I’m passionate about building hybrid online/offline communities because it is the single thing that has most profoundly changed my life.

Building a community has opened up so many opportunities for me to meet interesting people, collaborate with others that share my mission and travel all over the world hosting retreats by co-collaborating with local community builders.

Growing up with ADHD, I found schooling based on rote learning boring and I wished I could learn surrounded by other passionate, purpose-driven and creative entrepreneurial people. I dreamed of an education system based on learning by doing, where students created their own vision of a better world and then were mentored to start building that change that they so passionately believe in.

When I got into a startup incubator called Startup Chile in 2012 for my creative education startup DIY Genius, I finally found the entrepreneurial community spirit I was looking for by collaborating and working alongside entrepreneurs from 35 countries in the same coworking space for 6 months.

When that ended, I traveled the world and worked from my laptop in startup hubs and digital nomad hotspots seeking that similar community-driven passion and excitement that I just couldn’t find in my home of Vancouver, Canada.

At the coworking and coliving communities where I stayed, people were encouraged to create events, eat lunch together and teach their skills and expertise in group workshops. I found I learned so much better through hands-on workshops and conversational flow with other passionate people.

Participating in these creative communities, I met other entrepreneurial people from all over the world and for a few weeks to a few months I made amazing connections but then either I or the other people moved on.

When I returned to Vancouver, I knew I had to find a way to recapture the sense of community and collective learning and excitement I felt in those digital nomad hotspots.

At the time, I was teaching a course on meditation and flow states online to tech professionals who were working remotely and I thought a missing piece of fully integrating mindfulness and flow into our busy lives was nature connection.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve gone on long hikes in the forest and mountains to clear my head and hit the reset button on my stresses. This insight from teaching the course and the support of people in my online community inspired me to start doing forest meditation workshops in a popular local park called Stanley Park.

During these workshops, we would do a series of mindful forest bathing walks and stop regularly to learn about the trees, plants and mushrooms that grow in Stanley Park, a 1000-acre natural oasis that sit beside Vancouver’s downtown.

Finally, I had found something that recaptured the sense of community I felt abroad. Soon, word of mouth spread and the workshops would sell out weekly and I also began doing hiking adventures, retreats and spirit quests in the local mountains.

While I enjoyed teaching online and continued to do workshops at local startup incubators and coworking spaces, I found my real passion was teaching ecological awareness, facilitating mindfulness in nature and telling local stories and history outdoors in the forest.

During the pandemic, I couldn’t host in-person events for nearly a year and I found that the thing I missed most was the sense of group flow and human connection that came from constantly meeting likeminded people and collaborating with other community leaders on events.

This experience got me interested in everything related to community building and fostering human connection and I started to collaborate with other teachers

to integrate more of a sense of community into the online courses and the mastermind groups I started to run through DIY Genius.

The pandemic was a strange time and I struggled with my mental health without a community around me that I could meet with regularly. The online community I had built helped but I longed for the energy that came from teaching outdoors.

I found that I could no longer endure the 6 months a year of gloomy overcast skies and endless rain in Vancouver and I wanted to go somewhere sunny and more laid back where I could build roots in a way that seemed impossible in Vancouver.

The most beautiful place I had found in my travels was Banff in the Canadian Rockies so I decided to relocated there to build an educational adventure tour company called Mindful Ecotourism based around teaching mindfulness, ecological awareness and community building practices outdoors.

What makes me so passionate about community building and the magic of group flow is because I believe it offers the best way to learn new entrepreneurial skills and find other likeminded people for the emotional support and accountability that is needed to take those big crazy ideas that swirl around in your head and build something with them that makes a big impact.

From leading hundreds of workshops, adventures, masterminds and retreats I’ve developed a helpful model of group coaching, accountability and collaboration that I want to share with you that I call the Group Flow Coaching Method.