In today’s episode, I’m answering the question: Do you really need to be in a business mastermind?
The ultimate answer is no, you don’t. But what I want to share with you in this episode is how to decide whether a mastermind is the right fit for you right now, as well as the different types of masterminds that are available and when there might be some signs that it’s time to jump into one.
Here for the links referenced in the show notes?
The Heart-Centred Business Accelerator mastermind: tashcorbin.com/accelerator
I’ve already answered the primary question – no, you don’t always need to be in a mastermind. It’s not something that is non-negotiable when it comes to growing your business. I’ve seen that said a few times and I would hesitate a guess that that person runs a very expensive mastermind and that’s why they’re telling you that you have to be in one at all times.
However, there are some deeper things that I’d love to explore further in this episode.
Let’s dive in!
Firstly, you do you. It’s totally up to you whether working in a mastermind environment is the right fit for you or not.
There is no hard-and-fast rule that says you must be in a mastermind at all times, or even that you have to be in one ever.
I find it fascinating that that’s something people would even say, because some people:
- Don’t do well in small group environments
- Need a one-to-one relationship
- Don’t like a high-intensity learning experience and they’d rather take things at their own pace
We all have different personality types. We’re all unique. We’re all driven and motivated by different things.
There is no hard and fast rule about being part of a mastermind.
But there are times when it can be a very powerful choice to join a business mastermind.
Before I dive into that… what exactly is a mastermind?
Masterminds take a lot of different forms.
In essence, a mastermind is anything that’s a group experience (generally 20 people or less) where you’re not just learning from someone who’s facilitating but you’re also creating peer-to-peer relationships and peer-to-peer learning opportunities.
There are high-ticket masterminds for $30,000-$100,000, there are low-ticket masterminds for a few hundred dollars a month, and there are free masterminds as well.
Most of the masterminds I’ve been part of throughout my business have been free.
They’ve been a self-led mastermind with a peer-to-peer support network. However, there have been times when I’ve joined paid ones… and it has been a big uplevel for my business.
Here are some of the things that make being part of a mastermind a pretty powerful choice for growing your business.
Reason 1: Surrounding yourself with incredible people
When you join a mastermind, you’re surrounding yourself with peers who are ambitious, like-hearted, and who have achieved and done some of the things that you want to do.
Surrounding yourself with the right people is a powerful move.
It definitely shifts me from a mindset perspective and from an energetic perspective.
One of the big ways it does that is because when I’m in that mastermind environment, I am more likely to stretch my goals. I am more likely to set more ambitious targets or take on more creative, ambitious projects.
I’m someone who doesn’t mind a bit of healthy competition as well. I’m pretty competitive when it comes to board games, and I love that sense of competitive spirit.
When I’m in a mastermind and someone has 1,500 people signed up for their webinar, all of a sudden that becomes possible for me as well and I can set a stretch goal to achieve that.
Being around people setting larger goals or with bigger expectations in their business, plants that seed that it might be possible for me as well.
It’s really powerful to create that next level of stretcher momentum.
I attended a masterminding retreat last year. As part of that, there were conversations about big 6-figure investments.
It was fascinating to me that I had never thought of investing at that scale before, but all of a sudden it felt possible.
It was a really powerful conversation. As part of that, the person running the session said, “We’re all the kinds of people who are capable of creating and launching a program that makes a million dollars in a year or two“. I was so taken aback because I didn’t necessarily think that about myself at that particular point in time. But as soon as that person said it about me, I did.
I totally embraced the fact that I was one of those people and that even though it felt like a stretch, it was definitely available to me.
That leads me into the next powerful thing that comes from masterminds…
Reason 2: Borrow people’s confidence in you
Other people see you a certain way. When you’re in a mastermind, you can start seeing yourself that way as well. Sometimes we need to borrow other people’s faith in us before we have it for ourselves.
Just like the fact that you’re in the room with these fancy people.
I was in a mastermind in my second or third year of business, and one of the people in the mastermind always flew business class.
That person said to me off the cuff that I must always be flying business class as well because of how tall I am.
At that point in time, I was mostly flying business class. It was mostly through points or bidding to upgrade (I wouldn’t pay for a business class ticket at that time), but suddenly I could view myself as someone who would always fly business class.
It was just that beautiful reflection of seeing me as the kind of person who just does that.
That might be a really frivolous example, but it happens in hundreds and hundreds of tiny little ways.
You’re seen as the kind of person who will invest in growing their team. You’re seen as the kind of person who’s committed to their business. You are seen as the kind of person who invests ethically in causes that they’re passionate about.
Whenever you join one of those masterminds, whenever you step into that space, there is this sense of being seen differently.
When you’re seen differently, you believe new things about yourself.
I think that’s really powerful and can be underestimated sometimes.
Reason 3: Accountability through visibility
When you’re in a mastermind (especially if it’s one of those smaller group experiences), you are far more visible to other people.
That creates a sense of accountability because there are more eyes watching you more closely to see that you follow through on what you say you’re going to do.
That type of accountability and reporting back can be really powerful for some people.
For some people, the sense that everyone’s watching and they’re going to see if you don’t do it is overwhelming and it feels hard. But for others, they know that that sense of accountability through visibility is actually really effective for them.
That’s another layer of how masterminding can be quite powerful.
Reason 4: Mentorship
If it’s a mastermind that’s facilitated, then it’s also a powerful opportunity for mentorship and to build a stronger connection with a mentor.
Usually, a mastermind will go for six months or more, but even if it’s one of those 90-day mastermind experiences, that’s an extended period of time where you’re building that relationship and the mentor is getting to know your business. Over 90 days, a lot happens and sequences together in a business.
If you’re not in that container of a mastermind experience (for example, you’re in a course and there’s not that same level of connection on an ongoing basis), then it’s not quite the same journey of mentorship.
Mentoring is really powerful.
Reason 5: Shared experience
Seeing as you’re in that experience not just with a facilitator but also with peers, it brings so much more shared experience to the table.
Think about it: You could work with me one-on-one and get access to my experience. But if you come and join my mastermind where I’m bringing together a bunch of people who are at similar stages of business, who are ambitious and in the heart-centred space, then all of a sudden there are dozens of people that you can tap into. There’s a whole extra network.
There’s more shared experiences, more knowledge, and more recommendations.
One of the biggest benefits I have gotten out of the masterminds I’ve been part of is asking for recommendations for a VA who can do X, Y, Z, and then getting a recommendation and not having to faff about trying to find a stranger on the internet.
There have been dozens of those experiences – whether it be a recommendation of a book, course, hire, mentor, speakers for my events.
It’s so powerful being able to tap into that collective wisdom and get those recommendations.
Reason 6: Cross-promotion
Cross-promotion is something that I am very focused on in the masterminds I facilitate.
We are able to borrow each other’s audiences for each other’s benefit.
Everybody wins when we borrow each other’s audience and it’s a reciprocal relationship.
That opportunity for cross-promotion is really powerful – particularly in facilitated masterminds because everyone is usually in a similar stage of business. If you’re not in a similar stage, then you get to know what stage of business people are in quite deeply, quite quickly. You know what their niche is, and you know what their audience wants, so those cross-promotions are far higher quality and far more effective.
You’re also not wasting so much time jumping into cross-promotions with people who don’t have the same scale of audience that you do or don’t necessarily have a consistent enough presence on social media.
When I first started my business, I said yes to every podcast, every YouTube interview, and every opportunity that I had to get in front of other people’s audiences.
Some of those never saw the light of day. The person never launched the podcast, the person was starting a YouTube channel but never actually followed through, or the person did have a YouTube channel but within six months the video only gets five views.
It’s not necessarily a fruitful cross-promotion endeavour.
But as you step into masterminds, you’re in a certain stage of business, there are certain foundations that are in place, and everyone’s in another level of commitment to business growth. Because of that, the quality of those cross-promotions and opportunities to share audiences can be far more effective and valuable for us.
There are lots of different types of masterminds that you can join.
You can join a mastermind that’s free, or you can create one of your own that’s free. You can join masterminds that are paid, you can join ones where one person is leading the way (whether it’s free or paid), and you can join masterminds where there’s not one specific leader.
I’ve also been part of paid masterminds where we pay a facilitator, but that facilitator is not necessarily a mentor.
There is one that I was in that was very effective because the person who was facilitating the mastermind was a brilliant facilitator. They didn’t necessarily have an advanced business, they didn’t necessarily have the marketing strategy and the things that we wanted to work on, but they knew how to draw it out of us to support each other.
That was a very powerful mastermind experience for me, and it was brilliant because I already had the business strategy and the business experience at that point in time. I was very savvy with social media and marketing, but two of the other members were really good with the mindset stuff. One was an EFT practitioner and money mindset mentor, and one was a Profit First professional.
It was such a great mix of skills, and I felt like it was a really beautiful well-facilitated experience.
There are some that are led by a facilitator who’s a mentor. There are some that are led by facilitator who’s simply there to facilitate the connections. And you can also have self-led masterminds as well.
You can have masterminds that are topic-specific.
One of the first masterminds I joined was a self-led mastermind that I formed with other people who were doing a course with me. We were all doing the same course and we thought it was a great opportunity to all focus on that subject together.
We were very specific about what the purpose of the business mastermind was.
Then there are some masterminds that are specific about a goal.
Everyone’s all going for their first $100K month, or they’re all running their first webinar, or they’re all going for a million-dollar year.
Whatever it is, the mastermind is about having a similar goal.
You can also have masterminds that are more general and broad, where everyone is in business, they just want to grow their business, and they want to have that mastermind experience where they’re able to connect with each other, tune into the collective wisdom and support each other through that growth phase.
There are lots and lots of different options when it comes to masterminding.
What I specifically wanted to talk about as a final piece for this podcast episode is when I think it’s a good time to invest in a good mastermind.
There are times when self-led is great. You don’t need to particularly worry about that bigger investment or being in something that’s more structured.
But I do think that there are times when it’s just worth investing in a good mastermind…
1. You’ve been in masterminds that all seem to fizzle out
Maybe you’ve tried to do some self-led or free ones, but everything just seems to fizzle out and you’re sick of things fizzling out.
You want to know that when you step in the room, the room is still going to be there in six months. It’s still going to be an active room, you’re still going to get the support that you need, and you’re not responsible for trying to keep everyone motivated to be there.
That’s a big reason why I’ve invested in a couple of masterminds. I was always the leader, I was always running the show, I turned up to a couple of calls and I was the only person there, so I decided that it was time for me to have space held for me and I wasn’t going to be the space holder anymore.
I decided to invest in being able to go in and be supported, rather than have to try and maintain that momentum and stop the fizzle out.
That’s a big one for me.
2. You specifically want to work with a leader who is a mentor
You specifically want to work with someone who can give you the answer or help you make a solid decision and move forward.
There are times when it’s good to ask a bunch of different people for their opinions. But there are also times when you just want to ask a trusted advisor to tell you what to do, or to help you make a decision.
If you’re in that space, if you’ve got that stuff coming up pretty consistently, then a paid mastermind that’s facilitated by a mentor is going to be very effective for you at that point in time.
That’s a good sign that it might be time to invest in one.
3. You’re after a much bigger stretch
Let’s say you’ve been in peer-led or free masterminds before, but sometimes you’re the biggest business in the room or you’re the most experienced person in the room, and you know that stepping into the next space will really help you with that big stretch. Or maybe you’ve been playing it safe with your goals for a little while and a goal of yours is to really start stretching again and set something that’s a little more ambitious and be held to account for that big ambitious target.
It may be time to invest in a business mastermind if you want a bigger stretch.
That’s another time when I think it’s powerful to invest.
Even just the fact that you’ve invested can be a statement to yourself and to the universe that you’re committed to this and you’re really going to go for it.
That’s a big one for me.
If you want to uplevel the room that you’re in and have someone lead the way, sometimes when you’re doing free masterminds or the masterminding that you do is mostly related to low-cost courses or one-off courses, it’s not necessarily the level of room that you want to be in.
When I join masterminds, I want to be one of the little fish. I want to be one of the newbies compared to everyone else.
That’s when I learn the most. That’s when my inner competitive edge comes out.
That being said, it’s not necessarily too far away, because if the strategies that they’re talking about aren’t available to me and if those things are completely too far away from me then that’s not going to create a sense of excitement for me, that’s going to create a sense of feeling like I’m too far behind.
It’s not always about having this huge stretch that feels too hard. It’s about up-leveling the room that you’re in and up-leveling the types of conversations that you’re having.
I facilitated a mastermind a couple of years ago, and one of the pieces of feedback that I got from someone was that it was the first mastermind they had ever been a part of where no one in the mastermind was questioning whether they were cut out for business.
That conversation was done and dusted. In fact, our conversations in the mastermind were that we were completely unemployable now. There was no way that any of us were ever going back to a job, so we had to make it work.
It was a really interesting reflection, and I think it’s absolutely true of rooms I’ve been in before.
Sometimes you just need to be in a room where everyone’s committed.
You just need to be in a room where no one is dilly-dallying on whether they’re actually having a business now or not. No one is dilly-dallying about whether they should grow their mailing list or not. We all know that that’s a foundation and we’ve got to do it, so we just do it.
Investing in a mastermind will help you to up-level the conversations, the standards within that room, and the expectations within that room. Especially if you’re discerning about the type of mastermind that you’re joining and the level of the participants in that mastermind.
4. You’re getting distracted by shiny objects
I actually did this four years ago. When I did my quarterly review of my bank statements to see if I was doing any unexpected spending, I noticed that I had bought a bunch of low-ticket courses on many different topics.
I bought a bunch of different courses and support around Instagram, I bought something on summits, I bought something on Facebook ads, I bought something on running longer-form challenges, and I bought something on events.
I was clearly in flighty mode.
What I realised was that I knew what I needed to do. I needed to really nail and scale up my launch of the Take Off program.
Instead of focusing on that, I was looking for all these fun shiny things that I could play with, because I had some big mindset stuff around Take Off becoming too big.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was really blocked about the Take Off launches getting too big, too successful, and too many people joining at once.
Looking at my bank statements allowed me to see that I was jumping from shiny thing to shiny thing, so I went and invested in a mastermind.
When I started that mastermind, I told the facilitator to not let me get distracted by shiny objects. I asked them to keep me focused on launching the Take Off program and scaling up that launch to three times a year.
The third of those launches ended up bringing in just under $100,000.
Clearly, that was what I needed. That’s where my focus needed to go, and that was a really good decision for me to stop playing around with lots of tiny things. I just chose one big thing and participated in that.
4. You want more visibility with the mentor
There are two masterminds in particular that I have joined simply because I wanted the mentor to know who I was.
I wanted them to know what I did. I wanted to have that visibility with them.
This is because I knew that if they could see me and understood what I did and they knew about my work, they would be helpful in growing my audience and I might have a chance to be exposed to their audience.
It was also a big mindset wobble of mine. I didn’t want big names in my industry to see me – I just wanted to secretly talk to my little part of the internet.
This is because when I talk about consent-based marketing, I’m quite critical of some of those big names in the industry. I’m quite critical of some strategies that very popular people in my space use. And here I am calling those strategies out and saying how they’re not consent-based.
I just wanted to be able to quietly criticise it and not be seen. I didn’t want to create a big blow-up about something.
In the first one in particular, I invested in that mastermind because I knew that that was a block of mine.
I must say that that block comes up for me at new levels all the time.
I do have challenges with authority, and my personality type is definitely averse to getting in trouble in any way. I’m always making sure that we’re doing everything correctly so we don’t get in trouble. And I think I see those industry leaders as authorities, so I don’t want to be seen by them as doing anything wrong.
That extra layer of visibility was really powerful for me and allowed me to see it’s safe to be seen and it’s safe for industry leaders to see me. In fact, it’s really good for the growth of my business.
If you’re looking for that extra level of visibility – whether it be with your mentor or potentially having access to their audience – those are genuine reasons for being part of one of those masterminds.
That was one of my frustrations when I first started my business.
There was a small cohort of people that I started my business with who I knew through some free Facebook groups that we were a part of. Two of those people whom I was biz besties with for a little while had a lot of money to invest in their business.
I was in a small self-led mastermind with one of them, and she had saved up $150,000 to start her business. Her partner had a multi-six-figure salary, and there was no pressure on her to make money quickly in her business. But she knew she would buy her way into rooms.
The first investment she made in her business was to join a $20,000 mastermind even though she was in the early stages of startup. But it did its job. Then she jumped into another one for $25,000.
Then she got on the podcast of every other person in the mastermind and her business blew up. Here I was with no money and no way to join those rooms. I had to do it the organic way.
It is a privilege. It is a legitimate business growth strategy to pay the money to be in those rooms, and to benefit from having paid the money to be in those rooms.
There are times when investing in a mastermind like that will create more visibility for you, and will create that acceleration of growth simply because of the opportunities that become available to you for being in the room.
I think to deny that that’s the case is a bit short-sighted.
It understates the value that comes from those experiences, but also the privilege that comes from having the money to be able to be in those rooms.
That is our discussion around joining a business mastermind.
You might be wondering why I’m talking so much about masterminds, and whether I have an opportunity for you to work with me in that way.
Well, actually there is!
The Heart-Centred Business Accelerator is my mastermind to help those of you who are looking to scale to six figures and beyond.
I am in the midst of pre-launch/launch of that mastermind at the moment.
It’s called the Accelerator and that’s exactly what it does. I would LOVE for you to be part of our beautiful mastermind.
If you would like to find out more, you can find all the details here: tashcorbin.com/accelerator
You can also slide into my DMs on Facebook or Instagram, or email support@tashcorbin.com if you have any questions and want to discuss whether Accelerator is the right fit for you.
Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
