Finding the Right Frequency

Guest Contributor: Michelle Rumney
Michelle's Posts - Michelle's Blog


Recently, we started an experiment regarding the scope of our mastermind group. We are basing much of the content of our weekly meetings around the ideas raised in Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich". Hill recommends following a 6-step plan of sustained action to achieve your Burning Desire, and so far all of us have failed in our personal attempts to follow this advice.

So, we decided as a group to foster action by adding a weekly Power Morning to our schedule. The principle seems simple enough - each week those of us who can spare a few hours meet up to generously give our time and individual skills to help a specific member of the group to take action towards their personal business goals. The member in question is required to do a little pre-planning on this of course, so that on the day they can confidently direct the rest of us to make best use of our time and energies. The ideal scenario is that we have an action-packed, dynamic morning, creatively and harmoniously drawing on each others' talents propelling us forward on our quests...

However, in practice, it isn't quite working out as we'd all imagined. The first participant overslept (very uncharacteristic of her) and was ruffled and unprepared when the mastermind team arrived at her studio raring to go. The morning was consequently a bit disorganised and much less productive than it could have been, leaving the group feeling a bit flat. The second session was organised and productive, but it was a little unclear to the group exactly what purpose their actions served, so they questioned the value of contributing their precious time. And the third session was ambitious, in that the participant planned everyone's individual tasks down to the letter, except that the tasks more suitable for a week of action rather than a few hours, so the general feeling was of disappointment or frustration of being asked to do too much and not being able to complete what was started.

Although the Power Mornings from the group's point of view are focused on giving generously and gratefully, rather than what we can get out of them, and as such are based on a worthy ethos, my intuition tells me that in this case the Power Mornings will have to go. Meeting up twice a week with the same particular group is, it turns out, a huge time commitment that could turn into a chore rather than something we all look forward to. And becoming more directly involved in each other's businesses changes the dynamics of the actual mastermind session itself - it makes the process more personal and subjective; it risks losing the more objective and constructively-critical viewpoints we started out with that are so valuable when exchanging ideas and coaching members to find solutions and ways forward.

Achieving the right frequency for your group might take a little experimentation to find out what works, but getting the balance right is crucial if the group is to survive and continue to strengthen and develop.