Building Community and Connection in Business with Christopher Fox, Ph.D.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:15)
Hello and welcome back to the show. Do you want to build more real connections and community in your business? That's the topic today and we're going to dive into that with our guests. We are live, so if you have questions or comments, send them along. I'm Stephen Sakach here again with Tullio Siragusa and Mike Liwski. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (0:41)
Absolutely. Thanks, Stephen. To answer your question, yes, I do want to build more connections and we're going to do just that. We'd like to welcome you once again to another episode of The Bliss Business Podcast. Really appreciate our listeners and our followers tuning in. So what's on tap for today? So today, we have a guest who has truly transformed the way businesses communicate and connect with their communities. Christopher G. Fox, he's the founder of Ideas-Led Growth. He's spent over two decades pioneering the integration of three really interesting components. It's the integration of empathy, ethics, and strategic growth, and implementing that into different business practices. He's also the visionary of the grace method, which you'll hear a lot more about later today. It's a groundbreaking approach that helps redefine business communication to help make your communication be more intentional, also be more focused on humans or more human-centered, and also being a little bit more purpose-driven. So then to sum it up, in this episode, you'll gain valuable insights into Christopher's grace method.
Which will help you, again, build stronger relationships in your business. And by applying his strategies, you can expect to foster deeper connections, lead with greater integrity, and achieve sustainable success. That also aligns with your business values, which we know is really key. So Chris, I gotta say, I'm personally thrilled to have you today with your expertise in fostering community and connections. Because it's exactly what we're going to explore today. I couldn't think of a more perfect guest. So with that, let's welcome Christopher G. Fox to The Bliss Business Podcast. Welcome, Chris.

**Christopher Fox** (2:35)
Thank you. Thank you so much, Mike. That was a fantastic introduction. I really appreciate it. It's great to be on here with you, Mike, with Stephen, with Tullio. I'm very excited for this.
I've already seen it as the high point of my week, and I'm really excited to be here on this Thursday morning.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:51)
No pressure after that introduction.

**Mike Liwski** (2:54)
I love it.

**Christopher Fox** (2:54)
I will try to meet expectations.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:58)
Chris, when thinking about this show Topper, we've been doing a series of shows in the past week or so on community and connection billing. I was caught up on the idea of how much easier it is to create community since the Internet came along, but how much more disconnecting we've become. Do you agree with that? Or is that just my cynicism creeping into my thoughts, or are we getting more disconnected despite this technology?

**Christopher Fox** (3:28)
Yeah. I think it's one of those odd situations where both things are true. The opportunity for connection is unbelievably magnified by all of the digital technologies that have, if you look back to almost prehistory in the late 90s, as some of these digital technologies really started to hit the mainstream in the business world, through the first generation of websites, the social sites, and now wherever we seem to be in this interim period as AI gets going, there are so many ways for people to connect with each other. The other side of the coin is that there are a lot of challenges with the primary platforms that have inserted themselves into the way we connect with each other. I think back, a little bit of history behind me, so I think back to the way I used to interact with people on message boards, and there was this thing called Internet Relay Chat. You'd have these chat rooms where people based on a particular interest could all talk about a certain topic. There were listservs. There were all these things that were like, they're in some ways really recognizable. I think most people, if you got a few years less in the can than I do, you're not even going to know what I'm talking about with these things.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:55)
I was there.

**Christopher Fox** (4:56)
Over time, platforms, the big social platforms have inserted themselves, and they've also created these, what I call, incentives, where instead of chasing connection, they gamify, they use all of the sort of made-to-stick behavioral engineering type things to get you excited, not about your connections, but about your likes. It's not what are people saying, but how many comments did I get? That shift does, I think, sometimes distort the picture and create a sense where the opportunity is there to connect. But you also have to fight through the noise of the engagement statistics that can look impressive, but they don't actually mean anything from a human connection standpoint.