The Impact of Personal Sharing on Business Performance
In this solo episode of the Mastermind Mastery podcast, host Tina Corner Stolz—founder of Elixir Council and author of Your Seat at the Table—explores how personal sharing influences the effectiveness of peer advisory councils (PACs). She begins by distinguishing “personal” from “business” and argues that members are whole people; separating the two creates a fragmented view that hampers decision‑making. Stolz explains that incorporating personal context—health status, family matters, personal goals, fears, and regrets—boosts vulnerability, trust, and risk awareness, leading to better business insights. She shares a concrete anecdote about a member who missed a blood‑pressure medication, suffered a stroke, and missed a year of group participation, illustrating the cost of ignoring personal health. Practical techniques are offered: permission‑granting, opening questions, personal ranking scales, regular health check‑ins, monthly personal updates, and integrating personal goals into quarterly achievement sessions. She advises facilitators to lead by example, educate members on the purpose of personal sharing, and balance privacy with openness. The episode concludes with key takeaways—decide the level of personal sharing, model it, encourage it, and educate on its value—plus a call to action to apply these practices in listeners’ own groups.
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Hello and welcome to Mastermind Mastery, the podcast for professionals who want to create and run successful peer advisory councils, or as we call them, PACs for short, or they're also known as peer groups or business mastermind groups. I'm your host, Tina Corner Stolz, founder of Elixir Council, where I've been in the industry running groups since 2005 and now help those like you with education, certification, and support wanting to do the same. At one time, I ran 10 groups, nearly 100 members, and sold my groups For a Good Multiple and recently released my second book, Your Seat at the Table: How to Create and Run Your Own Peer Advisory Councils, published by Forbes, and grateful to you that it's an Amazon bestseller. I invite you to join each week where we share strategies and techniques to successfully launch and become a master of running your PACTs. You'll hear insights, perspectives, dos and don'ts, learn from my and my guests' mistakes, successes, and get the inside track to key takeaways. Each time we have a guest, we'll be having a bit of fun. So are you ready? Let's get going and dive into today's episode.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Mastermind Mastery. I'm Tina Corner Stolz, your host, and today's topic is how much personal do you bring into the meetings? So when you think about personal, the personal lives of your members and then their business lives. Typically, right, when someone becomes part of a group, they think this is how it's going to help my business. But how does personal play into it and how much personal do you bring, if any at all, into it? Because, you know, there's this saying, it's personal, it's just, you know, it's not personal. Let me get the saying right. It's not personal, it's just business. Well, running peer advisory councils, they are personal. So today's episode, you're going to have some key takeaways. Understand how personal impacts business. How much is it good inside your group meetings? Techniques to get your members to see the whole picture. And overall, why does it matter? So how much— we're going to dive right into it right now. How much is Is it okay for personal to be part of a discussion in a PAC meeting, peer advisory council meeting? It is controversial. I can tell you I will talk to numerous professionals running groups and get lots of different answers. Some will say not at all. Some say it should not be allowed, and others will go to extremes to bring in a lot of personal. This goes back to what's the right answer. It's definitely a personal preference between you and your members. I will tell you that. It's very much that. But what I will tell you, that while it's a personal choice, it should not be zero. And why is that? I had someone illustrate this once to me. And so if you can visualize looking at yourself in the mirror, here's this whole person right there in the mirror. And if you don't allow personal to be incorporated into your meetings, then basically what you're saying to that person that you're seeing in the mirror is split yourself down the middle, and the right side is your business side, and the left side is your personal side. And the only side that you're taking to the meeting is your right side, the business side. You're leaving the personal outside the door, at home, in the car, whatever it is, and only half of that person is really in the meeting. They aren't separate. You can't separate the personal impacts that happen to an individual, in this case the business owner, the leader, the CEO, the president, etc., separately from their business because we don't operate that way. We're a whole person, right? So the group can't just deal with this right half and be effective at it. As a member, you can't really just deal with this right half and be effective. It's the whole piece. So the personal side, which we probably should define, that is your hat of you, the individual. Not the hat of I'm the business owner and this is my company or companies, but over here, here's me and how I show up within that, right? And therefore, that's why you can't ignore the personal side. It's the whole. Now, we all know many members do not like to talk about personal. They're not very vulnerable on that scale. They're low on the vulnerability scale because they are extremely private. Everybody has their level of privacy, and it will be very hard to get some people to rope in anything personal that really are very private. And then it will be, you know, you'll know there are some members that just will talk about everything personal and private that really isn't private because they talk about it. That many will believe is just too much TMI, too much information, and there will be that balance. Well, their business is private too, and personally knowing situations is helpful to the overall picture to explain the benefits of roping in the personal, right? So the benefits such as addressed in the COP, so challenge, opportunity, problem, or idea, in a holistic manner is the ultimate outcome. It's just not the business-only side, right? Because it might not work and be addressed well on the business challenges if you're not understanding how the owner is showing up personally. So adding a personal component to your meetings will increase the level of vulnerability and trust and openness in your group though, because when people reveal things personally, they feel like you kind of let them into your inner circle by sharing something personal, regardless of how simple is, like how many children you have, um, to something very intimate, which is maybe a personal tragedy, tragedy, or a regret that you have personally. But it impacts how you think and how you run your business. So the one rule of thumb I kind of use about personal and business is talking with your group openly about this and asking them As a member, there are things personally that if the group knew about you would help them give you better insights, perspective, advice, and support. And whatever those are, feel comfortable sharing those. It will only increase your— right? Value that you get out of being a member. It will only increase what you can take out of the conversations that you have. It will only increase the effectiveness of your decision-making. It will only increase risk management because if we know this about you, it will help us understand what some of your blind spots are, your tendencies, your values, all of those kinds of things. So the benefits are tremendous if there's at least a certain amount of personal understood by everybody that is in your group. But how do you do this? Well, you can instill it by explicitly giving permission to include personal, you know, and, and encouraging them to share it. And there's a lot of different ways to do that. For example, when you open up and, you know, many of you that we talked about, my transition, which is how it is you open up a meeting, get everybody engaged really, really quickly for them to be present, et cetera. But you can include a personal question or ranking and not just business only. So a lot of our licensed partners do that. When they open up, they have the members rank on a scale, could be 1 to 5, 1 to 10, or it could be a word, describe a word about how you are personally. In addition to business, in addition to health, and health is a very interesting point I want to make in that if you do not do this today, asking your members how things are going regarding their health is just flat out good business. And it is because if the CEO, the business owner, the leader, etc., they remember has health issues or they're not attending to health issues, it impacts the business. Now, that's kind of logical. It's a little bit intuitive. But I can tell you is that so many people have health issues that they are trying to manage around and run the business. And if they ignore them is a huge issue in itself. An example that to this day I regret in running a meeting where, um, one of the members had health issue, high blood pressure. We knew this. So first of all, we knew this because we asked how everybody's health is. Like, that was part of one of the things I would ask. I would usually ask it like every other month, the health question. I didn't necessarily ask it every single month, but it is kind of good to ask every month, I will say. And it's also especially interesting to track it as well and show that tracking at the end of the year, what people's answers were to their health, because it can be equated to different moments in time, um, on why their health might have gone down. Maybe it was a stressful moment, they were overeating, whatever it could be. But this particular month asked the health question, and she answered with, she was doing okay, but she hadn't gotten to the pharmacy to get her high blood pressure medicine, and she needed to do that, but she was so busy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right, so in the meeting there was like, you know, you have to. They were like, Chris, you have to get that, that medicine, right? You know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, fast forward. You know what happened, right? She didn't do it. As a result, she had a stroke. As a result, she was gone out of the group for over a year because of recovery was so long. And then coming back to the group was extremely difficult for her. I will tell you, not only myself, but every one of her peers regrets they didn't follow through and hold her accountable to going to the pharmacy. And that is the benefit of ensuring health. Now you may think, well, that's not a benefit because that was a regret. My point is, is that by them sharing health, there's an opportunity for them to support each other on that health journey or even that personal journey. And it will bond your groups together even more so when they see the whole person, right? Intuitively, you know that because you share experiences, you share where you can help each other. Like, I've had that issue too. This is what I did. And it takes a whole new level of conversation because then when everybody sees each other before the meeting or during breaks and they're chatting, they can always ask, hey, how's your kid doing at so-and-so college? And how is this going with your husband, with that venture. And it just makes for truly an all-encompassing experience. The member experience is heightened when you add the personal component into it. So you can specifically ask for personal updates. That's another way. It's like, you know what, this month in giving updates, give a personal update, or every month, personal update. On how things are going. And particularly, um, you can ask in regards to when they do deep dives on the business and making sure that you have a section personally about what their goals are, what is important to them personally. Um, when they set goals for the year, include personal in addition to business. And so therefore, when they give an update at the end of the year, how did it go, they're talking about personal and business. And that works really, really well because the bottom line is there is no work-life balance. It's work-life integration, right? And having that integration and having the ability to talk about that and having particularly new members when they do their introductions, having them talk a little bit about their personal, like what brings them joy, what's their biggest regret personally, most proud of personally, even ask what's What's the biggest personal challenge, or what's one thing that the group needs to know about them that personally will help in them understanding how they run the business? What's their biggest fear regarding their life? What's one thing personally needs to be improved on so it doesn't impact the business? You get the idea. Those are all good things that you need to know about your members as well. Whether you get that in your coaching sessions if you're doing those in between, or if you're doing in what we call quarterly achievement sessions, QASs, or if you don't do any of that and you just do a pure meeting, then it's how you touch base with them in between, or the coffee or the social that you have, etc. So personal incorporating into your meetings is okay. It's somewhat of a necessity. Because when people understand somebody's background personally, it helps them give better insights for the best business decisions and support. That is the whole essence of my being in a group. So key takeaways: decide how much personal you initiate, you lead by example, encourage as the opportunity arises, especially for those that are not so warm and fuzzy, Okay, that you can expand on personally. So when there's a conversation happening, maybe, you know, let it go, encourage it, educate your members on why you're asking about personal, that this just isn't fluff, that there is a reason behind it, the importance of sharing. To educate your members about that, even those that aren't so warm and fuzzy will understand there is a why. And there is a why by incorporating personal in. And I hope today's episode, it causes you to think about how can you do a better job of it, incorporating it, and how much do your members really know about each other personally, and what is really important for them to know about each other personally that will make their experience even heightened by being in your group. Thanks again, everyone, for another episode and joining me, um, this week. And until next week, as you know, go make it happen.
Hey, moderators of peer groups, thank you for listening to today's episode. To get access to show notes and exclusive content and resources, go to TinaCornerStolz.com or www.ellxcounsel.com, where you can also become part of our online exclusive community, attend our academy where there are over 13 modules of how to create and run a successful peer advisory group, mastermind group, as well as free resources, white papers, checklists, and more. And you can even contact me there as well. With this episode episode resonates with you and you know someone who can also benefit from listening, please share with them by taking a screenshot or post it on your social media. I also love reviews and appreciate hearing from all of you, all of you who are doing this wonderful work of running peer groups. Please tune in next week for the next episode of Mastermind Mastery, and I will close by sharing something my mentor did after every learning moment with someone he connected with. He reached into his pocket and he shared a shiny pebble with anyone he passed knowledge to and asked them to forward that pebble knowledge on. Now I encourage you to pass on a pebble, the takeaways you learned today, to either your existing groups or fellow peers. Now go make it happen.
