A book compiling my methods for Mastering the Game of Allyship: Unlocking your Allyship Superpower
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"An Ally is the Player of the Game of Allyship"
The only way to loose the game of allyship is to stop playing. In this way you are all, so long as you're attemping to win, are winning. That being said many others are playing a game called SATISFACTION. And to lose the game of Satsifaction is to be aware of the ways in which you're dissatisfied. Many people have subconcius images of what effective allyship SHOULD look like and are dissatsifed when their allyship practice doesn't align. Because they aren't satisfied with their allyship they feel like they are losing. And its this feeling of losing that makes them want to give up the game.
The secret of the game of allyship is being able to hold this dynamic tension without letting go. These inner conflicts become the fuel that will keep you in the game of allyship should you let them.
Allyship is, at its core, about assisting, yet the kind of assistance required is context-dependent.
In this multifaceted game, various roles await you. You can be a helper, offering support when needed, or an advocate, speaking up for those in need. If you crave active involvement and change, you might become a co-conspirator, delving into the heart of projects alongside like-minded individuals. Or perhaps you prefer to be a supporter, cheering on those taking action from the sidelines. Lastly, there's the option of being an assistant, ready to pitch in wherever needed, functioning as part of a team.
Whichever role you choose, rest assured that your contribution will make a genuine difference. Whether you're taking monumental strides toward tangible change or offering comfort and companionship, being an ally can bring joy and fulfillment not just to those around you but to yourself as well.
To quote, Douglas Adams: "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary, but anything invented between ages fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting. Anything invented after age thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
The concept of being an ally is relatively new, and those who assumed such roles in the past may not even recognize the title. It's dangerous to assume that allyship is a recent phenomenon. Human ascendancy is attributed to our unparalleled capacity for collaboration and mutual assistance.
Unlike other species that must fend for themselves, humans collaborate and evolve by working together. They possess the unique ability to empathize with others and transform adversaries into allies.
However, the challenge arises from our contemporary ability to reshape our surroundings. Allyship is often seen as problem-solving. Effective allies are like visionaries, surveying a fragmented world yearning for mending. They perceive those they aim to assist as objects to be altered and shaped into a portrait of an ideal ally.
But there lies a fundamental problem. Many aspire to overhaul the entire world to resolve myriad issues. They take on excessive responsibility and set impossibly high standards. A common pitfall is believing that every problem one perceives is their personal responsibility to solve.
In light of our current state of global development, many turn to allyship as a way to cope with the internal tension stemming from their perception of the world's troubles and their perceived inability to remedy them.
This predicament underscores the notion that effective allyship hinges on recognizing the extent of one's influence. To resolve this problem, you must learn to be an ally to yourself, unveiling your unique field of influence.
This book, Mastering the Game of Allyship will guide you to become a better ally to yourself, setting the stage for improving your interactions with others. It will impart the skills needed to coach yourself and embark on a journey of self-development that enhances your effectiveness and makes each day more fulfilling.
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Most successful baseball players ascend to greatness because they were once kids who loved playing baseball. Their love for the sport drove them to practice diligently, and it was their unwavering devotion that allowed them to surmount challenges that might deter others.
However, they also had support along the way. They became skilled teammates by experiencing the guidance of coaches who taught them how to train, improve, collaborate, and strategize.
Before they could make others better on the field, they were already beneficiaries of help and guidance. Allyship is like this. It is about addressing issues by adapting to new paradigms and working collaboratively to create a better world for all involved.
But there's a problem. Many people attempt to tackle the whole world's problems simultaneously. They undertake more than they can handle. They grapple with a dilemma faced by many before them: the belief that every problem within their perception is their responsibility to solve.
As you embark on the journey of effective allyship, you may be one of those who aim to make a difference. Your goals may be lofty, and you may want to appear effective to those watching your efforts. Yet, delving into true allyship can be far from impressive, as many significant transformations are imperceptible to the casual observer.
Taking a different approach, you can begin your allyship with yourself, using self as a guinea pig. By doing so, you create a safe space to make mistakes, take chances, and learn the true dynamics of transforming lives. As you practice on yourself, you can experiment without harming anyone but yourself, potentially benefiting from your own improved allyship skills and, in the process, those who have relied on your ineffective support.
In this model, effective allyship shifts from taking control and manipulating reality into something more profound. It centers on recognizing the shared reality with those you wish to assist and removing obstacles both externally and internally to allow the highest level of well-being for all to emerge. You become a collaborator, co-creating a new world in alignment with the needs of everyone involved.
The trap many fall into is believing that they must address every problem in the world. They assume an excessive burden of responsibility. They adopt allyship as a means to ease the inner turmoil stemming from their observation of global issues and their perceived impotence to rectify them.
The true challenge of allyship lies in the role of a beginner. It is the discomfort of venturing outside your comfort zone and taking on the vulnerable role of a student-practitioner. To surmount this challenge, many people skip the process of discomfort and opt for roles as waterboys or towel boys. They revert to the stands, disillusioned by their inability to be players, and hope that their mere patronage suffices as allyship. They mistake the comfort of the spectator for genuine participation, unwittingly perpetuating a culture of surface-level engagement.
The old model of allyship is fraught with pitfalls. It presumes that answers will come from external experts who will deliver a secret formula to instantaneously transform individuals into effective allies. This expert-driven approach prompts a quest to find these authorities, and even when found, disappointment arises when their prescribed path doesn't align with your unique journey.
Now, it may seem ironic that I, too, am outlining my path to effective allyship in this book. However, my intent is to foster a paradigm shift, guide your exploration of new territory, and create a positive feedback loop for you to help others achieve the results you've attained.
The answers we seek regarding how we want to be treated and what will genuinely empower us to transform our lives do not solely come from external sources. The old model of allyship wrongly assumes that the helper bears the primary responsibility for the help. As this notion extends to non-professionals, a multitude of individuals, with the best intentions, attempt to bear the burden of all the help themselves. The reality, however, is that it doesn't work that way.
The opportunities with this new model of allyship are profound. By allowing every individual to define what allyship means to them, we can teach people how to identify the versions of allyship that resonate with their unique values and objectives. Power arises from the ability to make choices, and a monolithic definition of effective allyship is often counterproductive. A lack of a fixed standard causes people to default to their unconscious definitions, leading them to rely on others' perceptions rather than trusting their inner wisdom.
Becoming an ally to yourself sets the stage for understanding the intricate process that others will undergo when receiving your assistance. This readiness positions you to advocate for your approach, knowing it worked for you and is likely to benefit people like you. Additionally, you'll adapt your allyship method to address the ever-evolving needs that arise, sparing you from discarding your model and starting anew each time you encounter a new challenge. This incessant cycle of beginning from scratch is one of the most disheartening aspects of contemporary allyship.
In the end, an increasing number of people worldwide are in need of allyship. Your allyship practice must possess the adaptability to address these emergent needs without compromising your values.
By mastering the art of allyship to yourself, you gain the ability to impart these skills to others. Much of the demand for effective allyship results from personal development tools that require a certain level of privilege to attain. By scaling self-efficacy, you enable others to empower themselves, teaching them to fish rather than merely providing them with a fish.
Helping someone who identifies as a victim is a peculiar endeavor. To empower them, which is to say offer them an chance to choose to step out of victim conciousness, you must sometimes tread the path of unhelpfulness, almost infuriatingly so.
While there are many victims in the world those who are stuck in victim conciousness want you to solve their problems for them. They seek allies who will remove their discomfort, validate their position, and reflect their worldview as they see it.
Sometimes its this very worldview that is the source of their problems.
When faced with this particular challenge in allyship, intoducing discomfort, paradoxically open's the door to their own realization of empowerment.
In doing so you can help them break free from the endless cycles of fear, sadness, and helplessness.
It's vital to understand that your helpfulness may not always be appreciated.
The part of a person that clings to the status quo may perceive your support as a threat to their very existence. People tend to accept only the help they've preordained as "helpful."
My foremost advice: do not attempt to assist someone who is not willing to receive your help. However, when they attempt to withdraw, you must maintain that connection, preventing their escape, even if it seems like self-sabotage.
Now, think about the creative possibilities of unhelpfulness. When you're striving to be a genuine ally, be mindful of all the ways people might unconciously sabotage their own progress to preserve their identity. This starts by looking at all the ways you may already be doing this.
It's in these unconventional angles of thinking that the magic of transformation often occurs.
So my last day at T-mobile was Friday. It was a bittersweet moment. On the one hand I was happy to be out of what was ultimately a highstress environment and have space for my own projects. On the other hand I was, and am still worried, about what it will mean to lose the financial "stability" that came from having a steady job.
When I allowed myself to move away from working on my business and taking something more structured and stable I told myself that I wasn't going to abandon the path for anything less than a "culture fit".
This is to say I didn't want to work for a company where I'd have to spend emotional energy dealing with the fact I didn't believe in their mission.
While working at T-mobile was ultimately too much of a strain on my emotional resources I actually learned a lot about the nature of service, operationalized care, which ended up making it into the book. The biggest of which is that even though I went into customer service because I didn't want to be a salesman, there isn't any service delivery without selling.
Let's take a few steps back.
My "career" has always been in customer service. The first job that I had in college was at a tea store called Teavanna. My second job was at the Apple Store. My next job after I graduated was at Airbnb Customer Service and then I ended up landing a gig in Alumni Relations and eventually before starting my coaching business working as an Executive Coordinator at Blue Sky Studios.
The common thread between all of these jobs was that I was directly helping people. There were elements to sales at Teavana and Apple. Both these jobs focused on creating the perfect solution. Of course I had my own feelings on what the perfect solution was. If I felt it was in the best interest of the customer then I'd fight tooth and nail for it. If I thought it was just some corporate speak to trick people into giving up their money then I'd ignore any pressure to sell.
At Airbnb and at Reed College Alumni programs I found myself on the consumer side, mediating conflict and repairing relationships. Something would happen to an Airbnb user, or an Alumni would demonstrate their displeasure with the college (through action or inaction) and my job was to create experiences that would bring them closer to the "institution."
Most of the "selling" I had to do in these contexts was selling the appropriate solution I'd negotiated with the user with the institution themselves.
It wasn't until I started working on my own "helping business" that I realized how much selling went into helping.
In the institutions a lot of the selling was done through identity, which is to say Alumni inherently wanted to be in right relationship with their college, Apple customers wanted to love their products, and Airbnb people already wanted to have fun engaging trips and get what they paid for. There was no need to sell them on this, all I had to do was deliver the service.
Working on my own business I have had to learn that I actually have to sell people on the idea of being and effective ally. As much as people don't like feeling bad about themselves, they are so used to it that it's actually pretty hard to get people to change their beliefs about what allyship could be and what it could look like.
It turns out people are already pretty sold on the idea that allyship has to be a struggle, that it has to be hard, that it has to be complicated. And for the last few yers Id' sat in the conviction that this was wrong without actually doing the work of selling people to the contrary.
Which leads up back to T-mobile. At T-mobile we were in a blended Service/Sales environment. While our job was mostly to fix problems we were encouraged to "deepen the relationship", which is to say encourage people to buy more things. I was vociferously against this until I started to notice something.
The people who had fewer things on their account were some of the most difficult customers to work with, and the people who had a bunch of things on their accoutn were, on the whole a lot easier. By deepening the complexity of the relationship, these highly engaged customers were more bought into the process. They knew how things were supposed to work, but also had a lot omore patience when things went wrong.
I wanted to learn how did this apply to allyship? In what ways have people deepened their relationship to their cynicism and addiction to struggle, and how has my practice of offering something radically different not honored the way they've chosen to live their lives?
Aside from providing information, and a "new way of thiking" have I actually created opportunities for people to engage with Mastering the Game of Allyship
But most importantly, when people DO decide to make the leap into being effective allies, how have I empowered them to deepen the relationship with the people who they want to help? The current state of allyship has people engaging at a shallow level, and applying their "care" broadly in ways that aren't that transformative. This is because people haven't commited to a style of allyship. They haven't embraced their superpower, they haven't identified those who they most want to serve. and in trying to serve all people they end up serving none of them particularly effectively.
Whats more, very few people, myself included, have master the art of selling their worldview in a way thats compelling, engaging and obvious.
My question for you my readers is, what's currently getting in the way of selling your vision of the world to those who are in need of it, and what's getting in the way of selling that vision of the world to yourself?
What would it look like to deepen the relationship you have to your own vision of how the world should be for those you want to help?
Earlier this month I learned I have to move out of my place in 3 weeks. This little one bedroom house in the riverside neighborhood of Wichita has been home for 3 years.
3 years of a lot of growth, struggle, heartache, and adventures.
Back in 2017 I had to goal of wanting to evelop a safe place for myself, within myself but also in my physical space.
During West Coast Winter(tm) I found myself with out safe spaces to lose myself. even as I travelled through some of the most beautiful locations in the world, I didn't feel as though I had a place to truly go wild, except for at home.
I've heard, adn experienced, that in every large creative undertaking you spend some time going absolutely insane.
The smaller the project, the less time spend out of your gourd.
A year-long book project means that I've also spent several months koo-koo for Cocoa Puffs in this house.
In a more practical sense, as someone who was experiencing less than ideal levels of success in business, I wanted to take advantage of the low cost of living in Wichita to perhaps save up some money while working at a steady job so as to eventually get the chance to focus on the work I'm most passionate about
Its the surprise little inconveniences and chaotic disruptions that shift intentions away from their mark in life.
It turns out, doing work you're not in alignment with takes up a lot of emotional energy.
Even if you're good at something, if you aren't able to bring your full self to it, the road is going to be rocky. And this is a feature not a bug of reality.
No one likes being betrayed. It isn't a pleasant sensation. And so when we betray ourselves,or appear to do so as a function of how attached to our intuitions we are, our subconscious depending on its level of development is usually out for some kind of revenge against the [self].
I don't necessarily believe in luck, but I do think there are subtle forces at play that allow us to recognize when we're in flow or when we're not.
And the times I've felt the luckiest is when I've been in flow.
A sudden move has a way of causing a chain of events that clears through the internal blockages in sympathy with objects in external reality.
But clearing blockages on your own versus having the universe intervene for you, well let's just say I know which on I prefer.
Which leads me to talk about the nature of grief and despair. When the chips are down and you've got no more gas in the tank, sadness shows its true colors.
If you're willing to surrender to the flow that's already present in your life, you don't actually need to energy of anger and fear to get you where you want to go. You can surrender to grief and trust that the path you've put before you leads to where you're meant to be.
And it always does.
And so here I am following the path of least resistance to get to ya'll with another book update.
Much Love-
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