Running Events for your business? Knowing how you celebrate and wind down can help a lot!
With Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com and SexGeekSummerCamp.com and Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com.
Reid: What are your after care needs when you run events? After what?
Cathy: Knowing how you like to celebrate and wind down is really important and knowing to share that with your business partners and find win-wins is really useful.
Reid: Cathy said business partners because this is a business advice video because we’re wearing the Sex Geeks Summer Camp shirt and that means sex education workshop facilitator, that kind of stuff, business advice. This is Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com …
Cathy: And Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com and Sex Geek Summer Camp. We were driving back from Sex Geek Summer Camp. We had just run the event. It went amazingly, loud people.
Reid: Cathy was my organizer. She was awesome.
Cathy: It was really fun. I was wanting to babble about it and spent time with Reid and have dinner out to celebrate and he was like, “I just want to go hang out with other people,” and I was feeling rejected. I was like, “But, we just did this cool thing. We’re supposed to celebrate,” and as we were talking, I realized, “Wow, we have very different celebration styles.”
Reid: We have very different after care needs. For those of you in the kink community, you know what this means. What do people need after the scene and can you design it a win-win for everybody, as if you just spank and run and they’re like, “Oh,” that’s not good aftercare.
Cathy: What we actually did, I like to decompress and share and write down all the ideas for next year. We have a wall of all of that then, but Reid doesn’t like to. He likes to decompress with other people and what we did was a good solution. I really appreciate you thinking of it. He just decided the event wasn’t over for an extra day. We spent an extra day together decompressing and it was good because we recorded a lot of ideas we would have lost otherwise, and I got my nice dinner and the time together and then after that, he went off to go hang out with other people and I felt like my needs were met and he decided the event was finished when we finished up.
Reid: It’s basically like jumping into the kink community, because this is where I learned the idea of aftercare. If you’re the top in the scene, you’re seeing scene-scene isn’t done until you’ve take care of your bottom. Once they’re all handled and good, they’ve gotten the aftercare they need, now it’s time for your aftercare. You could negotiate, “Well, I just don’t do aftercare,” but you should facilitate your bottom getting the aftercare they need. That’s being a kind and respectful person, so taking this concept into business, especially if you run live events …
Cathy: Because you collaborate, or what do they need …
Reid: … or even digital events, like a tele-summit or a launch or any of these other things. What do the people that you’re working with need or what do you need when you’re working with other people to feel really good, like to nail the landing of the routine?
Cathy: It sucks to have a really great event, everything goes fantastic and then just think your partner’s going to run off and hug you and you fall flat. That doesn’t feel good and then there’s conflict and both of you lose that glow afterwards. Figuring out how you like to celebrate and there’s lots of different ways, we’re all unique. Figure out what would feel delightful for you. Ask for that. See what’s a win-win. Find a way to help each other either get it with other people or get it together and when you’re conscious about any of these things, you start making your life more powerful. You start giving your partners ways to support you and you start making, “Now I feel charged up. I want to do another event. That was great,” versus if I’d fallen flat and felt like we didn’t celebrate at all. We had this great event and there was no way to wrap up and wind down, I might not feel so charged up.
Reid: If you’re the figure head or the face of the event and you’re working with a team, this is the same thing. Check in with your team and just see what their aftercare needs are. Just because you might not be a person who has aftercare needs, and I would just suspect that you having to put words to them, you’re probably getting your needs met, hopefully in healthy ways, after an event just kind of look at those things and see what actually leaves you feeling recharged and reinvigorated, but just because you don’t have the same needs as the people that you work with does not give you the right to just tell them to go fuck themselves …
Cathy: Or shame them for wanting it.
Reid: … or shame them for wanting it, so just be careful about that and if you’re feeling resentful or trapped, it probably means that you aren’t getting your needs met, like there’s something you’re not doing for yourself. Your team doesn’t owe you jack shit. If you’re the person in the position of authority and you’re being resentful, my advice, this is from my experience, is you need to look at where you’re not taking care of yourself or you’re not communicating stuff that you need, because them having aftercare needs is probably not why you’re resentful. This is the deep moment to figure this out. If you’re in a position of authority and people are giving you their time and focus to help you with your career and your events, handle your shit because it’s not fair for you to be abusive to them because you don’t know what you need and you haven’t implemented that. That’s when you grow on.
Cathy: If you find yourselves in conflict around it, you might either need to bring up someone to … If my need was really telling massage and touch and the partner I’m working with isn’t in that space after an event, I can either hire a masseuse to come or go to a massage and get it or if there’s not a way to meet that need, it might be that maybe we shouldn’t do events that are that long or that big together. You get to decide that and find out there’s a bunch of different places where you can be a good match and just because one’s off a bit, doesn’t mean that it’s a failure, but if it’s a big conflict and you’re spending a ton of time fighting about it, either get immediate or it might say, “Why are you guys both saying the same thing? Why don’t you just do this or maybe ratchet down what you’re doing.”
Reid: There’s probably a third option that you haven’t considered and if you’re both feeling triggered …
Cathy: It’s harder to see it.
Reid: … it’s harder to see it, so get a third person to come in and help you to figure out what’s going on and also go back and revisit what’s the shared intention that you have for working together at all. It’s possible that that might not be clear enough or that now you’ve worked together for long enough and you know about each other’s aftercare needs, just go revisit that shared intention, because that might be out of focus a little bit.
Cathy: We hope this helps. We’d love to know what you think. What are your aftercare needs? How do you celebrate when you do a great job?