S7E7: The Power of Co-Living at Events

Dive into the transformative power of co-habitation at events. This episode discusses how living with others, even for a short amount of time, can help foster more valuable connections and truly allow DEI to happen through these interactions. Be sure to follow along for more episodes in the coming weeks!

Today we are discussing:
Cohabitation Friendships (1:13)
Open Minds (3:23)
Learning from Others (6:27)
DEI and Cohabitation (8:12)
Internal and External Change (9:44)

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Transcript

Dr. K:
You are listening to the Experience University Podcast with Dr. K. Season 7, Episode 7.

Speaker 2:
Welcome to Experience University, where we aim to educate, inspire, and empower individuals who wish to design transformational experiences. Now, your host, Dr. Kristin Malek.

Dr. K:
Hello, my friends. I am so excited to be recording this back home in Lincoln, Nebraska. I have been traveling for just over the last three weeks. It's the longest I've been away from my kiddo since she was born. She's now eight, and it's just really good to be home, at my home set up to be back in my day-to-day routine. I never, ever take those things for granted.

You know, what's really been interesting in terms of the podcast is that since I've launched this season, so the last six episodes, every time an episode drops and some of my friends that listen to the podcast, they hear it, they send me a text. So I have these three wonderful human beings who send me a text, and they're like, "This episode of the podcast was awesome," or, "Wow, I really got this piece of information from it." I was really thinking about that. And they all three of these particular people, they all had one thing in common. It's not that they're experienced designers or that they're event designers. It's that I met them all at places where we cohabitated, where we spent the nights together. Doesn't mean we were necessarily in the same room, though. One of them was my roommate, and I really found a lot of value in that.

I was talking to somebody about how on my travels, these last three weeks, the first two weeks were spent in Austin. And I had decided, rather than spend almost $3000 in a hotel, I was going to stay in an Airbnb with four other people, and it brought the cost of those rooming arrangements down to like $750. So trying to be fiscally responsible, even though someone else was paying the bill in the situation, you still always want to be fiscally responsible, right?

And I was reflecting on this, and the five people, including myself, that were in this house, we were all on totally different spheres of life. We had some who were younger, we had some that were retired, we had some people who were super left, and we had some people that were beyond the right. We had some people who were kind of like hippie health people. We had some people who were very much not. The thing that is incredible in these situations, and where I find that a lot of behavior change can happen in these cohabitation type of situations, is that you're more open to having those conversations with more of an open mind.

So we knew we were all bought in to this training. This training was very expensive. There were 16 people, I believe, who participated overall at this training. And we were all bought in. We were all on the same track of mind when it came to buying into this particular training. So we already had a shared interest and we had already bought into a significant fee for this training. So we knew that we had that in common, and we were more likely to sit around and to talk about other things in life with more of an open mind.

And this is where the real magic happens, this is where we can sit down and instead of blocking people on social media or dismissing different viewpoints, even if we think that they may be a little kooky, we sit down and we're like, "Tell me about that. Tell me how you're thinking." I think there's a lot of value for this to be built into our experiences, into our events. So in this Austin training that I was at, we had one night where we just literally sat in the living room, and it was the five of us, and we talked for like three or four hours. We talked about everything from... I won't say everything that we talked about here in the podcast, but we talked about everything from aliens, to Q&A type things, to war, to prepping... it was all over the gambit.

We had one person in the group who was just like, you could tell they hadn't really been exposed to a lot of these different concepts in any way, shape, or form. And instead of just getting up and walking out or having a closed mind, they said, "That's interesting. Tell me about that. What does that mean? Who is that person? What does that look like?" And even if it just sparks curiosity of like, "All four of you know this, why don't I know this?" or just like, "Tell me more." That's where a real mindset change occurs, because you're listening with an open mind with real value and interest. And it was really important to me to share about this on the podcast because this has been happening to me consistently over the last year.

I was at another event in Poland, and my roommate here who listens to the podcast... Hey, girl! We were total strangers. We had no idea who we were, same as this Austin event. I did know two of the people, I had been at one training with them before. So I didn't know them, know them. Being put in rural Poland and having a roommate that now you're with that you didn't know before, and instead of just lying or masking and hiding, sitting there on the first night and saying like, "Here's all my crap, here's all my stuff, and what's all your stuff," and choosing to form that authentic bond and also getting to see how other people live, the products that they use.

I was at another event in July where it was a retreat. So there were a lot of us in one house together and just learning like, "Oh, okay, what is tongue scraping?” I didn't know what that was. Okay, so apparently half this house does it. That had never been a part of my life. I was not raised to do that. I didn't even know what it was. And then I went on the rabbit hole and I looked things up and I bought one and now I scrape my tongue every morning. Somebody brought their particular type of water filter and I was like, "Oh, what is this water filter?" So it's kind of that exposure, just that daily life, that daily routine. Because oftentimes, we grow up in our family unit, whatever that looks like or consists of. And then maybe we go to college, maybe we live on campus, and we have limited exposure to that. And then we maybe live by ourselves. Maybe we live with a roommate. And then typically we partner up, and then we live with that partner for the rest of our days. So we don't necessarily have a chance to really cohabitate with people from other cultures or other areas or different upbringings. And that is where I have found the true magic is happening, the true community, the true change in mindset, the stuff that you're not planning for.

I can design an experience that can meet all of your company's objectives and it can change mindset and change behavior. Check. Absolutely. But by having people cohabitate, you're changing so much more. This is where I made the opinion of Kristin, Dr. K, here. I feel like this is where the real diversity, equity, and inclusion is when we're sitting there talking about DEI or DEI initiatives. It's not happening in a passive training. It's not happening in a PowerPoint or a meeting room. The real DEI things are happening in these open-minded conversations. Yes, you can obviously curate outside of living together, but it naturally happens and occurs.

I have learned so much just by living and sharing, seeing how different people eat, and their different habits. If you're connected with me on Facebook, then you know, I just made this public post. I was at IMEX America last week, and there at IMEX America, they had a system set up for your hologram. So essentially, if you're a speaker or keynote speaker and you can't make it in person, you can send this giant tech box to the location, and you can be on a green screen, white screen back home, and your 3D hologram will be in this other place. And it's pretty much real-time. I think there was like a five or 10-second lag. I'm sitting there, and I'm just marveling over how it looks so real. That's the point, right? It looks so real, but it's not. It got me into this mindset, this thought process of sitting there saying, well, all you ever really see is the outside.
So I made this post on Facebook about how over the last year I have changed so much, so drastically much. My views of the world, my spending habits, my buying, what I choose to spend my money on, and my belief system. It has changed so, so much. But you would never know that if you just looked at me because the physical body doesn't really change, right? You may gain some weight or lose some weight or add glasses or take away glasses, the physical body still looks pretty much the same.

If you're hanging around the same people for more than a year, they never really stop to reassess necessarily. So you're constantly having these thought processes and viewpoints of who you are cast back on you, even though it's not who you are anymore. And this happens a lot with families over time. For example, I have a sibling, and for a long time, you know, you see people every single day, you're not necessarily acknowledging growth.

So if we're thinking about it in weight loss, then when you see the same person every single day and they lose one to two pounds a week, you don't necessarily recognize it in that other person because you see them every day. So your brain is constantly reprogramming who you are and what you look like. So you don't sit there and say, "Oh my gosh, I can tell you've lost weight when it's only one or two pounds, right?" But one or 2 pounds every single week when you see a friend or you go to a conference that you haven't seen in a year and they're like, "Oh my gosh, you look great. You've lost 20 to 30 pounds. You look incredible." It's because they haven't seen you in a while. So they're seeing you with fresh eyes. Well, when you grow up with family or with friends and they see you all the time, they're not necessarily seeing all that internal change. Because of that, they're still evaluating you and judging you on your past.

But there was a long time in my early to mid-twenties, I have a sibling, and I know they would still make those passive comments about high school or like, "Well, you're still that person that cheated at Monopoly that time back when we were kids." And it's like, no, I've grown. I have. But how do you prove that? How do you show that? Your mannerisms will change slowly over time. And when you're around people so often, then you don't acknowledge that. It's interesting because mindset and behavior change is internal and it's shown in everything that we do. But you also have to acknowledge it externally. And, what's the best way to do that?

So I hope that if you're planning events or you're planning experiences and you have the opportunity to have shared housing or some kind of co-living or co-habitating. Even facilitating for your attendees to get an Airbnb or VRBO or some kind of shared rental space, that you do choose to do that and build it into your design. I will tell you that over the past decade-plus of events over the past year, I have had the most significant change in empathy, DEI, all of those things coming from events and those shared living facilities. So I hope that you try that out, and we will dive more into this concept next week. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening to the Experience University Podcast. Stay tuned for our next episode