A Mason's Work

[00:00] Everything we talked about this week so far, the play mindset, the preparing room, the minimum viable environment, all of it assumes a single variable.
[00:12] You.
[00:13] You control your desk.
[00:15] You control your threshold practice.
[00:17] You control when the work starts.
[00:20] You set up the minimum viable environment.
[00:23] When you add other people, things change.
[00:28] You suddenly have a hard time trying to manage the mindset.
[00:32] You can't give them that sense of play.
[00:35] You can't necessarily walk them through their own preparing room.
[00:39] They arrive carrying whatever their burdens are, whatever morning they had, whatever, you know, fight that they most recently were a part of, whatever that is.
[00:49] And when you ask them to drop all of that and be present, it's really a big ask in a lot of ways, in a lot of cases.
[00:58] This is the challenge of working with groups of people.
[01:02] And it's where most meetings and most team sessions and most lodges fall apart before they even start.
[01:10] It's not because the work is wrong or the people are wrong, but nobody built that sort of startup ritual for everyone to kind of cross into the work together.
[01:20] And you'll see it in lodge now where you probably have guys going through the motions of a startup experience that startup ritual, the opening ritual or whatever.
[01:30] And it doesn't actually start or open.
[01:35] It just kind of is something that folks endure to get to the next step.
[01:39] When we try and consciously solve this problem and, you know, the history of the craft has done this in traditionally in the preparing room where we strip away all of the trappings of the outside world and get folks oriented to the experience and the work they're about to do.
[02:00] When we've done that, well, it it's it's great.
[02:03] Like it solves the problem.
[02:05] This this gets guys coming back.
[02:07] It gets the work in the right sort of headspace.
[02:09] It's in heartspace.
[02:11] But think about the last significant group event you attended a workshop or ceremony or any of those kinds of environments where the moment you arrived, you knew it was different.
[02:26] Something was not the same.
[02:30] You were at a higher operating at a higher level.
[02:36] I will tell you that that environmental setting those environment until conditions was not an accident.
[02:45] Someone engineered that experience.
[02:48] Someone took the time to think about that threshold moment, that art of the start conversation where you enter the room.
[02:56] For example, for example, you know.
[02:59] You know.
[03:00] Literally enter the building, the room, the dwelling, the online space.
[03:04] Think about entries.
[03:07] Right.
[03:07] When someone has to go through this process of divesting.
[03:11] We give them things like signposts.
[03:15] We help them navigate the entry of a room or a workspace or an environment.
[03:21] There are places where this entry becomes meaningfully part of the conversation.
[03:28] If you're having a place, a sign that has, you know, welcome to the dinner and a coat room if it's warm or a place to store your belongings if it's hot.
[03:44] That kind of mirrors the preparing room in a lot of ways.
[03:49] You have a sign indicating what's going on and a place to divest the burdens of your everyday life.
[03:56] When you get into that room after that, you need to have all of the things people need in order to put the outside world behind them.
[04:05] It needs to be physically comfortable.
[04:06] It needs to be, you know, have food and or, you know, a place to go use the restroom or things like that.
[04:15] It needs to have water, a place, things to drink.
[04:17] You need to meet the body's needs.
[04:20] And then you need kind of the last thing.
[04:24] And this last thing, if if it's if you do everything else right, you get you get folks that show up and are listening and paying attention.
[04:33] This last bit really begins the elevation point.
[04:36] And that is the place where you let people unpack their mental baggage.
[04:42] Maybe you have a moment of silence.
[04:44] Maybe you have a prayer or a dedication or an invocation of some kind to start that mental divestiture as part of a letting go of the outside world and allowing the transition to then elevate the experience where everyone can start working together in flow.
[05:03] Now, there's lots of things that you can do.
[05:06] This is these are just some examples in this episode.
[05:09] The environment, again, will not do the work.
[05:12] It can't manufacture care.
[05:15] But what it can do is create that space where care emerges.
[05:19] And then from that, people can move into a place of safety, comfort and then flow.
[05:25] So today, as you think about the next group session that you're responsible for, the next conversation or next event, think about that entry point, that transitional space where people leave the outside world to create that opportunity where proper work can emerge.
[05:43] And I think if you spend some time there, your next event will be much, much more successful.
[05:49] Tomorrow, we finish the week.
[05:51] Then we go somewhere even more exciting.