Authentic Austin's December + Holiday update

❗Join us for our upcoming A² retreat!

tl;dr: Ready to close 2024 with clarity and step boldly into 2025? Join us for a half-day immersive retreat designed to help you reflect on the year past and intentionally shape the year ahead.

More details in the post!

👉 Click here to apply

🎯 What’s Included

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From the Community

December meetup co-hosted with The Red Fridge Society, Rounding out the November meetup, A² annual reflection/preview workshop

💡 Skill Spotlight

A Simple and Nourishing Gratitude Practice

📆 Join us IRL

A²’s next Conscious Connection for founders, leaders, and curious people is on December 18 at 6:00pm. This one’s a special holiday edition co-hosted with The Red Fridge Society. I’m SO excited about this because of the quality of attendees and conversations we’ll have (more on that below).

We're inviting both the market-focused leader AND the spiritual seeker within you to the table. It's a great place to make authentic connections in an intimate setting.

Our calendar is the hub for A² IRL gatherings. Subscribing is the easiest way to get notified of these!

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 From The Community

🅰️² x🧧 December meetup co-hosted with The Red Fridge Society

I am so excited to host our December meetup at The Red Fridge Society.

More about them: ​The Red Fridge Society is a private community and workspace for entrepreneurs, investors, and creators. They focus on manifesting serendipity by fostering diverse interactions among members and moving forward together, celebrating successes, and supporting each other through downs.

​There’s strong value alignment with A² and I’m excited about the quality of attendees and conversations we’ll have. Here’s a sampling of the members you might meet:

• ​Serial entrepreneurs: like A.T. Fouty of Nibbles, to founders with decades in the same business and tens of millions in ARR, like Steve Rafferty of Active Prospect.

• ​Investors: Everyone from emerging seed-focused VCs like Zaz Floreani of FirstMile Ventures, to growth equity investors like Jim Curry, who held leadership roles at Dell and Rackspace, and co-founded BuildGroup.

​You can read more about the Red Fridge Society here.

💫 Rounding out the November meetup

The November meetup was awesome! We experimented with our first indoor meetup given the season 🥶. Turns out, there’s kind of a maximum limit to meetups based on how big the space is (~20), or else cross-talk becomes way too loud.

Dave and Kristen led the group through introspection on business and life as we near the end of the year. People left connected, inspired, and energized for the rest of the year!

Dave and Kristen are awesome humans. If you want to learn more about them, check out their work and connect!

Dave Gorum is a design coach to visionaries. Drawing on his experience as a successful founder and advisor he is devoted to serving the boldest work of sensitive, ambitious creatives. Through A², Dave is most excited about meeting creative and thoughtful people at the intersection of spirit and business. → More

Kristen Pavle is a community strategist and social designer who helps tech startups, coaches, consultants, and creators find early customers and craft meaningful communal offerings. Through A², Kristen is most excited about cultivating the spirit of community, where authentic connections and shared purpose drive personal and collective growth. → More

🤔🤓 A² Annual Reflection retreat

Ready to close 2024 with clarity and step boldly into 2025? Join us for a half-day immersive retreat designed to help you reflect on the year past and intentionally shape the year ahead.

This is for: Founders, leaders, and curious people who care about living their life intentionally.

What we’ll do: We’ll be doing an Annual Review/Preview, A² style. This isn’t a set of “New Year’s Resolutions". Our Annual Review is an invitation to come home to yourself. Through a guided journey, you’ll explore where you’ve been, reconnect with what matters most, and uncover what’s possible when you live a life rooted in your essence.

This will be a time to pause, disconnect from technology, listen to what comes up in stillness, and share deeply with others.

What you’ll get: A deep reflection on the year past, a renewed sense of purpose for the year ahead, and kindred souls to support you in the journey.

👉 Click here to apply

We're building Conscious Connection by inviting both the market-focused leader AND the spiritual seeker within you to the table.

Know anyone that’s looking for more of that in their life? I’d appreciate if you invite them to our next event!

💡 Skill Spotlight

Gratitude is one of those things we all know about, but often skip doing. I think a primary reason for this is that we try to be gratitude perfectionists, looking for grandiose things we’re grateful for in life. The problem is that life is mostly “in-between” big happenings. The shift we’ll talk about today is how to move our gratitude practice to something we do daily, celebrating the mundane and boring.

Here’s how the 3-3-3 Gratitude Practice works:

1. Set aside 3 minutes (morning is great for this!)

2. List out three things that you’re grateful for today.

   • Make at least one about a person in your life

   • Be specific (not "my family" but "my sister's encouraging text this morning")

3. For each thing, take a deep breath and fully feel your gratitude for it.

   • Notice where gratitude shows up in your body

This simple practice helps connect us to what we want to celebrate. Remember: the magic isn’t in the complexity, it’s in the consistency. If you’re struggling to find things you’re grateful for, go smaller. That feeling of brushing your teeth? Amazing. Waking up to a sunny room? Awesome.

📚 Resource Corner

• Book: Thanks!: How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert Emmons

• Article: The Neuroscience of Gratitude

📆 Join Us IRL

A²’s next Conscious Connection for founders, leaders, and curious people is on December 18 at 6:00pm. This one’s a special holiday edition co-hosted with The Red Fridge Society. I’m SO excited about this because of the quality of attendees and conversations we’ll have (more on that in the post).

We're inviting both the market-focused leader AND the spiritual seeker within you to the table. It's a great place to make authentic connections in an intimate setting.

Basically this graphic:

📫 Our calendar is the hub for A² IRL gatherings. Subscribing is the easiest way to get notified of these!