ParTecK 2023 Mastermind Resources

Derrick:

This part is just giving a little bit of an overview of what we're inviting you into, before we do the ceremonial opener and actually go into the mastermind meeting structure.

So we call this a mastermind, but I don't know if how many of you have participated in masterminds. I think the form can vary quite a bit. We have a story arc to the meeting that's fairly well defined, but it's possible that it could change depending on how this goes. So think of this as a little pilot for this kind of meeting structure that may continue, or maybe we'll tweak it as we go. The real intent, as Carissa mentioned, the real why behind having this meeting structure is to try to create a space where we can practice the skills and capacities and intention setting around bringing deep attention into your grant projects, in whatever the way that looks for you.

So…with any mastermind, you're trying to master something. And I guess you could say we're practicing and seeking to not necessarily master the skills because we're only meeting once a month. So there's only so much mastery you can get in one call, so rather we are leaving an impression for the kinds of skills or capacities that might be available to you as you engage in your grant project work. So that's part of the intent.

And then also part of the intent is going deep into the projects themselves. And giving a lot of space for that to happen so that we can get intimate with the projects, as intimate as, you know, the project leaders want to get. So that we really build familiarity with each other and we get to see all the variety of projects, challenges, threads and developments of each project. So rather than trying to give project updates, like you might do in a weekly meeting, or something like a business meeting, we want to go deep into one or two projects each time we meet. At least that's the proposal, this could change. So deep work and sort of deep inquiry into each project. So it's a two part thing.

In future meetings, we'll probably start each meeting with just a update from whatever projects or projects that did a deep dive on the previous month so that we can get a pulse check what's happened since then. And then we'll do a ceremonial ritual to open. We feel like the opener is important, like rituals, they just do something to shift the state.

So we'll have that and then we/ll do some warmup exercises, which are mostly individual with a little bit of group reflection. It's just a chance for you to sit down, especially if you haven't had the chance to do this, and have some somebody or something else build some structure for you to do some reflection on your projects, so that you don't have to apply your cognitive resources to structuring yourself. And you can just respond to some prompts, just to orient to what's happened in the last month. This is also where we're going to try out different types of prompts that might help you understand how you can deepen your engagement with your process in new ways.

And then as we mentioned, after we do 30-40 minutes of that, we'll sit with one, project, one person or collaborators and we’ll do a kind of group inquiry around that project. What we're really trying to do there is hold the attention on one person and project as a group, and to ask them questions that might enable them to see their project deeper in new ways, maybe in familiar ways, but appreciate it in new ways. So we're trying to deepen their inquiry to their project. You can think of it as asking the types of questions that might lead them to ask themselves questions that might support their insight on their own projects.

During that time, we probably will have things come up where we think, Oh, this resource would really be helpful this person, I'd like to connect them to this person, potential collaborator, or just a perspective that might really land, something maybe more instructional, where it's like, oh, my gosh, I've done this, if you did this, I think it would really help you. So a little bit of giving some advice. What we want to do during that group focus time is note that but not necessarily deliver that. And then after the group inquiry, we'll have a space and time to land those resources. We can note when the resource came up the in the inquiry as well.  We still want to offer resources and advice, but we're bracketing that so that we can preserve the group inquiry space and still land helpful resources.

So our last activity will be offering resources, before we do a ceremonial closer. And then optional for anybody who wants to continue to stay on at this point, we’ll leave the space open for another 30 minutes for anybody that wants to have freeform for conversation. That's available as well. So at 90 mintues, we’ll have a ceremonial closer and say goodbye, and honour the time commitment. A number of people I'm sure will leave, and some people may stay.

So that's the structure and me explaining the structures. We won’t be giving this preamble at future meetings. When when we get to the each section, I'll do a little framing to get us into it as well. Just keep that in mind.

And all this is recorded, so if you missed anything, you'll have access to that. We'll have a dedicated web page for hopefully for each meeting, for anything that we want to be able to reference back to we'll save it on a common web page each month.

Carissa is there anything you want to say?

Carissa: Just a couple of housekeeping things. First, Derek and I are available in between these meetings, if anyone wants to run by their project or things they're thinking about. If you're hoping for that kind of more one on one support with us we're available for that.

Also if you feel in terms of the deep dive for the groups that your group is ‘up’ and you'd love some support from the broader group, like you have a question you'd really like to get everyone in on then feel free to let us know. Otherwise, we'll just pick people.

And then the third one is task that I have for each of you is I'd like to put your projects up on the grants website. So if you could send me a paragraph and I can link it to a bigger document if you'd like. It’s also important for us to be able to highlight you. So I think that is it. I'd like that I'd love to have that within this mastermind cycle. So before the next meeting be great for the summary paragraph

Derrick:

We are going to do our ceremonial entry into the wonderful ritual of PartecK Masterminding. So the way we thought we would start these meetings is a three part, set, set or setting. We're calling the first one an eco-set, orienting to your environment. The second is the mind-set - being present to running thoughts and emotions, and the third is social-set, orienting to the group and people.

Let's run through those together. As we start with eco-set, there are a few ritualistic things we want to encourage everyone to try out. In the vein of getting into deep work, if you guys can silence your phones, this is usually an obvious thing. And I'm sure a lot of you already do this. But for those of you that already do this, I would take this one step further. And I'm sure some of you have seen that there's been social science research showing that even if you have your phone, within view, not even within view, if it's in your room, and you know that, there's something that happens where it can still disrupt your attention, like, it's still within reach. And so it could get inside your thought loop. This is the ceremonial thing I'm going to be doing each time is, and I wouldn't encourage everyone to do it this way... I'm going to throw my phone out of out of the room - it has a landing pad, which is my couch. This is honestly it, if you can get it out of your room, it does a lot, we're sealing the space here a little bit. And then apps, browsers, anything that's up on your laptop, or computer, if you can, closing it down or saving it, this would be a good time to do that. Even in your line of view... I have a few things on my desk, I'm going push them under the rug, so to speak, out of view. So we are minimizing distractions as much as possible, so we can really get into the space.

We can now also orient some mindset. So if you have thought loops, if there have been things that keep coming to mind, like you got to do or you you've got to commitment later, cetera, et cetera. If you're more kinesthetic or physical, you can think of like, okay, I've got these thoughts, I'm going to put them in a box, I'm going to throw those out. Or, or set them aside if you want to be more gentle. Knowing you can come back to that, or even if you just consider that, okay, I know that's there, I'm going to come back to that.

Carissa:
Just wanted to sorry, the other thing for the environmental set is to turn off the chat. So we'll be turning off the group chat, so you can chat with the hosts.

Derrick:
This is us walking the talk a little bit. There will be moments where we'll bring the chat back on, but it's just that that little red notification. It just, you know, like tweaks your brain-stem a little bit. So we're minimizing that, but then we'll try to use the chat intentionally through these meetings.

So we're noticing mind, we're minimizing the notifications, and then social set. So this is the third set. Just taking a moment orienting to the group. Just take a moment to take everyone in and this who we're going to be doing its training with. You can click on the participants as well if you want to see more of the names that don't have their videos going.

This is our ceremonial opener,

Derrick:

The next thing we're going to go into is some warm up exercises, or you could just call them exercises. And this is really pretty simple, we're just going to present half a dozen prompts, every few minutes. And if you have pen and paper, nearby, now would be a good time to grab that.

Or if you prefer to put up a simple note app on your computer, that's fine too. But just something to reflect, I do encourage the pen and paper, just because activating more of your fine motor skills seems to do something during reflection. And it forces you to slow down a little bit because you write slower than you'd type.

Framing:

 The theme for these reflective exercises is the polarity between constraints and freedoms. And we're thinking of these as not even as a polarity more like inseparable dimensions of reality in the sense that it is often constraints that enable new freedoms. But also more freedom might actually create more constraints. So, if you suddenly win the lottery, you all of a sudden have these new affordances new freedoms. But now you're also constrained by family members constantly asking for money and getting phone calls and suddenly, you have all these constraints on your time and demands.

Also sometimes creating more discipline around, let's say, your daily schedule, for example exercising every day, meditating, and eating good, often affords you new energy, and then maybe that consistency, creates new freedoms - it frees your mind, you start doing better work, you start getting paid better, etc, etc. So this is why we're thinking of it as ‘joined at the hip’ constraints and freedom.

We want to explore how that might be playing into your projects. Because the more we can notice our constraints, we can start to creatively work with them. And this is, I think, the basic skill we see a lot in successful serial entrepreneurs, or innovators. But not just that, just anybody who seems to have facility and being resourceful, and creative with what they have, and using it to create interesting and new work in the world.

Constraint-Freedom: Time

We're going to focus on one constraint, which is time. The point is to give you a prompt, and for you to respond, see if you can engage it as a kind of constraint -freedom, freedom-constraint, but focus on your project specifically. And for those of you that have collaborators here, you'll be able to compare notes, I think after as well. Keep that in mind as you're doing it in parallel with your collaborators.

Prompt 1: Ideal work pattern vs good enough work pattern

The first prompt is that you'll see on the screen is ‘ideal deep work pattern versus a good enough work pattern. So I need to explain a few things pattern deep work.  I mentioned these prompts are around time. So we're really thinking of time as in terms of how many hours in the day you (or a typical person) is able to do quality work. We are exploring what the pattern of that is for you.

Just to give you some benchmarks… there's a number of ways you can kind of look at it, but let's just say there's this general metric, which doesn't actually exist. But there's some general metric, which is that which can measure general productivity across different domains of work. And it seems to be that most people tend to have anywhere from three to six good hours of productive time. You hear a lot of people who say, they just grind for like, 12-16 hours a day. But probably what's happening there is three to six hours of that is creative time, if they're lucky enough, or able to minimize distractions, and really give themselves that time to do that kind of creative work, which is not the case, in most cases, I would say.

And then the other, you know, six 9-12 hours are kind of scattered, the kind of automated tasks that you don't have to use a lot of creative problem solving to complete or may not even be work. But it's a little bit like kicking the can down the road.

So if you take a moment just to think about when there's pulses in your day, maybe it's immediately in the morning, maybe it's mid-morning, it's afternoon, maybe it's at night, evening, but what are the pulses for the day where you seem to have your most productive powers available? In an ideal sense, if you didn't have any constraints, and you just woke up every day, and you didn't have kids, you didn't have a job? What would your pattern be most likely, something you've probably noticed, if you woke wake up on a Saturday, and you have a free day, you kind of know what your pulse is, you know, when your peak times are. And compare that to actual reality. Given your constraints. what is probably more realistic in terms of when you can have your productive, creative hours.

To give you example, if you have to drop your kids off at school, right in the middle of your peak hours, then obviously, you're going to have to work around that. Or if for some reason, you have to wake up at 5am every day, and you're not a morning person. But that's when you're going to get three hours of undistracted time. So just compare, ideal and good enough.

I promise every prop won’t have that much preamble but I needed to explain deep work and pulses to really get into these exercises. So we'll just give you a couple minutes for this function.

Prompt 2: What are you deep work pre-commitments?

Okay, let's move to the next one. I think you may have already started to answer this question, so we'll move through fairly quickly. What hat are you already committed to using those deep work hours towards? You'll notice we're really trying to look at like the preciousness of deep work hours. Because there's not that many if you're looking at it at it on a day to day basis. And for most of us these grant projects are not full time project, they are side projects. So if you tease out what those are so you really get a good idea of how much you are working with how and much wiggle room is there in terms of the distribution of deep work during the precious creative hours a day.

Prompt 3: Grant project deep work needs

What do you sense is really needed for your grant project? If you think of working on the project having a spectrum of deep and more superficial tasks, where do you feel the different big chunks of the work for the project rest on that spectrum?  And if you can't think about what the big tasks are, what questions might help you clarify that? The way to go about this is just to ask yourself those questions. The point isn't necessarily that you thoroughly respond to each of these prompts. But if you give yourself some things to come back to, that's the main thing.

Group Sharing

We're going to take just a moment, if anybody wants to share a little bit. And then we'll jump back in to a few more prompts before we move on to the next phase of being focused on.

Speaker 1  - Nori

On the first profit, I was thinking about deep work. And I've been actually trying to focus on that a lot recently, I even have a document titled 100 days of deep work on how to make a commitment for 100 days to try and find that space to do it. And what I've found in 2023, since starting this year is I have a lot of meetings in the morning, and I get up early, and that's where my high energy is. And then I have the afternoons free. So I'm blocking out four hour chunks of time I'm going this my deep workspace, but it's after lunch, and then I get into that food coma stage and my energy flags so it doesn't match my energy levels well, and that's been really challenging for me to figure out how to use this afternoon time, which is pretty meeting free for me to do the deep work when my my physical energy levels start to drop. So I subscribe to this thing called focus at will which uses binaural beats and music to generate the focus and energy and other things and I'm trying to incorporate ritual to get my body used to doing deep work time in the afternoon. I find myself not accomplishing the deep work that I want to do just because of the energy. Any tips or reflections on that would be really welcome. But um yeah, or maybe I just need to stop doing all those meetings in the morning and find work time when the energy is there.

Speaker 2 Brad

I think I'm kind of in a similar vein in that my peak energy time is definitely is in the morning for sure. And this made me realize that yeah, maybe I should be organizing my day a little bit more intentionally around it, utilizing those peak hours and then using the afternoons for admin work and setting up meetings. I definitely power down more so in the afternoon. Then I waslooking at my pre-commitments. Over the next while and they're actually super minimal. I think it made me realize that being very intentional about those deep work times and not being frivolous with those times that I do have free because I am lucky right now to have a lot of deep work time. So just sort of some intentionality.

Speaker 3 Daniel

One thing that pops to mind on the same kind of topics that we're on is looking at, for me, what my pulse is like, optimally connecting with people, the energizers and inspirers, around the work that I'm doing. And then the blocks of work for follow up on whatever comes from that, and to try to chunk those in a way through the day that works. I definitely hear what you're saying about that sort of post lunch coma. And so trying to schedule that time - maybe that's a good time for me to be doing the little micro recordings with people who are inspiring and energizing around the work that we're doing or things like that. And later, I'll throw out an offer in terms of like, if people are wanting to anchor some times where we can energize and coordinate together around some of that.

Speaker 4 Rochelle

A couple of things struck me one is that there's the time of day and there's certainly some things around the kind of thinking I can do that comes more easily in the morning. And I find around 4:30 a shift into a kind of frivolous time, just hanging out chat with someone, Hey, how's it going, not having this real driven purpose. If I feel like if I have to do the purpose thing, then I have no energy, but if I feel like I can put on some jeans and go into that kind of a mode. So then I'm thinking about who I'm around, and what the pulse of what we're doing is, so there's various things that set mood that's a little different than just the time of day. The other one was that there's deep work, but then there's like stuff that I realize isn't complicated. But can feel it's there's a feeling of not feeling ready. Or maybe an understanding that to do this simple thing of just messaging that person and say hey, do you want to do blah, blah, blah, like that simple. But what that means in terms of what that might set in motion, is kind of an another thing, so I just realized that these seemingly simple things can feel harder than deep work. Why do some of these things feel harder? Like they the easy tasks feel sometimes harder?

Derrick: I love that distinction. So true. Emotionally deep work or the emotionally difficult. Well, this was great just getting some diversity of different challenges and patterns. We'll do a few more prompts and then move into a focus group inquiry. Now the prompts are going from little bit micro to more macro patterns. So not just the day-to-day dynamics of emotionally and cognitively difficult deep work.

Prompt 4: Meso and Macro patterns of deep work

Do you notice archetypical patterns, not just, I'm good in the morning, but I'm good in two-week sprints, or there has to be consistent things happening every day because I have kids at a certain age, and they have their own daily schedules, and so for me it's more about consistency. Or I have the affordance that maybe you can't move things on a day-to-day basis around, you know, deep work early in the morning. Maybe you have to take a bunch of meetings, but you can do like three-week retreats, or something like that. So just feeling into what those patterns might be.

And if you have reference points for it, it's great to look at things that worked or haven't worked as we transition to the next prompt.

Prompt 5: Collaborators’, social fields’ deep work patterns

What of these of macro patterns would be helpful to look at in this project? Have you shared with your collaborators or stakeholders, people who are impacted by your work? And if there's opportunities there what might you want to explore with them? And what would you want to know about their deep work patterns? What questions might you have?

Just it's taking inventory of what you know about your collaborators, deep work patterns, and what you imagine they know or don't know about yours.

Prompt 6: Deep work phases: now and potential deep work phase shifts

There's potentially a lot of uncertainty around this prompt. So it might just lead to questions. But you can also think in terms of the macro patterns and phase shifts as they relate to your project. Does your grant project require a lot of upfront deep work? Maybe you anticipate that actually what needs to happen is a lot of not as deep of work, but the emotionally difficult work that Rochelle was pointing out, and then that might set up the space you need for deep work. And Nori was talking about shifting your day around - would that require a bunch of difficult conversations upfront with people you normally meet with but then it would lead to more deep work time? So if there are phase shifts, or setups that might change, when might deep work happen then.

Completion

Okay, it does look like there's still quite a bit of note-taking happening. So I'm sorry to be the notification disrupter, but just for the sake of time, we want to leave just a little bit of space and not enough space for the group inquiry. We do if we continue with this structure I think we'll move through things a little faster the next round.

One of the things that I think this was already suggested co-working. Carissa, and I have been doing that ourselves for deep work blocks, and it's really super helpful. And yeah, maybe these prompts can be helpful as well for setting up those conditions as well give you some ideas of how to approach others if you want to do something like that. Or maybe there's co-working that can happen with this group as well.