Conscious Growth Club FAQ

There isn't a monthly option. The minimum membership for CGC is a year.

Having annual memberships ensures a high commitment level among the members, and it helps create a stable group throughout the year.

Sure, here's a walkthrough video recorded in 2019. Since then we've added even more to CGC, but it will give you a good idea of what some of the member areas look like.

There isn’t a payment plan. We tested one when CGC first opened in 2017, and I learned the hard way that I don’t want to be anyone’s creditor.

Offering a payment plan did attract more members who might not have otherwise joined, but unfortunately it didn’t work out well enough to make me want to continue offering it, so I’ve decided not to offer a payment plan going forward.

The payment plan added more complexity and distraction, which I disliked and would rather not deal with anymore. Some members overstretched themselves financially and didn’t complete their payments, and they had to be dropped from the group. Sometimes people wanted to put their payments on pause. Other times people decided they could just quit after a month or two, trying to treat it like a monthly pay-as-you-go plan, despite the fact that they’d agreed to commit to the full year.

The actual experience of offering a payment plan was disappointing, even though it did result in a net gain from a numbers standpoint, including some people who’ve been excellent members. Alignment matters more to me though, and offering a payment plan ran contrary to that purpose.

Most members chose to pay in full anyway, so the payment plan wasn’t as popular. I fully expect that if we offered a payment plan, we’d attract more members, perhaps as much as 20% more. But to me it’s just not worth all the problems and distractions it creates.

It’s not as good for the community to have some members dropping out along the way for payment-related reasons. When other members invest in you and then you drop out, it's a letdown for the community.

It feels more aligned to get everyone’s payments handled up front as they join. Then everyone inside knows they’re fully paid up for the year, and we can be fully present with investing in each other for the year. Then no one has to wonder who might drop out along the way because they couldn’t or wouldn’t honor the payment plan.

I especially disliked having to drop someone from the group because they didn’t complete their payments. It would be unfair to other members to keep them in the group though.

If people want to finance their memberships some other way, that’s up to them. I no longer wish to be involved in extending credit though. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I’m glad that we at least tested it, but I like the dynamic a lot better without it. I think it yields a healthier community inside. And people can always save up and join in a future year if they so desire.

There's a lot of variety amongst CGC members, so it's hard to sum up what everyone is like. Frequently shared commonalities include: caring, playfulness, sincerity, ambition, and a desire to learn and grow. If these commonalities resonate with you, I think it's likely you'll get along rather well (and perhaps even make some new best friends).

Most members are in their 20s, 30s, or 40s, but we've had adults of all different ages inside.

The age span within CGC has served to strengthen the sense of community while offering a greater range of perspectives and experience.

CGC members can seek out other members to act as accountability partners. Sometimes small accountability groups or masterminds are set up as well. Additionally, you can start a Progress & Accountability log in the forums to formally document your progress. Making your progress visible can help keep you accountable.

In CGC there's a mix of those who are single, those who are married or in long-term relationships, and those who have families.

In the member forums members have discussed parenting as well as dating.

As long as you can communicate to some degree in English, you'll be able to connect with others in CGC.

CGC has many members who speak English as a secondary language, and they are still very active and well-integrated into the community.

You can even lean on the CGC community to help you improve your English skills, such as by practicing with other members in the video Watercooler.

CGC is a community for members to help each other grow, regardless of members' political affiliations. Members are to exercise good judgment, reasonableness, and mutual respect. If and when you disagree, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.

There tends not to be much debate about our differences inside CGC. Members usually don’t want to bother with that in a paid community because they want their money’s worth, and arguing opinions doesn’t really help them move forward in life. Arguments of this nature are way more prevalent in free communities.

While some members in CGC identify as having social anxiety, we do our best to create a culture of psychological safety, caring, and support. It's a team effort to help each other get results.

You certainly don't have to be extroverted to make use of many of the resources CGC has to offer. That said, the process of making friends usually involves some degree of extroversion. As CGC is a very friendly and supportive group though, you may find the process of making friends within CGC to be a lot easier compared to making friends via other worldly interactions.

While it's always helpful to know what you want, it isn't necessary for joining CGC. Inside the group you'll get access to the Stature course on character sculpting, which can help you clarify who you'd like to become. You'll also be invited to partake in our 5-step quarterly planning process, which will help you define your goals 90 days at a time.

Helping you get clear about what you want to accomplish and experience is a big part of CGC.

As much as you want. Some members are active in the group every day while others check in less frequently.

CGC has a flexible structure, and nothing is mandatory. How much time you invest in the group depends on what you want to accomplish and experience.

As long as you're interested in personal growth, you're welcome to join. Your starting point doesn't matter.

You can always contribute to others by sharing encouragement and emotional support, which many members appreciate.

You may be surprised by just how much you know that's valuable to others though. Trust yourself.

First, it challenges people to make up their minds. Are you in or out? It's good for CGC to attract members who can make up their minds and commit themselves when they see something they like. This helps create a more action-oriented culture inside.

Second, it gives us the opportunity to welcome new members together in a relatively short span of time. Then we can spent the rest of the year helping and supporting each other and fulfilling CGC's purpose.

If you're retired from a career path, that's totally fine. Please do join us.

If you're retired from personal growth, however, then you shouldn't join because we do work on many aspects of personal growth, so it's important that our members are interested in taking action to continue learning and growing. It's a club of lifelong learners and explorers.

We are very welcoming of the LGBTQ community, with various members identifying as LGBTQ themselves. Discrimination based on sex, race, gender, orientation or identification is not tolerated within CGC. Mutual respect amongst all CGC members is a must.

It's not a problem for the community if it's not a problem for you. You're welcome to join us.

CGC members are pretty good at using meaningful titles for discussion threads, so if a topic doesn't interest you, you don't have to open it. You can also mute topics that don't appeal to you, so they won't even show up on your updates list if people keep posting to them.

Members are free to discuss what they like, as long as they stay civil and follow the community rules. Sexuality (including kinky sex) is a valid topic, but so far those types of discussions have been rare. Just be aware that they're allowed though since sexuality is an aspect of personal growth for many people.

On a coaching call, if some member wanted to discuss an issue that you'd rather not hear about, it's easy to mute the discussion till the next member comes on (or simply skip ahead if you're watching the recording).

People who can't afford the fee won't join, so they won't become CGC members.

If that's a real issue, then it may be better to start with the Deep Abundance Integration course.

Additionally, some people treat the affordability issue as a personal challenge. It creates a conflict between their desire to participate in a personally meaningful experience and their current self-image that’s still keeping them stuck in some ways. Such inner conflicts are common in life, and they actually help us grow – if we allow ourselves to accept them as invitations instead of rejecting them as punishments or taunts.

There are active members of Conscious Growth Club who found it challenging to afford their membership, and they decided to see if they could make it happen anyway. For some people there can be a personal growth journey just to join such a group. This often involves some reframes about what’s personally possible. For some people it was a big stretch experience to attend one or more of our previous live workshops as well. Just getting to the event can feel like a major accomplishment.

The price was co-decided with the first group of people who were interested in the idea of CGC in early 2017.

Some people actually wanted it to be higher to create a more exclusive club while others wanted it to be lower to make it bigger and more accessible.

The current price has been the same since 2017 and has worked well, ensuring a healthy-sized group of dozens of members each year.

Lots of people prefer in-person interaction, which definitely has its advantages.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can do both. CGC isn't a replacement for your in-person social life. Think of it as a very useful supplement for that.

The question is: Is your in-person social circle growth-oriented enough for you? Do you have an accessible social network of dozens of good friends who encourage and support you in pursuing your desired goals and experiences?

Most people (including most CGCers) don't have that strong of an in-person social network. And it might take them years to build one if they tried. Some would have to move cities to make that realistic for them. CGC can do a pretty good job of filling this unmet need.

An online group has some key advantages too. We can gather committed, growth-oriented people into one community from all around the world. The group is available 24/7. You can access all of it from any modern Internet device – computer, smartphone, tablet, etc. If you move cities, you can still keep the same online friends and keep learning and growing with them.

Every month in CGC, we host a group 30-day challenge. Members can choose which challenges they want to do, and we share updates as we go through each challenge together.

Some challenges are to improve our habits or to test new habits. Other challenges are more exploration-based. Some are just for the experience.

Each challenge allows for plenty of customization, so members can adapt any challenge to fit their situations. In May 2019, we did a daily exercise challenge, and members decided whether to walk, run, bike, do yoga, weight train, etc. In January 2020 we did a self-expression challenge, and members chose how and what they wanted to express each day; some did daily blogging, for instance.

Here are the themes of one year's worth of challenges we did, from May 2019 to April 2020:

• Exercise daily
• Overcome procrastination
• Build momentum
• Practice mindfulness and gratitude
• Explore a curiosity
• Optimize your sleep habits
• Shift your vibration
• Declutter your space
• Express yourself
• Be a good friend
• Fuel your body / strengthen your immune system
• Structure your time

For each type of challenge, we provide some specific examples. Here are some examples we provided for the October 2019 “Optimize your sleep habits” challenge:

• Get out of bed by a specific time each day
• Get into bed by a specific time each day
• Go 100% stimulant-free (no caffeine, chocolate, etc)
• Keep your phone out of the bedroom for the whole month
• Take a 20-min nap each day
• Use a sleep mask for 30 days
• Turn off WiFi at night
• Sleep in a room with no active electronic devices
• Get into bed by a certain time and read till sleepy
• Avoid using anything with a display screen (TV, computer, phone) after a certain time each day
• Test a 28-hour sleep-wake cycle
• Keep a dream journal and log your dreams upon waking
• Practice lucid dreaming each night
• Sleep naked
• Sleep without a pillow or with a different pillow
• Fall asleep cuddling someone

These challenges are… well, challenging. They help to build self-discipline and determination. Each one requires a small habit change for 30 days, so there’s a training effect when we do them. They strengthen our adaptability and flexibility as we practice incorporating small, positive changes into our lives.

We don’t map out 12 months of challenges for each CGC year in advance since that would be too rigid. Instead we prefer to select each challenge on a month-by-month basis. We look at what’s arising in the community and develop a sense of where the momentum is and where the group energy wants to flow next. This has been working well. Many members find that the monthly challenges are nicely aligned with their personal goals.

Growing as a human being requires change, and change is difficult. These monthly challenges help us practice the art of change. At the start of each month, there’s a new invitation to change or improve some aspect of our lives for the next 30 days.

Members don’t do every single challenge. They selectively choose the ones that feel aligned to them.

The number of members will be different each year, but each year so far, we've landed in the range of 88 to 150. So it would be reasonable to expect around 100 members.

Yes, there are many vegan CGC members and members learning in that direction because my work attracts a lot of vegans and future vegans. Many people in my online audience have also gone vegan after reading some of my articles on the topic, such as How to Be Vegan.

CGC isn't a vegan-only community, but it is a vegan-friendly community managed by long-term vegans.

Yes, many members do have a strong interest in spirituality and the spiritual aspects of self-development. We've had plenty of discussions about the nature of reality and the Law of Attraction as well.

Spiritual curiosity seems to be common among CGC members. Mainstream religion doesn't seem to be very prevalent in the group though.

There are some interesting discussions about plant medicines and the spiritual insights people have gained from such experiences.

Some members do spiritual work for a living while others have expressed interest in leaning more in that direction.

Spirituality is just one of many subjects discussed in CGC though, so it's certainly not the only area of interest to our members.

Transformation is free. A membership in Conscious Growth Club is not.

If we offered something similar in design and made it free, and we invited people to join for free, it might still be interesting, but it wouldn’t be Conscious Growth Club.

Conscious Growth Club is a paid program, and delivering it in this form has many advantages. The investments people make help to ensure that the group has ample resources, making it more sustainable. This also makes it easy to invest in its ongoing development. Having a price to join attracts more committed, ambitious, and action-oriented people than a free community would. It keeps the group more manageable in size, so we can give members more personal attention, such as the many hours spent coaching people on our coaching calls. This also creates a sense of accountability among members to do their part to get their money’s worth from their memberships.

From 2006 to 2011, we ran free public forums for 5 years (at a loss to provide the service). More than 50K people created accounts, and there were more than a million posts. That experience ran its course for me.

In free circles, people mostly talk about personal growth. They discuss and debate quite a bit. They usually hesitate when it comes to bold action though.

Our free forums were quite possibly the best of their kind anywhere. We had a good run, but that ship has already sailed.

Give this some thought: Would you rather participate every day in a free forum with 50,000 members, where no one has invested a dime to be there? Or would you rather participate every day in a paid forum with dozens of members, knowing that they all invested financially to get access? That isn’t a trick question, and there’s no single answer that’s right for everyone. It’s simply a question of what’s right for you, right now. I spent many years of my life having the free experience too, but right now I very much prefer the paid community experience. It’s just a better match all around.

Free is a good start for many people. I also benefitted from other people’s free content and free communities when I first began on this path. But eventually I saw that I benefitted more when I paid money and had some skin in the game. The risk of loss motivated me to try harder and take more action. And paid communities tend to have very different dynamics inside than free ones.

When someone pays $2K to be part of a group with other people making a similar commitment, it raises the accountability bar for everyone. Free doesn’t provide much accountability to take action and get results. No one needs a result when they aren’t invested. If people aren’t getting results but there was no significant risk to them anyway, people are frequently okay with that. They just move on to something else that’s also free. In the long run though, this approach is limiting. It can feel pretty circular after a while.

It would be wonderful if people would routinely make powerful progress just the same when they pay nothing, but that usually isn’t the case. We frequently need some risk to drive us. We’ll often do more to avoid losing than we will to accomplish something risk-free.

Having some risk of loss isn’t a bad thing. Risk can be stimulating and motivating. It’s what drives many entrepreneurs.

When you invest financially, you feel that pressure to act. You sense the risk of loss if you don’t do your part. And that works well for a lot of people, including me. It gets us taking action and testing ideas, and from that we eventually get some meaningful results.

I’ve invested a lot to make Conscious Growth Club a reality. It was a risk to attempt to create such a group. It required a lot of nurturing, careful decision-making, and co-creative solutions. It hasn’t been an easy project, and I never expected it to be. I feel very good about what we’ve built thus far and how it will continue to evolve.

People don’t have to pay for transformation, and if anyone prefers to remain in the free space, that’s totally fine of course.