September 30, 2020

🔥 Meetups are dead. Enter Mastermind Groups!

If you want to go fast, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.

Attending meetup events has been a good way for me to find like-minded people. But after the pandemic forced everything to go online, it created a void for me which the virtual events simply couldn’t fill. That’s when I came across mastermind groups.

A mastermind group is a peer-to-peer mentoring group used to help members solve their problems with input and advice from the other group members. Think of it as a place to get feedback and truly be heard by folks who know what you’re going through.

I have been experimenting with running mastermind groups lately. I have seen a lot of groups fail and few thrive. Here are the key ingredients of a successful one:

1) Curation
This is the most important step. You want to bring together folks with similar goals / desires. If you nail this one, everything else will tend to automatically fall in place without much effort.

2) Leader
Even if everyone is at a similar level, someone has to take charge. There’s no such thing as something that runs itself. The leader must make sure that everyone shows up, and then stick to the agenda.

3) Agenda
An agenda is critical for masterminds to work. If people just show up not really knowing what to talk about, that is a sure recipe for failure. A good idea is always to have a “hot seat”. A hot seat is where one member of the group talks about their issues and projects. About their challenges. And the group rallies around that project/challenge solving the issues the best they can. They give the person in the hot seat some resources, answers, and even more questions, enabling them to think through the process.
You might wonder why this structure works? Just think, what happens when we give others advice? Their problems are crystal clear to us, the solutions obvious. Something that’s present when we deal with our own obstacles is always missing when we hear other people’s problems: the baggage. With other people we can be objective.
When people come together to talk about their challenges (business or personal), something magical happens. The brainstorming leads to insights (wisdom of crowds). A situation where one person didn’t have all the answers, but a collective group of people could feed off each other’s wisdom and come up with a solution. Or a different perspective. Or even a challenge to the original concept.
Focusing on one person for the week keeps the agenda tight and allows you to understand the problems faced by that one person. And it allows you to collectively work on solutions, more questions and different angles to look at just ONE project or challenge.
However, this is not set in stone. You can bring up your burning challenge that needs solving right now even if it’s not your turn. This is YOUR support group, so it would always have time and space for you.

4) Meeting regularly
A good frequency is to get yourself on the hot seat once every month for accountability. If you’re a group of 4 people, that means meeting once every week or once every two weeks (if you make the meeting time longer).
One of the destructive elements of mastermind groups is that people get too busy. To combat this, get time commitments from everyone in advance. Put the recurring event on everyone’s calendar. This is so important that I’ll emphasize this again. The greatest killer of mastermind groups is finding time to actually show up. Members of the group regularly get abducted by aliens, or get into an accident with pomegranates raining from the sky, or the latest iPhone sale.

TL;DR
Masterminding is when a group of fiercely-motivate people get together on a regular basis. Over the weeks and months, it often becomes a place of refuge. A place where you can go to have an honest discussion with people you trust and respect. A place where you can sort out your issues and people hold you responsible. And most importantly it becomes your support group. These are people you trust. They know your journey and your struggles.

I’m loving my tightly-knit groups so far. I only wish I had started sooner. If you’re looking to start such a group, feel free to reach out for anything. I’d love to help!

Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap