Hello fuzzbutts!
So I’ve been streaming for a while now and I feel like I might have plateaued a little bit. I’m not trying to turn my streams into a full-time gig and replace my career (I like my career) but I do want to continue to improve and grow the channel. One of the things I’ve been curious about this entire time is the concept of masterminds. I normally see them for people who run businesses and want to advance to the next level but I figured “Why not for streaming too?” So I invited a couple of streamer friends who come from different backgrounds and content creation to sit together and talk out our feelings and get/give some advice.
I’ve never hosted (or attended) a mastermind before so I wanted to just keep it simple. I wrote up my own prompts of questions I needed to ask myself and get thinking. I wrote up my own answers for each of them and sent them to the invitees as examples of questions to think about and how to approach the ideas. Did I notice anything in the analytics about how many people were watching and was there a reason the numbers were high or low? What is something I struggle with and would like to improve? What’s something I would like to add into my streams? Is there anything in the back end (tech, tools, etc) that I could use to improve the way the streams go? Questions like those.
It was tricky to schedule us all together (Different timezones) but we did finally meet up. We hopped into a voice call and I led the way, discussing my stream first along with the questions and ideas I had. I received a ton of wonderful feedback and even better ideas that I could try to implement.
We then picked the next person and discussed their work and it was so enlightening to hear about the things they struggle with that I would never have guessed to be a problem for them. We talked it out and came up with more ideas on how to address their issues and even went on discussions and tangents that also led to more interesting insights.
By the time we had to wrap up (I was about to go live when we ended), we had clocked in almost 4 hours and probably could have gone another 4 hours talking shop. I did my best to lead the group through the prompts and discussions but also let ourselves go on tangents since they also led to nuggets of gold. There were maybe only a couple of times I had to reel in the conversation.
Everyone, at the end, was very pleased with what we had all talked about and came away with some valuable ideas on how to move up to the next level. I wrote down all the notes and action items for each of us and posted it so they could keep it handy and try to implement something in the coming month. As much as I loved it and would adore having another discussion this coming weekend again, I think it’s important to let the ideas digest and give ourselves a chance to actually try them out so that’s why we won’t do it again for a month.
That being said, I did leave the door open that if we ever wanted a non-mastermind chat, it’d be a fun time to just talk, rant, and just have a more formless talk.
Overall, I’m really happy with the group and it wasn’t even too hard to get started (Scheduling a time for us to get together was probably the hardest part). The important thing is to make sure you prepare ahead of time and be ready with follow up questions to pin down the tasks that need to be accomplished. Contributing to others and receiving their advice is a major part of any mastermind group.
I think 3 of us was plenty for a meeting like this as we get the balls rolling and I learn a bit more about how to host these. It was still about 4 hours of good discussion and it would have been much longer if I had 1 or 2 more people. I’m happy with the size of our group and time will see if anything changes.
So yeah! If you have something you want to take to the next level and could use some advice, it wouldn’t hurt to gather a couple more people, set a framework for the discussion, and see what you all have to say!