Mastermind Groups: Why It Takes A Village To Raise An Adult | Jullien Gordon | TEDxWilmingtonSalon

so we've all heard the quote it takes a village to raise a child but I believe that it takes an equally strong village to raise an adult and today I want to talk to you about the power of mastermind groups I'm going to open up this talk with the talk or motto that I use to open up my mastermind groups and it goes as follows in this room is the power to change the world and me is the power to change the world if I'm going to change the world I need a world of change in me change comes naturally but it can also come intentionally until the power of goal-setting and community I can achieve anything I put my mind to everything is possible to the extent I believe it is and I want to dream wide awake as much as I do asleep and through focus action we can do it 30 days at a time this is the life dependency curve it goes from full dependency to independence from birth to death and when we come into this world there are people to clean up our poop and on our way out there are people to clean up our poop and so as we navigate life we actually have community when we're born community organically forms around a child and then on our way out community tends to form again in terms of retirement communities this being one of my favorite of all times and so we go on this journey from birth to adulthood and we become more and more independent we start tying our own shoes letting ourself into the house we just start driving a car we might go away for college then we get a job more professional and adulthood is synonymous with being independent being able to take care of yourself but my experience of adulthood has been a little bit different I've actually experienced that adulthood is the place in our life where we need the most dependence on others and this is what I call the valley of adulthood in this valley is when my parents got divorced in this valley is when I almost got divorced in this valley is where I've seen people I love and care about experience depression be overwhelmed by debt experience downsizing or diagnosis and even death in fact my wife has lost 4 family members in the past 4 months nobody teaches you how to bury your parents nobody teaches you how to remove the fog of depression yet because we're adults people assume that we're just going to be able to figure it out and it's in this valley that we actually need the most help this is my wife and I on our wedding day it's a beautiful day in a beautiful picture and she looks absolutely amazing but despite how much we loved each other and how smart we both were we came to a point in our relationship where we hit this rough patch and she nor I could figure out what was causing it it wasn't a particularly but something had changed and we were stuck we were at a stalemate and we realized that the thinking that a God has to marriage wasn't going to be enough to get us through marriage in adulthood I had also somebody who I love and care for deeply experienced alcoholism and as they were on their road to recovery they kept telling me about this organization a-a-a a-a-a-a and it was in this valley that I thought friends and family would be the ones who came through for you but instead it was a group of strangers who had become their friend and family and I got very intrigued and so I went to an open Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with a friend and I walked into that room and I saw the most diverse community I ever seen people of all ages all cultures all socio-economic classes supporting each other towards one goal which was to stay sober I left that meeting and I turned to my friend and I said I want this but in that same breath I recognized that I couldn't have it because I was not an alcoholic and that sent me on a journey to try to create a community that wasn't based on addiction or depression but a community that was based on people's aspirations and dreams so I went to look for Alcoholics Anonymous secret sauce so I could apply it to what I wanted to create and as I was doing my research I came across this research from 2002 where they did research into show that people who went to formal treatment alone only had a 25.9% 3-year after this rate but people who went to formal treatment and AAA had a 50.9% 3-year abstinence rate so participation in a a going to meetings actually doubled people's Astin his rates and here I had found the secret sauce it was the collective accountability in the community the other thing I love about AAA is that beyond just being in 100 120 thousand groups all across the world with serving over 2 million people a week is its first step and its first step is really all about admitting that there is a problem and that life has become unmanageable yet we as adults are taught to project as if we have it all figured out and the humble words of Kanye West you can't tell me nothing and we have all this programming as we mature of every man for himself survival of the fittest it's me against the world if it's gonna be it's up to me if you want something done do it yourself and my favorite of all time pick yourself up by your own bootstraps raise your hand if you've made bootstraps before so the quote in it of itself about self-reliance suggests that we actually need somebody else to help and so this is programming that we get embedded into us from when we are young and so we get into situations that are in the valley we call for one one for more information instead of calling 911 for direct help from other people we go to Google we ask Siri Siri how do I bury my parents Siri how do I get through this fog or depression Siri can't answer those questions see I found that the most powerful three words in the English language are not I love you there actually I don't know none of us all have it figured out if we all had it figured out we'd already have everything that we want and desire and there's room for growth and so when we look at our education and we had to figure out how do I know I need help we looked at our grades well in adulthood there aren't grades we have the different areas of life from personal social family health spiritual financial and if you honestly had to grade yourself in every domain of your life what would your life GPA be most of us we would not have a 4.0 and it's in this space wherever we have a grade that's lower than we expected it's an opportunity for us to ask for help from somebody who has mastered that particular area of life or from someone who's just further along without feeling insecure asking for help from a place of strength when we look at all of the world's most successful people there is a crystal clear pattern whether it's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak Bill Gates and Paul Allen jay-z and Beyonce Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen every success story in the entire world involves other people there is no autobiography written on the face of the earth where the author is the only character in that story this whole notion that it's lonely at the top is absolutely not true because it is not lonely at the top all the world's most successful people move in packs and moves in teams but yet as we become adults we try to do it all on our own our contemporary Mark Zuckerberg who was a genius in his own right and could have got very far off of his own intellect said this in a recent speech no person knows how to deal with everything find the team of people or friends or family and notice that he says team first not friends or family that's what's really going to get you through you don't have to be superhuman you just have to kind of keep going and not do it all alone find people who share your passion so I started thinking about my village the village that is part of me from the age of 18 until now and help me become a man and I started putting all their pictures into this collage that you see here and all honesty I would not be Who I am or where I am today without these people I don't attribute part of my success to these individuals I actually attribute a majority of my success to these individuals who have poured into me in different ways and different capacities at different moments in my life you see when my wife and I were going through our tough times it was these specific people who I was able to call on who gave me advice who prayed and held space for me and just listened which helped me see myself see my wife see love see marriage through a different lens it exposed me to new thoughts that I can now take to the table and it's what allowed my wife and I have bounced back to a place of joy and we still have a lot of work to do but it was because of these people that we are still together today and my wife and I are in the process of building our second marriage not legally but symbolically and is why we're to reading wings now because we had to release our first marriage we had outgrown it and we had to create a new one I started my company on January 9 2009 the absolute worst time in the in the last 67 years of the sp500 I didn't know that then and though I went to one of the top business schools in the country I'll be honest with you I didn't know what I was doing and what helped me get through this wave get through this time of scarcity we're all these people in my village all of these people supported me through volunteering through making referrals who's giving me feedback and there were some people I even had to pay for in terms of coaches consultants or contractors these are the people that supported me to be even more specific these are the people who showed up to my living room on November 22nd 2008 before I quit my job to experience a full-day workshop that I was doing on helping them find their life purpose and they gave me powerful feedback from that experience and that is what literally set my career on the trajectory that it is today this is the power of community so I recognize that not everybody has this village that organically formed around me in my adulthood and that is the question that wakes me up every single day my vision is to create a world where everyone has a team and this is why I created masterminds org so that people could find a team and be part of a team that supports them and creating the life that they ultimately want so I've been creating mastermind groups all over the world this is Jimmy Jays in Alberta Canada Elena in Detroit Michigan Salome in Brooklyn Fatima and Amsterdam and Stephen in Minneapolis these are just some of the pictures and this is not a Getty image this is an actual group this is one of the longest-running groups masterminds in the community and when I look at this picture I see that a a meeting I see diversity I see people of all different cultures in all different ages and what's even more special to me is this young girl sitting on her father's lap experiencing her parents not trying to just figure it out on their own but actually getting support and help from other people who simply want what they want for themselves so what is a mastermind group a lot of people may have heard of the word and it seems like this esoteric thing or this space that only already that's what people are invited to and that's not the case similar to a a mastermind has three criteria which is it's a group of people who meet consistently there's a space where an individual can step in the middle of the group and share a struggle and get support or coaching from the community or they can step in and share a successful that everybody can learn and it's also a space where everyone gives and receives there's no Google and a mountain in a mastermind where everybody's just bowing at their feet this is a space where everyone contributes equally the concept comes from Napoleon Hill and his book Think and Grow Rich where he talks about the mastermind principle and we've all experienced masterminds in different ways if you've ever heard the Pope whenever two or more gathered or two heads is better than one or two go fast go alone go far go together all those speak to the power of masterminds and the truth is that you've already probably been part of a mastermind you've ever been part of a Bible study or a book club or sister circle or a men's group or accountability group all of these are essentially masterminds and then I the favorite quote that I have from Jack bowling he adds that a mastermind group as a space where people believe for each other things which each alone may find difficult to conceive or believe for him or herself we've all had that moment in our life where we were caught up in self-doubt and had it not been for someone else around us believing for us when we didn't have belief in ourselves we would have stopped dead in our tracks but because they believed in us and for us we were able to overcome and make it through and so I went on and started creating mastermind groups all over the country and the world and I started joining mastermind groups and the upper left is me at a mastermind I'm the youngest person in that room I am the only African American in that room and as a result of being there I was able to soak up all the wisdom and experience of people who were 10 years 20 years even 30 years ahead of me in the particular space that I was masterminding around this is the power of maximize they can accelerate your success and your transformation now a lot of people will say Julian I have great friends and family I already have people who believe in me why do I need a mastermind well here's the thing a mastermind isn't about surrounding yourself with people who think just like you like friends and family because that's likely where you got most of your thoughts from anyway it's about surrounding yourself with people who think differently so you're exposed to new thoughts about love about marriage about money about business about life so that you can actually expand your awareness of what's actually possible for you we also have to recognize that love is layered and especially when friends or family have their lives intertwined with ours when we decide to take a road that's less traveled what tends to happen is that we tell them for some of you it may have been changing your major in college or leaving a job that everybody else thought was good for your purpose and what comes up for people is this thick layer of fear this thick layer of fear and really that's just love being masked because they want you to be safe but deep down below that layer of fear people around us simply want us to be happy and to have what's best for us but imagine a space where you could go where there was no thick layer of fear where people simply believed for you that which you want for yourself that's what a mastermind is really all about and I found that the easiest way to access that is through a coach or through a team now when people try to start masterminds they typically think about their friends and in this age of social networking we tend to put all of our friends in the same bucket right imagine if Facebook had an acquaintance button things we could awkward pretty quickly right but we literally have two types of friends there are our social friends and our successful friends our social friends are the people who take you out to parties they take you out on weekends they take you out to brunch they take you out on nice trips and you need your social friends right life is supposed to be fun but you're successful friends are the people who take you out of your comfort zone these are the people who push you to your highest level and it's very rare to find somebody who's both a social and successful friend this is a person who would party with you till 3:00 a.m. on Saturday and still wake you up at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday to work on that business plan and so when you look at your network a lot of people have a lot of social friends but we don't have as many successful friends and as the late great Jim Rohn said you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with so if you look at your network and you don't have that many successful friends around you one of the ways to access a mastermind is through having a coach remember it says whenever two or more gathered or two heads is better than one does have to be a whole group of people and when I think about my favorite movies of all time from the Matrix Malcolm X a Karate Kid there was always this character whether it's mr. Miyagi Murphy's or brother Baines who was holding space for the main character and believing for them that which they could not believe in themselves yet and that's what a coach does a coach literally compress his time and expands your awareness of what's possible for you in your life I'm a huge LeBron James fan and he often times he is compared to Kobe Bryant in Michael Jordan and what people fail to recognize is that Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan literally had the best coach in NBA history LeBron James has taken all rookie coaches to the NBA Finals if LeBron James had Phil Jackson or Gregg Popovich as his coach he would probably have 10 NBA championships by now this is the power of a coach and so how did I build my village one I accepted that I did not know everything and that opened me up to receiving help too I invited my successful friends to mastermind with me around very specific areas in my life and then I found mentors or hired coaches that would support me as well so a lot of people say that success is just a matter of time if you work hard enough you get enough education one day you'll be successful and while those are important I found that success is really a matter of team we are a tribal people and so if you want to transform your life find your tribe or create it thank you so much [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 17,159

Rating: 4.9726028 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life, Achievement, Career, Community, Entrepreneurship, Friendship, Goal-setting, Personal growth, Self improvement, Self-help, Success

Id: vuFfMLC5XFE

Length: 18min 13sec (1093 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2017