Hey Julia Woods

The Heart of Community

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In this episode, we explore the vital role community plays in shaping our lives—from providing support and connection to building resilience and purpose. Whether you're deeply involved in your local neighborhood or just beginning to crave more meaningful connections, this conversation will inspire you to see community through a new lens.

We’ll talk about:

  • Why community is more essential now than ever before

  • How connection creates strength in both joyful and challenging seasons

  • Simple, powerful ways you can contribute to the well-being of those around you

  • The transformative impact of showing up—imperfectly, but consistently

If you’ve ever wondered where you truly belong or how you can make a difference in a seemingly noisy world, this episode is for you.

Because at the end of the day, the heart of community isn’t found in grand gestures—it’s found in you.

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💥💥Everything you need to grow the marriage you long for is waiting for you in the Marriage Growth Community:

https://beautifuloutcome.com/mgc-one-time-offer


🎁 Free Gift for you! 100 Prompts and Ideas to Connect with your Spouse!

🎁 FREE GIFT: Turn Defensiveness into Connection! https://beautifuloutcome.com/e-guide

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👉 Take the free communication quiz! What’s YOUR communication type?! https://beautifuloutcome.com/communication-quiz

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Where you can find me:

INSTAGRAM: Connect with me at @HeyJuliaWoods
YOUTUBE: Subscribe to @HeyJuliaWoods
SHOP: Marriage resources in my storefront
RETREATS: Attend a Marriage Workshop
WEBSITE: Find more resources at BeautifulOutcome.com
 FACEBOOK: ...

Speaker 1:

Welcome to hey Julia Woods podcast. I'm your host, julia Woods, founder of Beautiful Outcome, a coaching company focused on helping couples learn to see and understand each other, even in the most difficult conversations. On my podcast, I will share with you the real and raw of the messiness and amazingness. I'll share with you aspects of my relationship and the couples I coach in a way that you can see yourself and find the tools that you need to build the marriage you long for. Welcome to another episode of hey Julia Woods.

Speaker 1:

Today we're talking about the deep need for community. I'm excited to share with you about community and what it's doing in my life. About a year ago, I started Marriage Growth Community and many of you listeners are a part of that community and I'm just excited to talk about it. It is what is deeply happening in my life and if you had asked me two years ago if what I would say is the deepest thing that's happening in my life is community, I would have been like no, I don't think that's going to happen. So I just want to share candidly with you about community, what it is to me, what I thought it was and what it's doing in my life, because I think it's valuable. I'd never really heard anyone talk about community, and so I'm hopefully today going to offer you a conversation that invites you into inquiry, that invites you into curiosity about community. What have you decided it is? What? Might it be that you don't know what might be available for you in it that could actually transform your life and your marriage? And so thank you for joining me, and I'm excited to go on this adventure with you. I have made a very loose outline and I'm just really sharing from my heart with you, which is one of the gifts that's coming out of being in community for me.

Speaker 1:

I have said before that about three years ago I started. I like to walk, go for walks and talk to God, and I began to experience this deep knowing inside of me. That was an invitation. I started experiencing God to be communicating to me that I needed community more than I needed air and water. It has been an adventure of the last three years, and I'm starting to grasp a sense of how much I need community more than I need air and water, which means a lot of new things. I didn't know what it meant. I was like air and water. I couldn't survive without water. I was like air and water. I couldn't survive without water. What community is bringing me to live is that I am really spirit and soul far more than I'm body, and while air and water nourish my body and keep my body alive, it is community that is the air and water for my soul and for my heart. So what do I mean by community? Community for me is about knowing and being known.

Speaker 1:

I just want to share with you how community began for me. First, it began with my sisters. I began sharing my desire for community and I started thinking about who is it that I would want to know and be known by. And so I reached out to two of my sisters and I just said hey, here's my desire. I want to know and be known. Would you want that as well? And so we started by just having a weekly conversation, about an hour we scheduled on the calendar, and we just started calling each other and sharing for us what was vulnerable, what felt like the deepest thing that we were exploring in our life that week, and it was really powerful. And about five, six months into that, I was out shoveling my driveway. In last January, my neighbor that I didn't know well at all came over with a shovel and one thing led to another and she started helping me shovel.

Speaker 1:

Before we dive deeper into today's episode, take responsibility for yourself and who you are being at the moment. It's not about what your spouse needs to change. It's about you taking control of the only thing you can control, which is you. That's the truth that nobody's talking about when they talk about marriage, but I am inside the marriage growth community where I will help you take responsibility for your ability to lead conversations with your spouse, to love and connection, so you can have the marriage you dreamed of when you first fell in love. At the very first link in the show notes, you can grab my Marriage Growth Community and that's really going to help. I know that because it's based on the same principles. I've used to coach this couple and hundreds of other couples to marriage success over the last nine years.

Speaker 1:

I started doing some 12-step work in my life over the summer and started finding myself in 12-step rooms and exploring what that kind of community is. And wow, it is shocking how quickly you can find a safe space with seemingly complete strangers. And yet we're all human and we're not that different from each other. And so in my definition, what I would have defined community as before is community is the people that you do life with, that have your barbecues and your celebrations and you share the ups and downs of life with, and while I think that can be an aspect of community, what I would say now community is is a group of people that you consistently allow yourself to let your insides out. You show up, offering and receiving intimacy into me, and I am learning that with that, I am experiencing growth that I've never experienced in my life. I'm seeing things that I would have not seen before, because these people are living with me and are not living with me, but living life with me in a really honest and vulnerable way, out of the connections with my neighbors, they're helping me see gifts and strengths that I didn't know I had. As I sit here, feeling like sometimes such a fool, sharing tearfully these things that feel so silly to be wrestling with, and yet they're meeting me with grace, they're meeting me with compassion and empathy. They're sharing with me somehow, in all that messiness, they're seeing my strengths to be able to articulate things, and strength to be able to have courage and faith that I don't see often in the day-to-day wrestling of the messiness of life, and I am grateful for community, and I want to invite you to wrestle with.

Speaker 1:

What have you defined as community For me? I'm recognizing more and more that as human beings, we are relational creatures. We are designed for relationship. That's the heart of what we are, it's the heart of who we are, and even one of the things that's blowing my mind is the reality of even God. God, the God, the one who is so much bigger than me and is the all-knowing, the all-seeing, the all-encompassing everything. Even he is unwilling to do life without relationships, without the community of the Father, son and the Holy Spirit. Like even that, he knows he doesn't want to do a relationship without community. And it is so powerful to me and I don't know where your faith is or where you're at. I invite you to wrestle with that. However, you wrestle with it, and yet for me it speaks deeply to how much, no matter how big, no matter how powerful, no matter how amazing you may be, how much at the heart of everything you are and who you are is still a relational creature.

Speaker 1:

And this war between us, within every single one of us, that is the war between the hero and the villain. That villain in me screams loudly about how I need no one, every man for himself. Nobody understands me, nobody gets me, nobody really cares about me, nobody really wants me. Oh, that voice of that villain fights deeply and passionately against community. And yet that hero in me says I need others, I want to be known, I want to know others, I want someone to run to when life feels bigger than I am and I'm not doing well, and I want someone to celebrate the beauty of this crazy life and the moments I know I've really done something that I'm proud of. I want a group of people that want to celebrate that with me.

Speaker 1:

So I want to invite you to look at what have you decided community is. Do you call community what you have on social media? Do you call community chit-chatting about superficial things and taking trips and the people that you go to dinner with surface level experiences of community? And that what I'm discovering community is honesty. It's knowing and being known, it's needing each other. It's a circle of trust. It's those people that you're going to say something and it's going to offend people and you're going to work through the offense together, because you've developed such deep roots with each other, that the things that I used to fear were going to cause a community to abandon me, I now share, because I have such deep roots with these people that I trust we can handle the hard things of life together. And how have I built a community? I've shared with you the overarching context of what I'm experiencing with it and what I really feel have been the steps that I've taken is honesty, vulnerability, sharing.

Speaker 1:

Often I'm surprised at how childlike I'm able to be in this community and how much childlikeness has been what's brought the community about. I don't think we're actually ever designed to grow up. I believe we're designed to mature our emotions and our ability to show up in things and develop our character through them. And yet I believe the heart of the child that creative, spontaneous, willing to risk, the optimistic view that people love each other and we really need each other that I see in my grandkids. I'm like, yes, that's who I'm returning to be and that's happening in community.

Speaker 1:

As I let myself be vulnerable, as I let myself wrestle with the uncomfortable things that I used to keep in secret, that now I share out loud, it's telling these people the visions that I have that are really scary, to be honest, that I want them and vision them because they might fail. And it's sharing with them when I am failing and it's sharing with them the little glimmers of growth that I see that make me really excited and really scared, because now I get a hope more and I get to face the honest fears of what it looks like to grow something that I don't know if it's going to turn out or if it's going to be what I like when I get there. It's like the messiness of life. And so community for me is connecting. It's what's helping me move out of my addictions of busyness and work and isolation, doing things that are the opposite of connecting with others, because I'm disconnected with myself. All of my addictions that I use to numb they're because I haven't wanted to feel.

Speaker 1:

And in community, in deep, real, honest community, I'm finding my greatest ability to feel, and when I'm feeling I'm healing, and that's what community is bringing to me. It's letting me feel, and because feeling allows me to get honest about what I'm thinking and what I'm believing, and community helps me see what's true, more true than what I'm thinking and believing, because what I'm thinking and believing came out of the tea I was steeped in as a child and all of what my parents believed and what generations before them believed, that's the beliefs that I have, that I don't even know. There's other possibilities that are far more valuable to believe than what I've let myself believe we as human beings. I am learning how much I lie to myself in ways I had no idea, because community is helping me see that they're sharing their truth and I'm like, wow, that's a really different way of believing than I believed, and I didn't know that the way I was believing was a lie. I didn't know that people don't see me the way I fear. They see me very different and what opens up if I believe about myself, what they believe about me, it is a really powerful place. Community is helping me turn the light on so I can see and discover the truth about me, about others, about life, about connection, about intimacy, about love, about beauty, about the depth of meaning and purpose of life. So do you have a community? Are you like me and stumbling in the dark about what community is? And yet deep down, intuitively, you know you long for community.

Speaker 1:

I am stumbling about many days in the dark as I work to grow this community called the Marriage Growth Community. I have seen the deep need in the couples that I coach and the couples that I work with who are like community. I don't even know where to start. I can't talk to my family about these things, I don't have friends to talk to about these things, and I needed a community, and I thought there's a lot of people in the community that I'm working with, in regards to the couples that I coach and who come to my trainings and who do my courses, who are also longing for community, and so my desire is to hold this space, and it's messy, it's not anything close to what I've dreamed, what I dream of and what I long for, and yet it's a start and I want to invite you if you are looking for a community, would you come and join me?

Speaker 1:

Would you be a part of this messy development of helping me, working with me, growing with me and discovering the gift of how can we take the technology that's available to us, of lessons and online coaching and Facebook group and direct messages between husbands and wives and meaning I have a. We've now, just last week, we started a Facebook. In Facebook, there is a direct message channel chat for the wives and there's a direct message channel for the husbands, so wives can talk about some of the wrestling that we have and husbands can talk about some of the wrestlings that they have, and I learned that was something that was missing, that was something that was needed, and so it's a work in progress, it is a development, and I want to invite you into the messy journey with me and discovering and becoming who we're created to be, which is relational creatures living out loud in the messy, beautiful growth journey of life as we face this opportunity of marriage. That is the greatest arena of becoming love. So, thank you, I'd love to hear if this connects with you. Would you share? Would you just leave a review on this channel, on this?

Speaker 1:

Wherever you listen to podcasts, about this podcast. That is what helps this grow and if you find it valuable, would you do that and would you share this episode with a friend? And if you feel Marriage Growth Community would be valuable to you, would you just try it for one month? You can try it month by month or you can join in for a year. So thank you so much for being here. I'm grateful for you and want to connect with you in whatever way works for you for where you're at in your journey right now.

Speaker 1:

That's going to do it for this episode of hey Julia Woods. If you've ever gotten any value from this podcast and you haven't already, please leave us a five-star rating and a quick review in the app that you're using to listen right now. This episode shares the power of what can happen when a spouse takes responsibility for who they are being one conversation at a time, and if you want the marriage that you long for, click that first link in the show notes and this will take you straight to the resource that's going to solve that for you. I can't wait to connect with you inside my membership, where you can get the support you need to grow the marriage you long for 24-7. All right, that's going to do it for the show. My name is Julia Woods. I'll talk to you next time, thank you.