Last week was our annual Brain Trust retreat, and it was a doozy. I mean that in the best possible sense of the word.
I feel liberated. Seen. Supported.
Lightened.
As Mark Silver said in his beautiful recap of the retreat:
“These five people are among the brightest lights in my life, and have patiently and compassionately helped me walk ever more deeply through my core pattern.”
Here’s where the wombat comes in. Every year we spontaneously come up with a “code phrase” that we use to signal, “Hey, you’re doing that thing again” but with humor and lightness. (That thing being your core pattern, your habitual knot, the main lesson you keep learning, you know, that thing.)
There is perhaps nothing sweeter (nor perhaps odder) than sitting in a living room with five of your closest friends talking about what you most want to create in the world, getting stuck and lost, and having someone call out:
“I smell a wombat.”
(Take a moment to picture this. Lovely cabin on the water, sailboats bobbing outside, crisp white sofas and chaises to relax on, healthy snacks in abundance… and then here comes the wombat.)
You squirm and hem and haw, insisting (perhaps loudly with your hand held out like a big stop sign but only if you are me), “This is not a wombat. This is a real problem. This is different.”
Some people might back down at this point, especially when faced with a loud Scotch-Irish temper and shall we say, a certain level of intensity. These people? Not.
This is one of the many gifts of a great mastermind group – getting to know with your whole body you are not alone in your struggles. That alone would be worth the time and energy invested.
But when you add in what you learn from each other, feedback of your business and creative projects, helping you see what you can’t see because you are too close to it, sharing fantastic resources – you get true preciousness. Or as Eric said at the end of our retreat, right after we took that picture,
“It is a rare thing in this world to find a group of people who can hold you close, love you as you stumble, see your radiance and lovingly challenge you to bring it forth.”
It has been deeply healing to be held to my dreams by these folks, to not be able to float away into fantasy and projection, but instead to be called to take real, measurable, inspired action day after day. To not allow my whining and self-doubt to rule me. To be held to my best self by being held to reality.
With lots and lots of silly jokes, You Tube videos, and the best snacks ever!
P.S. I’m putting together a How To Create Your Own Mastermind class – so you can have what we have. Two classes, some interviews, criteria, Facebook group to meet each other. Affordable. Deets soon.
