LEVEL UP! Turning Trauma Into Massive Growth and The Power of Mastermind Groups
Aloha, Problem Solvers!
We encourage all of us here at The Rationalist Society to have a small “mastermind” group of close friends at home and talk to them often.
Even just one phone call once a week is beneficial. If you have the courage to ask one or more friends to form an alliance with you, we believe you will see amazing results. If you don't already have a mastermind group, let’s challenge each other to try it. Like a little experiment. (Remember, results matter most).
We have found that the most important thing with any mastermind group is to honestly self-evaluate, and to also be honest with each other. Go over goals and ideas, set objectives. Basically, act as each other’s coaches during these discussions. Offer advice. Discuss progress or obstacles. Read some of the same books. Listen to some of the same podcasts. Suggest new ones to each other. Share ideas. And most importantly, problem solve your lives, together. Learn, together.
It is better that you pick someone who will be a good coach for you - and who you will be a good coach for - rather than pick someone who is just a friend but has no interest in a relationship like this.
This is more than a standard friendship.
It is a growth mindset relationship, where you only succeed if the person you are sharing ideas with and coaching with also succeeds. That means that you should both be better as a result of the relationship. That’s the goal.
The following conversation happened the other day, between two “think tank” coaches, and they wanted to share it (paraphrased) as a learing tool for all of us.
Dee:
Hey man, I got some good news.
RJ:
Oh yeah?
Dee:
Yeah. What I’ve been doing lately has really been working for me. As you know I have been feeling really down the last few months. It was a dark time for me. But ever since we’ve been talking I’ve been feeling better every week. I think I finally found a way out of the darkness. I’m feeling like myself again.
RJ:
Hell yeah. That's awesome. How did you do it? What are you doing different?
Dee:
Well first, strategizing with you… Also - and it sounds weird - but I started turning life into a game. If I woke up feeling depressed or whatever, the task of just getting out of bed would be so difficult. So… Now I look at that difficult task differently. I look now at it as if I completed the task, I would level up.
RJ:
Level Up?
Dee:
Yeah. You know. Like in a video game.
RJ:
Interesting.
Dee:
Got something challenging to do? Done. Level up. But then I expanded it. I started playing the game on the days I felt good too, instead of just the days I felt down. I would see a difficult task, and rather than shy away from it I would look at it like it was a final boss at the end of a video game. If I beat the boss - or in this case completed the mission in my real life - I would level up. The challenges in my life started becoming fun.
RJ:
How’d that go?
Dee:
Honestly? I had the best week I’ve had in months. Maybe years.
After this conversation, RJ decided to also give the technique a try, turning life into a game. Guess what? It worked again.
Treating life like a game seemed to be showing tangible, repeatable results. Was it just a coincidence? Or did making goals in real life - like you would find in video games - really have the potential to help people?
Later on, one of our writers pointed out a similar scenario they had remembered.
A woman named Jane McGonical had given a Ted Talk a while back about how using game theory in real life had caused her to be able to overcome horrible suicidal thoughts. She played a game she invented to heal herself called “Super Better.” (great name!) It also worked.
The takeaway here?
If games like this can save people from suicide, or lift people up in any way at all, then we should really be exploring and unpacking this idea more.
Imagine a swarm of game designers working together to make a hybrid virtual reality game like this as a way to help humans - not only to overcome things like depression - but also to have positive tangible results and growth in their real world lives.
With the highest of praise we would like to recommend listening to Jane McGonical here tell her story here about how she dealt with trauma. Instead of ending up stuck only with the disorder that trauma often brings, Jane grew immensely from her experience and went through what is called PTG - Post Traumatic Growth.
And here is the real kicker: If you go through something traumatic, you have a shot at having either or PTG or PTSD (or both). But if you know that you could possibly grow from the trauma - if you understand both possible outcomes as you are going through all of it - it turns out that you are much more likely to not fall completely into PTSD, and instead find the benefits also found in trauma and experience massive personal growth.
It seems like society could benefit if we explored this more too.
Thank you to the Problem Solvers here who shared their personal story for this article (we masked their identity).
Enjoy these two videos. First is a clip from Mason, who speaks these courageous words you are about to hear after losing his family to a tragic accident, including children.
And then Jane’s masterpiece of a Ted Talk about “Super Better” right after.
Let’s level up, together!
Thanks for reading!
Clip of Mason (1 min):
Clip of Jane (19 min Ted Talk):
As always the entire purpose of The Rationalist is to connect with other solutions-minded results-driven people like yourself! We strive to be a Society of Problem Solvers, and if you align with that we are happy that you’ve joined us. For over 3 billion years on this planet there were only single-celled organisms. Then one day they somehow learned to work together and make complex multi-celled creatures like you and me. Right now we are like those single-celled organisms. Our next evolution is finding how to work together, better… like we wrote about here.
#DecentralizeEverything #Transparency #transparentsystems
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Great solution. Have been seeking this for 18 plus months. Since this s a group of problem solvers, what is the solution for FINDING just one (preferably more) friend in ones area to engage with? I have so many ideas for building a life and a community outside Agenda21...but more of us noncompliance folks than not have lost access to all friends and family and neighbors over the past two years and staying offline for our safety makes it a confounding challenge to identify and build new relationships with other nonGMO humans to mutually support ones efforts at survival. Where to look and how to vett?
This is probably going to sound like nitpicking; perhaps it is. I only practiced psychiatry for a short period in Germany, and that was nearly forty years ago.
1. There is nothing preventing one from having PTSD and PTG simultaneously. When I worked as a top-tier global management consultant I told my clients that the only thing more dangerous than growth was bankruptcy. Growth is high stress, even when you have a well-developed plan.
2. Those subjected to the highest stress are serial entrepreneurs. As we all know, there are few successful serial entrepreneurs. Most wind up suffering repeated business failures. For reasons I don't fully understand, serial entrepreneurs tend to be inspiring or impossible to work with, or both. I would point out that both Warren Buffet and Donald Trump were successful serial entrepreneurs, a rara avis of the first order.
3. At one point in my career I was doing a lot of work with start-ups on assembling a Board of Advisors. I told them that diversity on the Board is the most important quality. The usual response was, "I have a black/Hispanic/Asian on the Board." That's not diversity. They can all be purple Martian females if they have a diversity of experience sets. Otherwise, the dreaded "Group Think" sets in.
4. A swarm of game developers might sound appealing, but I remind you that the camel is a horse assembled by a committee.