More Advice for the “Deep Casual” Hosting Movement!
How to decide who to invite, how to deal with packed schedules, and an awesome tip from a surprising source.
Last week, I discussed the concept of “deep casual hosting” and I was blown away by reader enthusiasm and responses; last week’s newsletter was my most popular ever. The premise of “deep casual” is that you invite folks over, and the meal and accompaniments are casual and require minimal work. The goal is to set very realistic standards for yourself, show people you want to get to know how you actually live, and make it easy enough that you’ll be willing to host more often in service of building deeper connections. Read the original post here:
How to Find Your People Club members, this month’s assignment is to host a “Deep Casual” gathering in the next 30 days. For some of you, this may be an exciting prompt, but for others, I know you may already be breaking out into a cold sweat at the thought of having people over. If you have hesitations, this post will walk you through some anticipated hurdles. I’ll go over who to invite, how to get the conversation flowing, and how to deal with cancellations/guest flakiness.
How to decide who to invite
If you are new to deep casual hosting, or any hosting at all, start small. I’d recommend starting with one additional household to get your sea legs. To figure out who to invite, reflect on the communities you are interested in joining or investing in (think back to the exercise about mapping your community and connections from February), Examples could include your neighborhood, your kid’s school, your volunteer group, etc. If you aren’t part of many or any communities yet, feel free to invite someone who’s part of a prospective community you might want to consider joining, like a friend from work who attends a church you might want to join. For your invite, I’d like you to focus on people who are based locally and aren’t family members. You might have a great time having your cousin who lives an hour away for a deep casual dinner, but that probably won’t do much to help you find your people in communities near where you live.
As you get more experienced with this, you can consider adding a second household when you think you have a good social match of people to bring in, but much larger than that, you’ll start to get enough guests to turn it into a party, which will take a bit more work. That is fine, just be sure you aren’t skipping over the low-lift deep casual assignment. I love this update from
on how her year of having people over for dinner is going.How to find a time that works to host (and guests can make it)
Remember, the goal of deep casual hosting is for it not to be much, if any, more work than you’d do for yourself or your household. To get off the ground with deep casual hosting, I recommend deciding on a time that works for you and then inviting the one household via text message. Rather than saying, “I’d love to find a time to have you over, what time works for you in the next month?” say “We’d love to have you over for burgers this Saturday. Are you free?” If that guest can’t come, move on to inviting someone in that time slot that works for you to have burgers. Don’t hold off on hosting until that specific guest can come. If it can be hard to nail people down for longer-range plans, counterintuitively, you might have more luck trying the short lead time invitation of a week or less and see if that works better for making events happen.