Episode Description

In this episode of What If? For Authors, Claire explores why building and maintaining community can feel so uncomfortable—and why it’s quickly becoming a non-negotiable skill for authors who want a sustainable career.

From the push-pull tension between individual needs and group dynamics to the deeply ingrained patterns that make connection difficult, Claire breaks down what’s really happening beneath the surface when we “struggle with community.” Using the Enneagram, she highlights the unconscious behaviors that can quietly sabotage relationships—and how to begin shifting them.

If you’ve ever felt like an outsider, avoided author groups, or only reached out when you needed something… this episode offers a compassionate but honest look at what it takes to build real, mutually supportive connections.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

Why community is becoming an essential skill for authors (not just a “nice to have”)
The hidden cost of trying to “go it alone” in your writing career
Why community must be built before you urgently need it
The difference between connection and extraction in author relationships
How the tension between self vs. others shows up in every community
Why avoiding conflict actually weakens connection
How ego (your protective armor) interferes with meaningful relationships
Why accountability is an act of care—not punishment

Practical Reflection Questions

Do I tend to prioritize my needs or others’ needs in community?
Where do I avoid conflict instead of engaging with it?
Do I only seek connection when I need something?
What patterns might I be bringing into relationships unconsciously?

Resources Mentioned

Write Iconic Characters
Claire’s guide to using the Enneagram for character development
→ books2read.com/WIC
Liberated Writer (Website)
Coaching, courses, and resources for authors
→ liberatedwriter.com

Support the Show

If this episode gave you something to reflect on, here are a few ways to support the podcast:

Leave a review on your favorite platform—it helps other authors find the show
Share this episode with a writer who’s navigating community challenges
Subscribe to Claire’s Substack for deeper insights on writing, the industry, and the author life

Your support helps keep these conversations going—and supports a more connected, sustainable writing community.

Happy writing!

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If For Authors. I'm glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor, and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for authors as well as a humor and mystery writer. All my services, courses and books for authors can be found@liberatedwriter.com.

Go check it out. If you're curious about how you can build a more sustainable author career in uncertain times. I also have a new book out, sort of new at this point. It's called Write Iconic Characters. It's all about using the Enneagram to develop realistic and relatable characters that live rent free in the reader's head.

You can find that on most major retailers or go to books to read.com/wc. That. That's books the number two, read.com/wic. I'm a little tired coming into today. Um, today's recording is the third recording I have done today. I was on a podcast as a guest [00:01:00] earlier and then I did a, uh, q and a live q and A on Substack, and now I'm here.

So if my voice seems a little tired, never fear, your ears are not deceiving you and it's a little tired. I usually don't talk this much, but I have some hot tea here and so I will be okay. Don't worry about me. We are gonna get through this episode and not only are we gonna get through it, but I think we're gonna have a fun time together.

So, today's episode is about something that will become a superpower for authors over the next year.

It's already been a superpower for a while, uh, maybe since the dawn of humanity, but. People, you know, were getting by without it in the industry too for a long time. I don't think anybody's gonna be getting by without this power a year from now though. So I invite you to listen to what I'm saying.

Notice the resistance that pops up inside of you as I talk and just get very [00:02:00] curious about it, you let that resistance go unquestioned and uninspected to your peril, frankly, in this episode. We're gonna ask, what if I struggle with community? A lot of authors do because a lot of humans do. Community means being around people who annoy you, people who disagree with you, people who you don't completely trust.

It requires effort and attention from you. These are the reasons why many, many authors give up on it completely. We've probably all had negative experiences with community where the community turned toxic and maybe we just don't really wanna risk experiencing that again. So we just kind of create our distance.

, too bad, no risk, no reward, and you really can't afford to pass on the rewards here, not when the world is how it is right now. Not with the industry is [00:03:00] in such a big flux. Community is a long-term investment. So one must start building it before one absolutely needs it. And that's really difficult to grasp honestly.

Like you have to ,

Build the community, you have to feed it, and you have to tend to it before you really feel the urgent need for it. What I've seen a lot over the years is authors wanting to be an island until they need something from others. Then they're either shit outta luck or they go trying to extract that thing that they need from others without really building anything resembling a mutually supportive relationship.

For example, it's common for me to ask authors who they can cross promote with when I'm coaching them on marketing, say. They don't know anyone who they can cross promote with because they haven't been cultivating their author community. When this happens, either they miss out on the benefits of cross-promotion in that [00:04:00] moment.

, they may cultivate it over time and have it available later in their career. That's a possibility. , or maybe they just start emailing other authors in their genre cold just asking for something before really building trust and rapport, which doesn't tend to go over well.

To be clear, and you probably already know this, but we don't build community simply so we can extract something from it. Unfortunately, this is the mindset I do see commonly in the publishing industry. Like as soon as people are making decisions in the name of their business, they're professed values just kind of fly out the window and they turn into little colonizers trying to extract as much profit from everything as possible.

That's okay. Right? That's what businesses do. That's sarcasm if you didn't catch it. Um, anyway, meanwhile, community has its own benefits outside of just helping us sell books. And if we're struggling to connect to that internally, then maybe [00:05:00] we have some inner work to do. When we're looking at sustainability, say, extraction always has to scale and move from place to place, so it's not actually sustainable and it turns people insane.

Aligning your business to your deeply he held values is the only way to make it sustainable, frankly. Anyway, we must build community before we find ourselves desperate for it. So that's all the pitching I'm gonna do about community today. If you don't want community, I'm not gonna sell you on it any further, other than just to say that all of the seasons of success I've experienced in my rating career can be directly linked to the communities that I'm a part of.

So without those, no amount of my individual hard work would've produced the same results. Also, I probably would've quit this business entirely because community keeps me connected to myself and others in a way that is required for me to remember why I keep going when [00:06:00] everything kind of sucks, which there have been seasons of that as well.

There's an essential tension present in every healthy community, and that's the push and pull between self and other. When two humans with individual needs connect. Conflict eventually rises where what one person wants and desires the other person does not want or desire. Maybe I want you to be more communicative, but you want to be allowed to talk less.

I want to go to the park. You wanna stay indoors, that sort of thing, without any willingness to put the other person's desires ahead of your own. This relationship will not last. But if you always put their desires above your own, the relationship will also not last.

And while it does, it'll be a hollow excuse for a relationship. There is a constant negotiation of needs and desires in any lasting relationship then. And that's just talking one-on-one, right? So [00:07:00] now throwing a few more people and yeah, things get complicated. They get a little messy. If too many members of the group are unwilling to sit in that tension of self versus other, the community will start to disintegrate.

If there isn't a willingness to engage in the natural conflict of discussion and negotiation, the community just doesn't hold together over the long run, and that's okay. Not every community is built to last, but we want the ones that work to continue on as long as you know, makes sense for them. So this means that to be better at community, we must address our discomfort around having and expressing needs, and the feeling of not getting a hundred percent of those needs prioritized all of the time.

There are actually a ton of skills involved in this simple process of holding the internal tension of self versus other without, you know, swinging hard towards self or hard toward other. It takes awareness of this tension [00:08:00] to be able to hold it. It also takes a willingness to occasionally say, I'll take a little less today so that you can have enough this willingness alone means most Americans are not likely candidates for community without some deconstruction of internalized concepts around our entitlement to getting what we want all the time and immediately. So here's something to ask yourself. Where do you tend to fall on this scale between self versus other when you encounter community?

Just be honest because there's no point in asking if we're not being honest, and there's no shameful place to fall along this scale. It's just about locating yourself. You tend to struggle to compromise and set self aside, or do you too easily set self aside and fail to shoba up as yourself as a result.

It's important to notice this about ourselves because only then can we practice trying some other approach, experimentation, and this is something you [00:09:00] can work on and adjust. By the way I've done it, I still have to keep an eye on it and make adjustments depending on the group that I'm in. It isn't difficult to just take some awareness and practice, and the reward is, duh, being in community, not having to worry about your needs all the time because you trust that everyone's will be met and that there's enough to go around. Ego is poison for connection. Our ego is the armor we wear to protect us from our core fear, which is always a social fear.

So eager are eager. So the ego armor protects us great, but it comes at the cost of keeping us separate. That's why people who are in the unhealthy or even low average levels of development for their Enneagram type struggle the most with community. Their armor is too thick. They either cannot give enough or cannot receive enough from others to form [00:10:00] strong connections.

The ego likes to tell us that we're special or better than others, right? It needs to believe that. So until we begin spotting its lies and deconstructing them will keep running into the same issues around being part of a community. The four, for instance, will keep pushing people away because they need to feel special, and then they'll pull them in when they feel like they're being rejected.

And this drama pattern doesn't build strong community. It wears people out. The seven, for instance, will avoid the responsibility and commitment that comes with being in a community. Only showing up for what seems more fun and interesting than whatever else they have on offer. This sends the message to the others in the community that they are simple afterthoughts and that the seven will likely not be around when they need them.

Another example, the two may center themselves as the most helpful or the servant of the community to feel needed. Then eventually resent others for not giving back as much as the two [00:11:00] gives. Eight. Another example will only wanna participate if they get their way opting to go at something alone as soon as a compromise is suggested.

So these are tendencies of course, and each type has particular ones that make being part of a community difficult. Thankfully, the Enneagram gives us a lot of clues as to what our particular patterns may be that are keeping us from sticking with community and nurturing it consistently. There are a few general groupings that I think are interesting for us to look at, but for this episode we're just gonna focus on one, and you can also go type by type and really drill down.

But I think this particular grouping asks enough questions on its own to really get you started asking some useful questions. Let's start with childhood needs. These are sometimes called the unmet childhood needs, and the Enneagram applies them to particular centers. So the needs are autonomy, security, and attention. [00:12:00] For the 8, 9 0 1 autonomy is the deep childhood need that went unmet for twos, threes, and fours.

Attention is the need that went unmet for five, six, and seven. Security is the need that went unmet. You don't have to blame your parents to acknowledge these unmet needs inside of yourself, and each type within the group will express it a little differently from the other two. But let's just think about how each of these needs can show up in the context of community.

If you're an eight, a nine, or a one, your need for asserting autonomy is undoubtedly a recurring problem for sticking with your author communities. You may be confusing the concept of communal need with an attempt to steal your autonomy, in which case you may be overdoing it with the establishment of autonomy in the group context.

For instance, the eight might not like others taking the lead and may try to assert dominance or simply [00:13:00] peel off from the group. When that happens, they may misinterpret basic community practices as an attempt to control them. The one's attempt to assert autonomy might look like taking on too much responsibility and misinterpreting the transgressions of others as a threat to their own morality, leading to, I hate to say it, but purity tests.

Meanwhile, the nine tends to merge with the group to avoid conflict, but when the conflict becomes unavoidable, rather than addressing it, the nine will likely disappear from the group. Nines view conflict as a potential threat to their autonomy, so they reassert control by withdrawing from it disappearing.

If you're a five, a six, or a seven, your need for security is probably interfering with your ability to stay in community with others. If you overdo it with your need for security, it can cause trouble, and if you don't trust that others can offer security, you're also [00:14:00] going to struggle. For instance, the five tends to askew the idea that security.

Provided by others. Instead, they tend to see the demands of community as a threat to their resources and therefore a threat to their sense of security. They keep others at arms length to protect their energy, and that sends a signal to the rest of the group that the five doesn't wanna be part of the community at all.

The sixes need for security can sometimes create a push and pull, so their attention helps them find all the ways the connections are insecure. That's where their attention flows, and they may go way too hard. Trying to create security in the bonds beyond what we can ever really expect from another human being.

Depending on the subtype, this can look like codependency or really trying to cozy up to other people. And sometimes this can look like playing helpless so that someone comes and rescues them and keeps them safe and they're looking for a protector. But it can also mean that the six really slams the [00:15:00] door shut on others very quickly at the first indication of insecurity in a relationship.

The seven meanwhile finds their security through limitlessness, through endless options. This can make a community a novelty for a while, but the seven may lose interest once they start to feel boxed in by the limitations and responsibility of being in community. And they may start searching elsewhere for security, ignoring the community, or only giving it like surface level at attention, kind of dipping in and out, but not truly watering those connections.

If you're a two, a three, or a four, your need for attention may cause conflict with your community. When I say attention, I mostly mean being seen, so your pursuit of it can leave people confused or feeling burned or ignored themselves, for instance. The two's pursuit for attention can take an indirect route by trying to earn appreciation and praise for their [00:16:00] service while acting like they don't need it.

And then in pursuit of more appreciation, they can over help others, which doesn't allow for each person to have an opportunity to feel helpful themselves, and that can hurt the connection. The threes need to be seen as the best and the most valuable, can mean that they demand a lot of attention for their accomplishments, and then overemphasize those accomplishments to the rest of the community to be admired.

This can look like one-upping, which isn't great, for instance of, you know, collective accomplishment. The four can enter into a push pull relationship where they want attention, but feel uncomfortable and mistrusting of it. When they receive it may not feel genuine enough if they think they have to ask for it, and then they can become envious when they see others receiving attention.

And this envy erodes connection and usually ends up with a dramatic blowup or a meltdown. The foursome attention, but not the kind that anyone feels great [00:17:00] about. So it's really hard to hear about the patterns of our type and how they may be throwing a grenade into the communities we care about. But it is so important to sit with that discomfort long enough to decide that you're willing to do the hard work of changing, of letting things go so that you don't continue in this way.

Painful introspection isn't optional for growth. This is why so many people would rather opt out of community altogether or claim. It's just not for them. Those are convenient excuses to avoid the pain of introspection and to opt outta the courage to frankly own your shit. I.

You don't need everyone in a community to be self-awareness gurus for the community to work and thrive. You just need enough people who are committed to asking the tough questions of themselves and holding others accountable for doing the same. When that ship starts to veer off course. Accountability is a whole thing, right?

People who wanna act with impunity will [00:18:00] conflate accountability with punishment or retribution just to escape being held accountable. But accountability within a community is an act of compassion and generosity. It's saying, Hey, I trust that you're better than this, and that you have the capacity to make amends.

So I'm gonna sit here with you through it rather than running away because I care about you. What a wonderful gift to give to someone. It takes courage to hold others accountable, though to risk their immediate anger and to tell them, Hey, I'm not okay with that. I think that came from a place of suffering and not from the parts of you.

We both love. That's how I have to approach my work with authors. I don't point out these patterns because I wanna make people feel bad or punish them. And I have pointed out a lot of problematic patterns to community today. And you know, just for time purposes, I haven't gone into detail on what each type brings as a gift to community, though I have covered that in other places.

, [00:19:00] but you know, sometimes my job. Is to point out the patterns that are causing destruction and hurting connection. And I do that not to punish, not to make anyone feel bad, but because I know that those actions that are hurting connection, they come from a place of fear and suffering. And I'm willing to meet that person in that place and sit with them through the process of letting those fears go so that they can really return to themselves. Again, that's what accountability looks like and that's what I try and practice very imperfectly, and that's what it takes to be a part of a community.

So if you're wondering, what if I struggle with community? I'll just say, yeah, we all do. It's tough, man. We each have these patterns that make it difficult, but once we identify what those patterns likely are, we can practice clearing them out, letting [00:20:00] them go, and then we get to enjoy the wonderful benefits of feeling connected with others.

And those benefits stretch on and on, and it's a wonderful thing to have in your author life. Don't believe the lies your fear tells you about not needing community. It's okay to fuck it up as you're practicing new skills, but these are skills. Make no mistake. So that person you've seen who seems to fit into community really easily, who can make people feel welcome, navigate conflict, and come out the other side of the conflict with stronger bonds.

They've been practicing. They weren't born knowing how to do all those things. When we stop misattributing community skills to natural talent rather than to practice, we immediately empower ourselves to begin the messy process of practicing the skills our particular type may struggle with. When you meet a group of people who are also practicing their skills.

You unlock something so much [00:21:00] greater than the sum of its parts, you'll stop thinking of your author community as a resource to tap into and really just begin considering it an essential part of being an author. In general. You may wonder how you ever did without it.

If you're interested in practicing your skills of community and looking deeper at how your type influences your connections with others, go to liberated writer.com/ti. L-I-B-E-R-A-T-I. The TI is my Enneagram focused author community. So depending on when you listen to this episode, registration will either open soon.

Be open or have already closed. If it's already closed or hasn't opened yet, you can join the wait list and I'll holler at you via email when it's open. Again, that's it for this episode of What If for Authors. I'm so glad you're part of my community and I hope you'll check out the Libera. If you're ready to enjoy being in a community of other authors looking to build something new and [00:22:00] sustainable, I'll be there.

Hope to see you around that space. Thanks for listening to this episode, and I hope you'll join me for the next one. Happy writing.