somewhere that the universe has the ability to come in, and you have no control over it. That no control point, to me, is a beautiful part.

KH: That’s awesome. I’m guilty of trying to go 0 to 100 a lot, and it’s like, “This might have gone all according to plan, but it was missing something.”

SE: Right, right, some sort of magic. I think that’s where I believe the world or the universe comes in — just up until that point, once you reach that 90, and then, “Okay, okay, what’s going to happen? I don’t know. Let’s find out! Let’s find out!”

KH: Woo!

SE: Whether that’s creating something from a business perspective or a choreography perspective or a freestyle perspective, I know what my body is capable of doing. But then I always leave chance.

I’m going to let the music take me from here. It’s always guiding me, but then there are just moments where I’m like, “Okay, time to blackout now!” [woosh sound]

KH: Let it ride. So how do you approach designing a class?

SE: Other choreographers helped me understand a flow and a structure and that there are different ways to teach. But yoga helped me set an intention. Meditation helped me understand a lot as well.

So from that, I realized that I can take people on a ride from setting an intention to then creating exercises. Then from the piece, I push that even further. Now that you’ve learned movement from the routine that I’ve made, how can I drive this intention?

Okay, now that we’ve learned a routine, how can I pull this soul out of you to be expansive and for you to have an experience? I can’t break it out of you, but I can push you to the point of breaking it out. The rest is up to you. You’ve got to fully commit.

I believe that vulnerability is power and I can help take you to that point, but now you’ve got to open that door to release yourself. I think that’s where breakthroughs happen.

Okay, now that we’ve learned a routine, how can I pull this soul out of you to be expansive and for you to have an experience? I can’t break it out of you, but I can push you to the point of breaking it out.

KH: How do you push people to that point?

SE: How do I push people to that point? I guess it depends on the piece and the class, but if I can set the intention and encourage, make the class fun and exciting or laughable — because it’s just dance, right? If I can think about all these things and encompass them and push them into the class, then I’m doing my best.

Hopefully that’ll be enough for them to break through. Does everyone break through? No, and that’s not always the point, you know? Sometimes, it’s just to have fun and that can be a breakthrough point as well. Maybe some people are so dead serious on making this of something that you forget that it’s just dance, and this is just to have fun.

KH: I’ve seen people at the end of your classes, and they are incredibly thankful for whatever difference they have felt from the beginning to the end. It might be something they learned. It might be something they got out. It might be something they saw, but there’s extreme gratitude there.

SE: I didn’t really understand that gratitude when I first came into it.

It was an “I want to make something of myself, and I’m going to do my thing, and I’m gonna make you like it.” When I started this journey, I got value more from the impression that I made on the people that I taught. It was like, “Wow! People like my work.” I want that feeling continuously. I want to do it more, so I’m going to make more bodies of work, so I can do this more often, get that feeling and share my work.

Then as I got older, it really started to shift because through my journey, I could see that I was really impacting people on an emotional level and not just a gratitude level like “Thank you for class, thank you for teaching me how to dance,” but “Man, the work that you’re making is affecting my life.”

Then from that moment, I realized I now have the power to impact them in a positive way, not through just my life but how I teach or how I guide or how I narrate the class. My goal eventually became to create an environment and experience that people can feel something and feel alive when they’re doing it. Hopefully, by the end of my class, they will be moved to be so inspired that they want to do something for someone else.

Hopefully, by the end of my class, they will be moved to be so inspired that they want to do something for someone else.

As I got older, it became this more rounded circle of, “Man, I do this because I love to create and I love watching you break through barriers and feel something, because I can feel something from you, and you can feel something from me.”

This sort of reciprocation. This hope of “Man, maybe you feel something so much, that you want to do something for someone else.”

KH: Yeah, chain reaction.

SE: Yeah, and I love that.

What Shaun taught me

Shaun reminds me of what makes working with people face to face both intimidating and intriguing: we don’t know what’s going to happen. I can plan all I want. I can design the space. I can choreograph every step. But at the end of day there’s still an unpredictable human element.

In the same way Shaun might leave 10% of a piece up to chance, we can intentionally design experiences that leave space for interpretation. That individual contribution is significant because it gives people ownership of their experience, making the effects more personal and powerful.

Nonetheless, Shaun also understands the importance of ramping people up. A car can’t split a fence without room to gather speed in the same a way student can’t have a transformational experience without a warmup.

Instead, Shaun’s teaching style offers a progression that eases students in:

1. Set the intention
2. Facilitate exercises to explore that intention
3. Teach the choreography
4. Push people

Together, we did the math. Though he’s in his early thirties, Shaun has already taught tens of thousands of students to move (including me). He’s garnered a following within the dance community and beyond one person at a time.

Yet what impresses me most about Shaun isn’t the scale of his impact, it’s his commitment to positively challenging others. Movement may be his medium, but what he might be one best in the world at is showing people what they’re capable of.

To hear Shaun’s voice, listen to our interview soundbites on this Soundcloud playlist.

Thank you to Shaun for hanging out and spilling your guts. Keep doing what you’re doing. You can learn more about Movement Lifestyle here, and follow Shaun’s adventures on Instagram at @shaunevaristo.

This interview is part of the People & Company team’s ongoing research into extraordinary communities that are bridging the gaps between us. P&C is a small strategy company that helps organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider make smart bets with their community-building investments.

If you enjoyed this interview, you can learn more about our services and reach out here. We’ve also published a community-building handbook called Get Together: How to build a community with your people. Order your copy here, and subscribe to our podcast “Get Together” for more stories from extraordinary communities.

Shaun Evaristo moves people. was originally published in People & Company on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I drowned once.

There wasn’t a white light, and there wasn’t a tunnel. In fact, it was all purple. Purple, purple, purple… dark and light shades of purple as if I was swimming in a sea of Kool-Aid. Chest ready to explode, I still couldn’t breathe. My stomach rocked up and down, twisting and turning, like I was strapped into a rollercoaster, and all I wanted to do was scream. I kept stretching my mouth wide open over and over again, but I couldn’t make a noise. Everything was silent.

I was young-ish, at that amazing mid-pubescent phase in the 7th grade where the girls get taller and the boys look increasingly awkward. I was chubby, had a bowl haircut and a nice set of buck teeth to complement my overbite that was yet to be fixed by the modern marvels of orthodontics. At the time, I wore these killer dragon T-shirts every day with sometimes ornately matching cargo pants with the extra large velcro pockets.

My mom had wisely enrolled me in a local “swim team” at the athletic club (the kind that sort of competes but not really) to get me some much needed exercise and lay the foundation for a solid beach bod that is still yet to materialize. So every Tuesday and Thursday, I’d slip on my jet black speedo just under my slight pudge, tighten my blue Tyr swim goggles and flop around in the pool for an hour and a half with a host of other kids.

We sometimes did what we called “under-waters.” You’d swim as far as you could without coming up for air and inevitably the unofficial goal (especially for the slightly older kids) would be to make it to the end of that 25m indoor pool. I’d done it before, and I knew how it felt for me. By the 3/4 mark, you start struggling. At that point, my chest would start to kind of pump up and down desperately looking for air, but I’d just concentrate, stare forward at that marble plus sign at the end of the pool and push straight to it. You hit the end and explode out of the water gasping for air.

One day after practice, this kid named Cliff dared me to swim a full length of the pool plus a quarter of the way back without breathing (for twenty bucks). I was a couple years older, felt like I had something to prove and quickly agreed without a second thought.

I stretched out at one end of pool and started with a series of deep breaths. I’d basically hyperventilate, take a big gulp of air to fill out my lungs, drop quickly into the water, and push off the back wall as hard as I could. Stroke after stroke, I remember reaching that 3/4 point. It hurt, and I even took in a tiny bit of water, but I was determined. My moves quickened until I slapped the cold cement of the back wall, flipped my body, and launched right back in opposite direction.

The water was especially murky that day. I can recall turning my head around to try and spot the flags that marked my quarter finish line but couldn’t see a thing. There was no way I was going to come up for air a couple feet short of the goal. So, I clenched my teeth, pumped my legs, and pulled with my arms. But then… it stopped.

You know that feeling when you’re being chased by a monster in a dream and all you want to do is wake up? You try to pinch yourself, and you try to yell, but it just doesn’t work.

Everything was purple and I was jerking my body grabbing for air. My stomach jolted left and right, disorienting me. I wanted to scream but nothing would come out.

A line of swim team kids had been watching from the deck. I had swam the full length of the pool plus half the way back when I stopped moving. Cliff eventually dived in to pull me up but wasn’t strong enough to lift me out of the water. The swim coach and my mother nearby quickly walked over to see what the ruckus was, and they would soon fish me out onto the concrete poolside.

My mouth was still tightly clenched shut as if I was gritting my teeth mid-swim. But my mom, who’d been a registered nurse for twenty years, pried my jaw open with two hands thanks to the grip provided by my overbite. She inhaled deeply and gave me two breaths of life.

When I began waking up, I would slip back and forth between the cold cement pool side and that purple hell hole. I woke up screaming and thrashing with a giant burst of adrenaline trying to escape.

An ambulance rushed me to the hospital, and I spent a night being pricked and prodded (still in my wet black speedo) as they drew blood each hour to check my oxygen count. I eventually discovered that I’d lost control of my bodily functions while unconscious, so before that lovely revelation I had spent hours in the hospital bed sitting in my own stew. Talk about adding insult to injury. There was a little bit of worry about brain damage but I was fine, just weak, asthmatic, and a little more cautious in the pool a few weeks later post-recovery.

I think I was too young (and preoccupied with raging hormones) to reflect a lot on what had happened at the time. Things would likely be different now, and I’m sure my family has their own account, but that’s just the way it is. I didn’t exactly emerge with some sky-parting, reinvigorating thirst for life. I didn’t drop everything after getting better (albeit I was in middle school) to go all Ryan Gosling and confess my undying love to the girl of my dreams. In the rain.

But thinking back, what might be most interesting to me is how it was all my fault, how I managed to keep myself underwater. There wasn’t an accident or a giant rip tide. I just kept swimming until I couldn’t anymore.

You don’t think about that all the time. You don’t think about how going your hardest in the right direction can sometimes lead you into a hole. And that’s been something to chew on lately.

But don’t worry about me. I’m not afraid of the water. I still wear the color purple. And my mom is still just as badass.