078: Creating Transformational Mastermind Groups

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One of the most transformative aspects of my life as a business owner, as an author are mastermind groups. Today I want to share the different forms that these take. They're so powerful for me and I know for so many others. I and yet that word mastermind group can mean, I guess it's two words. It can mean so many different things. So I'm going to share a couple of the formats that have been working really well for me and others and none of these require financial investment, believe it or not. So while there are coaches and consultants who offer high end paid masterminds that I've heard as well create such epic transformation for people where they work with a cohort of people over the course of a year, maybe for one or more, sometimes four in person retreats. Those can be beyond game changing. But what I'm talking about here are what I engage with what I call friend tours in pivot friends who are also mentors. I find that the advice to get a mentor, find a mentor can be kind of tricky and hard and it's also sort of awkward. I guess that one sided relationship feeling never really worked for me. But there are certainly people who have been so generous with me throughout my career. I always like to figure out how we can serve each other. And I really also want to record this episode right amidst all the book launch festivities because I don't know that this book would exist without these mastermind groups and friends and friend tours in my life. It certainly wouldn't exist in the form that it does. It would have taken me longer, I would have gotten stuck so many more times. There would have been so many things I missed that I didn't even know about mastermind groups. I really want to celebrate them. And I'm not going to name names specifically here in this episode, but they have been a tremendous source of encouragement, inspiration, reflection, morale, boosting. Critical feedback, absolutely. Critical feedback at every step of this book, all of my books and my business. The reason I want to share this with you is to give you some ideas. I really admire connectors, people who are just great at networking, connecting and forming groups. And a lot of these mastermind groups, there was one that I initiated, but several others that I was invited to by others. And yet every single one is different, but has been so valuable to my life and again, not just to my business and my bottom line, but to my heart, to my spirit, to my energy. What I love about getting groups of friends together, and specifically peers, is you get so much rich input and advice. People can reflect things that I might not see about myself or the things I'm working on. And I just love hearing their feedback and their input. And then what I love too about doing this in a small group format is that you get to learn from each other's mistakes. You get to learn from experiments they've tried that have worked and you don't know what you don't know. So it can be really inspiring to see people go around the horn and do hot seats. For example, like we have in my BFF community, when somebody volunteers to do a hot seat, it's kind of vulnerable. They're sharing something that they're challenged by or that they're thinking about a brand new idea. And when everybody weighs in with feedback, there's so much to learn. But we also learn from watching a hot seat. Even if you're not the one in the hot seat, you can learn what people are suggesting or what even someone brought up for the hot seat and how they're thinking. So I love the aspect where you don't know what you don't know. Some of the mastermind groups that I'm in are talking about high level business model people who've been in business 10, 20, 30 years and how their business model is shifting and evolving. And that stuff is fascinating to me because they've often built very different businesses or businesses that share similar themes to mine, but then seeing where they're trying to go and where they're trying to take things, they're ideas that I might never have even thought to explore. Another thing I love about mastermind groups is they are available to anyone. The ones I'm talking about are free. These do not involve an investment but they do involve initiative. So let me share a couple of the types now. One mastermind group we meet monthly for a 90 minute call and we do check ins for about 15 minutes. This is a group of four of us. We each do a hot seat if we have something that we want to talk about. 15 minutes and then we close out when we're not on our live call together we trade Marco Polos and that's really fun. There's so much juicy stuff that happens and in the asynchronous communication because that's when we can quickly pop on and say this thing happened. I would love your input or I'm struggling with this decision. What do you think? Or I'm about to launch this product. What do you think the price should be? This or that. And so the Marco Polos are as valuable as that live time. But the live time is really sweet to get to see each other on zoom and see each other's faces and be in the moment together. There's another group that I was invited to of all authors. Bigger size, more people. Each person shares something they've done that has worked. What's a strategy for writing, editing, launching a book publishing industry in general that other authors could benefit from? What I love about that one is that the advice is all over the board and you really see different things that people are interested in. Of course I shared how I was using Notion to organize book writing, or how I experimented with giving away the audiobook as the pre order bonus that I've never really seen done, at least in terms of doing it via private podcast feed. So it felt good to share. Hey, this is something I'm trying. Here's how it's working and I just love seeing how people think differently. You know, people have talked about how they generate ideas during a launch or even how it can matter what categories that they label their book, how that can affect making lists or how you show up on Amazon.

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Another form. This is not quite a mastermind group, but my friend Dorie was always so good about organizing dinners when she lived in New York. Now she's splitting her time. Shout out DC But Dory was so good about getting interesting people together for dinners. I also just met John Levy, who has a fantastic book about influence and also conducts these secret dinners. But anyone who can organize a dinner and get interesting people together, I think that's a real treat because it's nice to be invited, it's nice to go out somewhere, and it's really nice to just have a way to connect in a relatively small group format. I used to do this with entrepreneurs. I called it Picnic in the Park. And the only thing that's tricky about Picnic in the park is that in New York, certain seasons are just impossible. They're either too hot or too cold. What I liked about Picnic in the park is that everyone's mobile. You can get up and move around. There's no seating. Sometimes even dinners, if the restaurant is loud or the table is long, you know, as soon as you have more than about six people, it kind of splits off into conversation. So what I appreciate that my friend Dori would always do is Even if there's 10 or 12 people at a table, she would stop the entire separate chit chat conversation and have everybody go around and introduce themselves, maybe share one personal, one professional thing. So it's nice. What makes that a mastermind, at least veering toward that direction and not just a dinner, a a social event, is that there is an intention of sharing who you are, what are you working on and how can we help and who could you connect with. She also did a great job of sending the list of names and the links to everybody's websites before and after so that we could get to know each other even if we didn't sit next to them at the dinner. In Pivot, I talk about my, what I call brilliance barter. I mean many things by that, but one of the things is that I said I hate this question. Can I pick your brain? So whenever I would think there's a mutually beneficial person, I would offer a 30 30. Not a mutually beneficial person, but where I know we each have something we could offer each other. So 30 30, I find is so much easier to ask for. And it's more joyful. I love the giving and receiving. When I talk in our private BFF community, I say, you know, we operate on a take a penny, leave a penny philosophy that I want everybody to post and ask for feedback and I want the whole community to help make sure that nobody else's posts go unanswered. So a 3030 is nice because these are almost like one off masterminds that you could reach out to somebody who's working on something similar to you and say, hey, you want to do a 30 30? I'd love your input on XYZ these certain aspects of something and then I'm happy to help you figure out whatever this is that you're working on. So I've done 30 30s around book launching, around licensing, around pricing. The sky's the limit, it doesn't matter the topic. But what's nice is to pick somebody that's a peer of yours, even that you want to get to know better. And not that you can't just do that in a purely social way. But I think 3030 feels so good because you're actually helping each other resolve a question or a sticky challenge. That's top of mind.

I mean, I cannot have this conversation without mentioning bff. That's the private community behind this podcast. And I've had this community in different forms, shapes, names. It actually started the name was Brilliant Sparter. Then it became Momentum and now it's bff. It's been over six years. This is one of my favorite places on the Internet and I would invite you to join us if you want that camaraderie and support and community. You can learn more@itsfreetime.com BFF but joining at least one community, I think it's probably hard to be part of too many of these. Maybe some people love them and will sign up whenever they can. I like having at least one, whether it's one you create or that you enroll in. Just a way to get a little more than individual feedback, but kind of group input on something. And BFF is meant to be a place for me and for everybody in it that as we're building things, as we're thinking about launching, we can get feedback in this enclosed private space from each other, knowing we all have the best intentions and different experiences that we bring to the table. Probably the last category, this goes with 30 30s a little bit, but I've also had a lot of fun with one on one voxers and Marco Polo Voxer is purely audio only. And then Marco Polo you have the Option to be on video, I always choose to turn it off and just go audio only for the most part. What I like about Voxer and Marco Polo is that what I mentioned at the start about it being asynchronous. It's really nice to trade ideas and feedback and conversation, but whenever time allows you can use the voice notes. If you have an iPhone, you can use the voice memos feature, but those are kind of hard to listen to if the screen shuts down or you lose it while you're recording it and then they disappear if you don't hit keep. Whereas Voxer and Marco Polo, there's more of the history. One time actually mid-2020, when everything was going down, I hired a coach that was purely through Voxer. I think I was paying 4.97amonth and it came with I got to ask one question a week. So I would submit my Voxer question on the Monday and then during the week my coach would reply and she would leave sometimes a 5 minute, 10 minute, 15 minute reply. But it was so helpful. I loved it. I loved it because I've greatly benefited from live coaching in the past. But it was also so nice that this was totally asynchronous and I could reflect at the beginning of the week record something when I had fully formed the question. And every week, you know, that is part of the coaching process is getting somebody to form what is the question. The questions we ask are so powerful to what follows. And through the three months I got so much great feedback from this coach that is now in Voxer and I can go listen back. I also love that you can speed up playback. Sometimes it is nice to listen at 1x but I particularly listen to a lot of things at 2x and I just found that it was a great way to trade conversation but in a really free timey way in that asynchronous, in the moment, thoughtful way. So these are just a handful of ideas of ways that you can get this level of support again. These are some of the most rewarding friendships and professional relationships that I have. They're so helpful and I'm so grateful to every single person that I've interacted with in ways large and small. And I shared here with you to just put that question out of. Could you create something like this? Can you host a dinner? If not weekly, could you host one monthly where you live? Could you get a pop up group together? Maybe it's within a community that you're leading or among peers. That's just for three months. That's a kind of quarterly pop up and then it disappears. Maybe you want to offer this as a resource for your own coaching clients. I've also done masterminds in the past where it's more structured and we meet every three weeks and we have a 90 minute call, but they change form, you know, and these types of groups come into our life and out just at the perfect time, but you don't have to just wait for the invitation. I think something I'm trying to remind myself is how can I create the groups and New York? I don't have to tell you. During the last few years, so many people moved out of New York City. There was this big exodus of people looking for more quiet living country, other states, a lot of people moving to Florida, Texas, even moving out of California as well. And so it's been on my mind recently of, huh, going through another wave after 10 years in New York. Of how can I create community here again? Or what does the next iteration of community look like? And how can I be an initiator in getting people together? And you know, I don't necessarily have all the answers to do that in person in New York City, but it's something on my mind. I can also say that these groups where we're not in the same city always come at the perfect time. And I'm always so grateful to the person who sets them up and to everybody who shows up. So I think that you can add so much value, even if you're feeling a little hesitant about what you might bring to the table. Will people say yes? Just creating the container alone is such a tremendous gift.

As always, I would love to hear what types of mastermind groups are you part of? What peer and friend tour circles have gotten you through these last two years? Do you have any creative formats that you've participated in or you've led that I didn't share? I would love to share that with other free timers. So drop me a line, let me know. You can email hitime.com or always leave me a voice memo. Itsfreetime.com ask thank you so much for being here. Listening, everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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