Mastermind groups offer a combination of brainstorming, education, peer accountability and support to sharpen your business and personal skills. A mastermind group helps you and your mastermind group members achieve success. Members challenge each other to set strong goals, and more importantly, to accomplish them.
The mastermind group process focuses on one thing: helping you make the changes you want to make in your life. First, you create a goal, a vision for how things will be in the future. Then, with the help of the other members, you design a step-by-step plan to achieve your goals. The group helps you with creative ideas and wise decision-making. Then, as you begin to implement your plan, you bring both success stories and problems to the group. Success stories are applauded (loudly!), and problems are solved through peer brainstorming and collective, creative thinking.
Each meeting has a mastermind group agenda so that conversations stay highly-focused. The facilitator is tasked with making sure that conversations are deep and balanced, and that all mastermind group meeting agenda items are covered in the time allotted.
The popularity of mastermind groups is growing worldwide, as people like you are creating success through brainstorming with your peers, solving problems, generating creative ideas, designing strong action plans, and holding each other accountable.
Mastermind groups are relatively new to most people, even though Napoleon Hill created the concept around 75 years ago with his book, Think and Grow Rich. A mastermind group is designed to help you navigate through challenges using the collective intelligence of others.
How does a mastermind work? A group of smart people meet weekly, monthly, daily even if it makes sense, to tackle challenges and problems together. They lean on each other, give advice, share connections and do business with each other when appropriate. It's very much peer-to-peer mentoring and if you are lucky enough to get invited to one, you will most likely see a marked change in yourself and your business.
1. You'll be part of an exclusive community. Joining a mastermind typically involves you being invited by the members or going through an application process. The other members need you just as much as you need them, so quality of experience and knowledge is crucial to all involved.
2. Advisement. Once you are involved in a mastermind, that feeling of "being alone" while running your business is gone. The other members of the group turn into business advisors of sorts and vice versa.
4. Extend your network. Joining a mastermind expands your network exponentially and rapidly. If you are in business, you know how important your network is. By joining a mastermind, you instantly add to your network and typically gain the networks of those in the group with you.
5. New learning. Everyone in the mastermind is unique in skill, experience and connections. By interacting and sharing your challenges, it's almost certain that someone in your mastermind will have a solution for you and you may also be able to offer a solution, connection or tactic to help another in the group.
6. Cross-promotion. When you join a mastermind, you will most likely find ways to help each other by utilizing cross promotion. Finding ways to help each other through promoting to your respective networks.
Today, I'm happy to share a guest post by my dear friend Jaime Tardy from Eventual Millionaire. Jaime is a business coach who is also a member of one of the mastermind groups that I'm in! She has interviewed over 70 millionaires and dissects why successful people are successful. One common theme throughout most of her interviews is the use of a mastermind group or a mentor.
Jaime fills in all the gaps that were missing in my previous posts about mastermind groups and mentorship, including downloadables for the structure of a meeting and a worksheet to help you find group members. Enjoy!
I always knew mastermind groups and mentors were an important part in becoming successful no mater what industry you were in. It became truly apparent when I started to interview millionaires. I've interviewed over 70 millionaires and over and over it came up again that a key mentor or a mastermind group helped their success exponentially.
So today, I want to break down the process. I want you to read this whole article and then go get your own mentor or mastermind group (or both!). If you don't plan on doing that, then don't waste your time reading this article.
Here is one example of how a mastermind group helped millionaire Tim Hamilton, owner of Astonished Designs. He was very open in his interview and explained the huge amount of fear he experienced as a business owner. One of the catalysts that help him get past his fear was his mastermind group.
Finding a mentor is somewhat similar to getting a mastermind group, except that you don't need to formally ask them to be a mentor. Many times you start to build relationships with people in such a way that you could call them a mentor, but neither one of you officially asked!
To do that, we need to be more intentional. We need to find a group of like-minded peers and set aside time on a regular basis for these kinds of conversations. People in other fields, like in the business world, call these groups masterminds. Now the mastermind model is making its way into education.
We all struggle to find time to get our regular tasks done, and setting aside even more for something like a mastermind may seem out of the question for you, but this is something that will definitely pay you back tenfold. We put a lot of focus on building relationships with and between our students, but we need those relationships with each other, too. Participating in an educational mastermind may be the most valuable professional development step you take; why not take it now?
Today, mastermind groups offer up a chance to learn from the decades-long successes and experience of their founders, who are more than willing to help put theory into practice for those that have a sense of urgency to take massive action and who are able to pony up a hefty sum. And by hefty sum, I don't say that lightly. Some of the world's best masterminds can run upwards of six figures. Yes, six figures. That's a hard number to swallow for most.
Before diving further into a discussion about the utility found in these exclusive groups of like-minded entrepreneurs and brilliant marketers, it's important to understand what a mastermind group is and what it isn't. Masterminds, for all intents and purposes, are peer-to-peer gatherings that are often helmed by thought-leaders and industry titans.
In the entrepreneurial world, some of the best mastermind groups are led by individuals who've achieved outlandish results and wildly-unfathomable levels of success. These are people like multiple New York Times bestselling author Dean Graziosi, an individual who has done upwards of $1 billion in sales with his brands and companies, but who came from such humble beginnings. Growing up in a trailer park, Graziosi wasn't blessed with a silver spoon in his mouth.
The truth? Thoughts are things. Graziosi knows this just as much as someone like Frank Kern, Roland Frasier, Joe Polish or any other number of mastermind leaders also know. In fact, Kern, who's arguably one of the most influential online marketers of our generation, and one of the most successful business coaches in the world, overcame his own demons, along with a severe struggle with denial, frustration and fear.
Yet, the beauty of masterminds lives in their ability to help its members learn from the collective experience of the group. Not only do the influential leaders help to guide those that are involved, but so do fellow members, who've also struggled and overcome things that other members might be going through at that very moment. It's a rare opportunity for networking and getting one-on-one help at the highest level with the exact people who can deliver the fastest and most proven systems.
Your own trial and error is the old way to succeed and masterminds seem to be eclipsing that at record speed. In fact, many of the leaders of the most successful of these groups have themselves invested heavily in masterminds before ever starting their own. And for good reason. They offer tremendous results. And some mastermind leaders, like Graziosi, Polish and Kern have invested upwards of a million dollars or more over the course of a decade because they realized that it provided a huge platform for growth.
Mastermind groups are a dime a dozen these days. They seem to have sprouted up all over the place. But, not all of these groups are created equally. While some newcomers to the entrepreneurial world have taken the plunge into creating their own masterminds, not all of them are effective. So, how do you go about finding the right group to fit your needs?
That really depends on where you are in business and in life. Some of the best groups are run by the most well-respected titans of industry. But, if you don't have the financial wherewithal to join a group like that, then you could simply create your own. Just find really smart people that are playing the game at a higher level. That's what it takes. But don't simply join a group where you're the smartest person in the room. Rather, join a mastermind where everyone is getting smarter together.
In my conversation with Graziosi, what I came to realize was that people seek out masterminds because they're looking for revolutionary change. They're looking to accomplish monumental goals and to take things to the next level. And Graziosi distills down any change into four parts. Address each of the four parts and you can achieve revolutionary results in any area of your life or business.
No change, whether it be in a mastermind group or on your own, is possible without knowing why you want what you want on the deepest level possible. Your "why" can be more powerful than you can imagine when it comes from your heart and it can be the driving force behind hard days and disappointments. Get clear on why you want something and be sure that it's not just something superficial.
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