Sometimes bravery means holding on but daring means letting go to create something new. This episode’s guest shows us how she moved from brave to daring. Community-building dynamo Bri Leever unpacks the difference between bravery and daring in the context of making big life changes. While bravery is about facing adversity and enduring tough times, daring is the active choice to pursue something new and uncertain—qualities that drove Bri to leave a demanding job to forge her own path. She shares how she built a business through “cold-intro coffee Zooms,” grew a multi-million dollar revenue stream through ambassador communities, and learned invaluable lessons about balancing profitability with purpose. Tune in for Bri’s insights on aligning personal missions with impactful work and how choosing daring over bravery opened doors to a more fulfilling career.

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Watch the episode here

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From Brave To Daring With Bri Leever

Riding The Upward Spiral Of Evolution

How We Met

Welcome to the Art of Transformation podcast. I’m your host, Marc Scheff. I had the chance to talk to Bri Leever, who I met through the community that I run. There’s a community owners’ community, and she’s very active there, and we started communicating there. She’s got an incredible podcast that’s helped me a lot in building my community. We got to some really good stuff about, specifically, the difference between bravery and daring. It was really interesting to hear Bri’s take on what that is and how getting that distinction helped her move from the very successful community she created for another brand to building her own company around helping people do exactly that. It’s a great episode. I’ll see you at the end.

We are here with Bri Leever. I’m so glad you’re here. Welcome.

Thank you for having me. I’m delighted to be in this conversation with you.

We met in part because I think you actually reached out to me. We’re both using Heartbeat to run our communities, and we’re both in the community owner community called The Heart. I think you reached out to me with some help or a request on something that I had posted, and we got to chatting. I’m just really glad that you can be here. I’ll say upfront, even before we get to the end, if anybody’s listening to this and you’re even thinking about running a community, you have to go listen to Bri’s podcast because it’s helped me so much in getting through tough situations. There’s an episode for everything. I was telling you before this, Bri, I’ve got friends who are running communities, and they’re having whatever issue. I’m like, here’s an episode. How do you do that? How do you find so many different topics on what, on the surface, might seem a simple endeavor?

That’s honestly the secret sauce to the whole series. In each episode, I bring on an expert to provide insights on an anonymous letter that talks about a community drama, fiasco, or conundrum. Really, the secret sauce is those letters, and from the letter, I find an expert who can speak to that topic specifically. I feel the exact same way. It magically unfolds. Like, there was definitely intentionality, but I’m so pleased with how it unfolded because we only have twelve episodes in season one. I feel the same way. Every conversation I have, I’m like, okay, and, like, I hate to do this, but, like, you have to go to watch this episode too. You’ll hear us go off about this.

They really are fantastic. But, you know, and I know that I did an intro before this, but you’ve had a long and interesting road in the world of community building. Can you give us a little bit more on the community that you were building before you went off on your own? I know you have some things to say about the work that it actually took to find that daring muscle to go and actually do that for yourself.

What a journey. I got my start in community before, and this is years before, I could even articulate that I was operating in the context of community, even though it’s what I was surrounded with every day. Building a community of ambassadors for a social enterprise based out of Portland, Oregon. It was my first job out of college. They didn’t know what they were doing. I didn’t know what I was doing. In a lot of ways, I think this is true for most of us, but especially for me, I think most of the work that I end up doing is in service to a past version of myself. I think it’s easier for me to access that empathy of “I know exactly what it’s like to be in that position.”

I think a lot of my community-building work is in service to that past Bri who just didn’t know what she was doing for several years, but still, regardless, it worked. We built a multi-million-dollar revenue channel through the community for the brand. After six years, that community was 90% of the company’s growth strategy.

Are these some affiliates on some level?

Yeah. There’s a couple of different terms you can use for it, but basically, primarily women who would sign up and join us to represent the brand in their community. They would get a commission on all of their purchases. It’s affiliates, referrals, it could also be direct sales. There was a multi-level marketing component to it, which I could go off on the language and the structure and all of that. It was a pretty phenomenal experience. Such a great opportunity to really kick off. I feel like if you can do community in the sales and intensive angle, there’s nothing you can’t do.

That is the interesting thing about what you did and even what you’re doing, is this idea of like, I think every creative, anybody who’s listening, is like, “I want to figure out, in plain terms, how to get other people to push my product, my work, my services.” There’s things like affiliate programs and stuff like that, but the concept of creating real community around that I think is really interesting. That feels, frankly, not to get so, but like, it’s really aligned with my values. I want people to feel at home in this space that they’re helping create with me or with your company. What was the approach within the community, or even building the community or nurturing the community, that was maybe fundamentally different from just “Every website I get my referral link and I can earn $25” and that kind of thing? What did it bring that was different from that?

Creating A Community With Mission And Values

There were layers to that. The brand itself had an amazing mission and impact. The brand is called Seiko. After I left, they merged with Noonday Collection. They partner with artists and partners around the world to create opportunities and jobs and then sell the products primarily in the U.S. A lot of people really gravitated toward the mission and vision and values of the brand. That was really central because to start a community just based on like, “You can earn a profit through talking about us,” I’ve found doesn’t ultimately get you that far at the end of the day. It’s just not enough for people.

We really embraced what could be perceived as tension between earning money in this opportunity and contributing to a greater impact. I think sometimes those two things can feel at odds, but we found that we really needed a healthy balance of both. We needed our community to see both an opportunity and a value and a real benefit. As part of our training, it was like really helping them articulate and identify what they wanted their activity and participation with the program to do for them and their family and coupling that with the impact that they were creating globally.

One of the biggest things that we did that really ignited our community early on was we introduced an incentive where, based on how much they sold in product, they could go to meet our production team in Uganda. It was wild. We did a whole week, and I led that trip. I ended up going, I think it was four times to Uganda by the time I left. That was always a super memorable experience, getting to, like, they would go to our production facility, make their own sandals, make their own bags, and get to know, essentially, their coworkers. Anyways, I could go on and on, but that’s just some of my initial thoughts.

From Bravery To Daring

You’re really inviting people into the process as well, which I think is also really interesting. You mentioned mission and values, and that strikes me. In the work that I do as a coach, that’s what people are really trying to get to a lot of the time, their own personal mission, their own personal values. I think when you do something like what you did, when you do the work within an organization, or if you’re the organization to say, like, “This is our mission, these are our values,” it sometimes can lead people to understand their own mission and values. I definitely want to hit on this because you said something before the call about moving from bravery to daring.

I know that you had this job and you ended up making a whole lot of changes, including a big move, starting your own organization, and starting your own podcast, which I’ve already sung praises for. Tell me about this. What is that distinction? What is the difference between bravery and daring?

Way back when I was starting to entertain the idea of leaving that role, it was really difficult. It took me about nine months to get my mind, heart, and body aligned on that decision. Even once I decided to leave, I found it practically impossible to find a new job while I was at that current role, partly because of just how demanding that role was and how little capacity I had at the end of the day for anything else.

If we have a job that’s very consuming, it’s hard to have that creative energy to think of anything else, so how did you do it?

I had a coach at the time who was really helpful. Looking back, I’m like, I can see they started this thread of a therapy modality that I use, which is called IFS, Internal Family Systems. Basically, this coach helped me identify two parts of me: a part that wanted to stay and a part that wanted to go. As we teased it out, we really gave these two parts full names and personalities. There was full dialogue between these two parts. Eventually, I realized that part of these parts was this difference in values. I had always identified, through reading a lot of Brené Brown’s work, that courage was a really core value for me, but I hadn’t always identified the angle of courage that identified the most with me, which was bravery.

I realized through these coaching sessions that I had really adopted this defensive strategy with courage, where, to me, bravery feels like, “In the face of adversity, in the face of a challenge, in the face of a really tough situation, you summon your bravery.” I realized what my body was really yearning for was the flip side of courage, the more offensive side of courage, which I identified as daring. To me, making a big values change like that is really difficult. I had to trick myself into it. My coach really helped with this. It might have been his idea. The posture was like, “We’ve been living out of bravery for a long time, and this one part has been in the driver’s seat, but what would it look like to test daring as our primary value?”

The primary value from which I make decisions for my life. Once I made that value switch, I was like, “It might be the brave thing to stay here at Seiko, but it’s the daring thing to leave and to find what’s next for me.” Finally, the pieces fell into place, and I was able to finally give myself permission to do that. But that whole season, I look back on it, I was like, that was so chaotic and tense and stressful. I just felt like I was abandoning this baby that I had nurtured and grown. It was so painful to walk away from that.

It might be the brave thing to stay but it’s the daring thing to leave and find what’s next.

It’s funny you mention that because I think when I see people, when I work with people, when I’ve been in these places in my life where I can feel that real tension, maybe it’s a clear decision, or maybe it’s just that tense feeling of like, “Am I in alignment with myself?” it’s time to maybe sit down and have those conversations. IFS is one system. I’ve seen it used, not under that name, with various coaches and programs that I’ve done. But this idea of sitting down and taking your inner critic, like, I have a coach at the top, and he has this inner critic versus your higher self, and you may start to have conversations there.

I just did this incredible thing called the Hoffman Process, which is like a whole other set of episodes. But there’s a lot of conversation with past versions of yourself, current aspects of yourself, and you imagine them almost as another person. You’re like, “If there’s this aspect of myself that is pure daring, what would it advise me to do?” You can sit down and start to have that conversation. What it reminds me of also is something else that we have in common is our love for this Designing Your Life framework. Did you also read Designing Your New Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness–and a New Freedom–at Work? Did you see that one?

I haven’t got around to that one, but I really want to. I think that could be a good New Year challenge for me.

I do recommend it. There’s something they have in there, I forget if it’s in the first book, but he talks about, I’m going to forget what they are, but it’s like the four R’s of changing careers, that kind of thing. When you have this tension, when you have this discomfort, that’s one of the three ingredients for “It’s time for a change.” You may not have a vision yet, and you may not know what the first steps are, but that discomfort is usually that first ingredient. That’s like a good signal.

Something they say is, there’s lots of options. One of them is just to reframe, to really sit down, take a look at your vision, take a look at your values, and decide that this is the right thing and be okay with it, but come to that decision clearly. The other, as you know, is to reinvent, which it sounds like you did with some daring. After these nine months of chaos, as you put it, what were some of the first things that you went off and did on your own with the knowledge that you gained from this experience?

Reframe And Reinvention

That’s so good. I’ll make a little comment and note on that reframe versus reinvent because I’ve been discussing this with friends. I’m four years into this big transition that all compounded and happened in 2020. All areas of my life shifted pretty dramatically. It was a big reinvention season for me, and I think there’s something so liberating about that. I find myself still drawn to those big reinvention moments, and my friend Ellie, we were talking about this over the summer, she was like, “I really have to ask myself, how can I make edits and not these big reads? I guess reinvention is the word.” I think you need both. There are seasons of both.

You need both seasons of reframe and reinvention.

Sometimes the seasons, as we all know, are thrust upon you. I know very few people who didn’t come out of 2020 with some seismic shift in either their work, their relationships, who they were, who they wanted to be, the kind of person they wanted to be, what was important to them, their values.

That was the year that I had this bravery, or articulated this bravery to daring, transition. The first thing I actually turned to, and I didn’t really know how golden this was at the time, but I had a couple of other mentors who really supported me during this transition when I left my work and provided me with books. One of the books they got me was Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, and so I started reading and working through that. I told myself I could take three months off, so I quit my job.

You just quit?

I quit my job. Didn’t have a backup. I had been networking, but I was like, “I just have to quit. I literally can’t see a way where I can find a new job while I’m at this current job.” I was also dog tired, so I quit in the first week of February 2020, and we can all remember blissfully, weeks before the pandemic.

You want to hear a funny story? Where I was at the beginning of January 2020 was taking a bunch of airline flights in Asia. My brother married someone who’s from Taiwan. We were over there, and we had friends in Cambodia and Bali. We went to all these different places and were flying around. We got home, and my wife had this weird cold that we couldn’t figure out. A month and a half later, we’re going, “Were you ground zero on this? Were you patient zero?” We all remember, there are things we all remember when that started coming down.

The last thing I did with this company was one of those trips to Uganda, which was an amazing sendoff, so special. From there, I just got off my two-way ticket back to Portland and just got off in Amsterdam. I ended up going around Europe for a couple of weeks, visiting some friends, and made it back like 48 hours before they closed the international doors for flights for COVID. Long story short, what proceeded to happen was, I wasn’t super stressed about finding my next job, but I was very intentional about it. I knew I had a little bit of a runway, but I didn’t want to eat up that runway because it’s also my savings. COVID’s happening. I got accidentally quarantined on my family farm in Pennsylvania with my two siblings, who I hadn’t lived with in a decade, and then had a relationship, we were planning a wedding. We broke it off. I started my consulting business and then moved to Hawaii, so there was just a lot going on.

Like an average 2020? What is even normal anymore? I completely hear that. You picked up stakes in every aspect of your life, and you’re in Hawaii, and you’ve got this concept of living in this daring place. How did that character advise you in terms of finding the next thing? Because people who are listening may think, I want to find the next job. When I work with people, we talk a lot about, “Do you want to find the next job, or is there something else within your organization? Is it the reframe of just saying, actually this is the right job, given my longer-term vision, but I feel better having a longer-term vision?” Or, like you, almost a full reinvention. So you’re here. What is this daring voice telling you?

Daring To Design Your Life

A couple of key moments. First, while this is all happening at the very beginning, right after I quit my job, I start reading Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. I walk away with this concept, I took it as a promise. I don’t know, but I was like, “They told me if I have 100 coffees, I’m going to find my next dream job.”

The prototyping conversations.

The prototyping. I was like, “Great. I like those stats. I’ve got 90 days. I’ll have 100 conversations. I can do that.” This is also like, everyone, it was just such chaos. People were Zoom-fatigued. It was a little hard to get on with people, but also everyone was open to Zoom. So, whatever, just dove headfirst into it.

There were coffees?

Yeah, within 90 days, 130-minute conversations, and by the end of that 100 conversations, I had enough client work for my first year and a half.

Can you dig into that just a little bit more? Because for people who don’t understand the Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life framework, there is an important distinction. You’re not necessarily going in and saying, “I’m Bri, you may have a job for me, or I have a service.” It’s not a sales call, right?

No. Those calls really evolved. In the beginning, it was, I truly didn’t know what I wanted to do next. I was truly just interviewing people to understand their journey, what they liked about their career, people I could identify with and steal like an artist, if you know that book.

I got all three of them. I have the T-shirt.

Amazing. I’m like, “I’m going to steal your career trajectory like an artist.” That’s what I was seeking and searching for. At the same time, I had another session with another coach who really opened my eyes and gave me permission to embrace the generalist that I am. I’ll just explain the situation and how I would apply it. He was very blunt with me, “You either need to work for an organization that trusts you implicitly and will give you pretty free rein to build whatever you want, it’s going to be really valuable for them, but they just have to trust you. That’s what you’ve had for the last six years. You need to find your next one if you’re going to work for somebody, or you need to do your own thing.”

He was like, “Ninety percent of jobs are made for specialists or people who fall into a certain category. You will not be fulfilled like that. I’m going to tell you right now.” I was like, “That’s real.” I think there’s a lot more language and structure and support for generalists in specialized companies. I think there’s amazing work with Generalist World and Millie Tamati. I think there’s a lot more that generalists can do in the professional employed world, but for me at the time, actually hearing that was so liberating. It just felt so right.

I was like, I’ve just been waiting for someone to give me permission to go off and do my own thing. It’s so silly, but like this random guy, I don’t even know where he was, like Utah or something, I never talked to him again, but he was like, “You have permission.” I was like, “Thank you.” That was so funny.

I had an experience like this. This is two lifetimes ago, but my first career was in tech. I got a degree in computer science. I got a job because that’s what you did. I worked at jobs because that’s what you did. I just got the next job because that’s what you did, and then I started taking art classes because that’s what I wanted to have as my main hobby. But I really liked the art classes. I was spending a lot of time on them, so much time that I was engaged, and that was falling apart. I was working, and I was going to night classes and weekend classes. I was very distracted at work. My boss called me in and was like, “Your teammates are talking about how you’re not really pulling your weight.”

I was like, “You know what? Heard. Thank you. Sorry. I got it.” She was like, “If there was a way for you to.” and she’s like, “This conversation didn’t happen.” She’s like, “But if there were layoffs coming, and if there was a severance package, would you want that?” I took a couple of hours and was like, “Yeah, I do.” She gave me this permission to actually pursue what my heart was calling for, and that was a whole career after that. It’s so funny how sometimes we need, especially, I was in my twenties, how old was I? Probably like 24 or something, but I really needed a grownup to tell me it’s okay.

I still need grownups to tell me it’s okay. I think that’s part of the beauty of what we get to do in our work with community building, we get to create a landscape where people give permission to each other to do the thing that they already know that they need to do.

That’s a soundbite right there. That’s amazing.

It’s such a privilege to set those spaces and set those interactions.

I want you to continue your story. I want to get back to this idea of this daring character. What is this character saying to you, that you have this permission? This daring character has a soapbox. What’s going on?

There was a really pivotal moment with the daring character. I started the conversations, my coffees with folks, pretty soon. I started organically talking about what I had built and asking, like, “I built this community for customers who loved the brand and wanted to be more involved with it.” I was naturally talking to brands that had a strong mission, vision, and values and would ask them, “By the way, what do you do for your customers when they ask you how they can be more involved? Do you ever, like, connect them to each other?” The best answer I ever got would be, like, at a minimum, or at the most, they’d be like, “We throw an affiliate link at them.”

I’d be like, “There’s so much more you could be doing.” Basically, it just naturally evolved. Eventually, I realized this is actually something that I could build for these brands, something I have a lot of experience in. I got about 60 calls in and hit this complete dead end. I had nobody left to call, because on every call, I would say, “After hearing me share a little bit more about what I’m pursuing, is there anyone who you think would be interesting for me to talk to?” All of my clients came from, like, second- or third-degree connections. Someone like, pretty, I don’t know these people at the time I get to them, and I might not even really know the person who referred me over to them because that question kept working so well.

I got to 60, and it just tapered off. I had like two clients at that time, but I needed at least one or two more. It was this absolutely daring moment, daring took over. I went back to some of the people who I had an initial conversation with and truly was embarrassed and just like, “I’m so sorry,” but like, I wouldn’t advise other people to do it this way, but this is just how I felt in the moment. I was like, “I’m sorry to bug you again, but I’m really trying to hit these hundred conversations in 90 days. A lot’s changed since we talked last. Would you be so kind as to get on the phone with me a second time and hear what I’m pursuing and help me know if I can connect to anybody?”

I had a couple of really key conversations when I just swallowed my ego and went back and had a second conversation with people. One of those conversations actually led to a client, which is pretty incredible. That was like, I remember that viscerally, just like, “I’m going to do the hard thing. I’m going to do the hard thing.” Those people were so kind and so generous. They’re like, “Yes, of course, we’ll get that.”

This is the first time that we’re meeting face-to-face. I’ve listened to you a lot. I’ve seen you on our heartbeat community, helping people out. I imagine that there was a note of appreciation when you reached out to them. You’re not just reaching out to everybody being like, “I need one more call. Can you be, but there’s a really… I’m sure you reach,” I’m inserting words for you here, but I imagine you reached out to people with whom you thought that first conversation was valuable. I imagine there was a good feeling that they got from that second invitation, in a way, right?

Yeah. I really tried to be thoughtful about that. With all of these conversations, one of the things that I think is the greatest gift that you can give to someone after you’ve had a random connection call is to share the outcome of what that conversation led you towards. I think the best version of this is like, “I remember this specific line that you shared, and here’s how it impacted me,” or, like, “Because of that insight, I did X.” I tried to be really thoughtful about saying, “I so appreciate you hopping on the phone with me 30 days ago. Here’s where that’s led me, and if I can ever support you or serve you, of course, don’t hesitate to reach out.”

It’s such a hard thing to keep track of. There’s all these CRMs and everything else, but however you do it, there’s a great book. It’s such a terrible name. It’s called How to Get Clients: New Pathways to Coaching Prosperity. It’s by a guy named Steve Chandler, who’s a pretty well-known coach in the coaching world. He’s a coach’s coach. Something that he says over and over and over again in that book is, “You have to nurture your referrals.” These weren’t necessarily referrals, I know some of them were, but the idea is, if someone’s gifting you their time, or if someone is gifting you their reputation by connecting you with someone else, that’s a real gift. If they never hear from you again, then it’s never going to happen again.

Let’s imagine I send someone to you, and you start working with them, and I never hear a word. Whatever my feelings are, I just don’t know how it went. When another opportunity comes up, I may say, “I’m not going to send it to you because I really don’t know how that goes,” but if you followed up with me two weeks later, a month later, and said, “Just wanted you to know I’m working with this person. Thank you so much,” that’s enough, just to be acknowledged. The time, energy, reputation, whatever the gift is that they gave you, and to actually strengthen that relationship. I think so much, this is maybe a platitude, but so much of the world runs on these kinds of relationships. That’s such a small thing that you can do that really is very meaningful.

I come from the world of word-of-mouth marketing. I know how this works, and it’s time-consuming, but tracking that and making sure that you follow up and circle back with people is so important because it really affects not just the relationship, but what you’ll see in the future too.

Connect With Bri

Absolutely. I am looking at the time, and I do like to try to give my listeners a break after a certain point, but this has been such a wonderful conversation, and I’m just so honored that you’d take the time. Thank you. I’ll send you an email in 30 days. Thank you. Also, as a way of thank you, is there a place if somebody is looking for you, what are some of the things that maybe you provide for people, and where can they find you? Obviously, we will post links for folks who are listening to Bri’s podcast, Dear Bri, and what are the other places people can find you?

Thank you for asking. I’m pretty consistent on LinkedIn. That’s a good place to hear my thoughts on the matters, but I also have a newsletter, which is probably my most transparent and vulnerable place where I connect with my audience. I serve my clients in two ways. I do one-on-one consulting, and so that’s for folks who are like, “We want a community built, and we want it done right yesterday.” I have a community for folks who want to learn the fundamentals and foundations of building a vibrant, thriving online community. Usually, they’re paid, and those are the two places where I serve people. That’s where you can connect with me if you’re interested.

I can vouch for your consistent showing up in community spaces, as we share at least one. As a pitch for anybody who is running their own community, these kinds of spaces are so valuable. I’ve got so much, not even from going in and having a question, just from going in and reading what questions people have and stealing an idea, going, “I want to figure out how to do that. That would actually serve.” There’s just so much value that’s provided in those kinds of spaces. It’s a landscape for people to give each other permission to be daring.

A hundred percent. I actually just wrote a blog post about this. Maybe we’ll link it in the comments, but my involvement in niche communities is a pillar for my business development. Showing up in those spaces, providing value, supporting other people, in the article, I talk about, “Give, give, give, give, give.” This also becomes a really powerful place to support you when you’re launching something new or when you have an offer that serves the people who are gathering there, and not in a spammy, self-promotion way. Part of the reason my podcast did so well is because of the support that I had in the niche communities that I’m involved in.

I remember the community leaders in our community sharing your podcast, which is how I heard about it. Thank you so much for the time. Enjoy your few hours earlier than me, so enjoy the rest of your beautiful Friday in Hawaii and the rest of your weekend. Thanks so much, Bri.

Thanks, Marc. I’m so rejoiced to share the space with you. Thank you for having me.

Awesome.

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Thanks for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed this episode, please do share it with friends. I do want to tell you about one thing that I’m starting up again, it’s my newsletter. I’m recommitted to a weekly newsletter, and I am sending out personal stories that are designed to shake something loose for you. I love having conversations with folks on my mailing list. You can find that at MarcScheffCoaching.com. If you like that or any of these episodes, it would mean a lot to me if you could share with your friends, like, subscribe, comment, all the things. I love being in conversation with people, and I’d love to be in conversation with you. Thanks again for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

Important Links

• Bri Leever’s LinkedIn
• Ember Consulting – Community
• Ember Consulting – Newsletter
• Ember Consulting – Post -Bri Leever
• Marc Scheff Coaching
• Designing Your New Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness–and a New Freedom–at Work?
• Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life
• How to Get Clients: New Pathways to Coaching Prosperity

About Bri Leever

Bri got her start building a community and growing it to a multi-million dollar revenue stream for a brand in Portland, OR.

Now, she supports coaches, consultants, and creators to build their online community. She’s a Community Strategist by day and a Campervan host by night on the Big Island of Hawaii and you’ll usually find her on, in, or under the water.