When Support Goes Deeper Than Advice
Insights and Activities from the April Joyful Connection Masterclass
Covve’s latest Joyful Masterclass for Connection Professionals took a different shape this month. Instead of a series of activities led by different facilitators, the session unfolded as a single sustained experience. A mastermind.
The design choice was deliberate. Most peer groups, even well intentioned ones, default to the same pattern. Someone shares a challenge. Others rush to fix it. Advice is offered quickly, solutions are proposed confidently, and the person at the centre of the conversation quietly disengages. The intention behind the advice is usually care. The effect is often the opposite.
This session was built to interrupt that pattern.
The masterclass focused on one central idea. Support does not deepen when we give better advice. It deepens when we share honest experiences. Across three acts, participants moved from naming what matters, to surfacing what is in the way, to being held in a structured conversation where no one was trying to fix anything. Here is a closer look at how the session was designed.
Naming What Matters Most with Asha Sarode
Setting the foundation through intentional focus
The session opened with a deceptively simple question. What really matters to you to make progress on in the next three to six months?
The framing was important. Participants were not asked about the urgent, the reactive, or the top of mind. They were asked to identify the top five percent. The things that, if moved forward, would genuinely change the shape of the year. This distinction matters because peer conversations tend to gravitate toward the noise of daily life. A difficult colleague, a stressful week, an unanswered email. These are real, but they are rarely the things that a mastermind is designed to address.
Asha Sarode modelled the exercise first. She spoke about simplifying her life by closing open loops that were keeping her reactive rather than purposeful. The answer was honest, specific, and personal. It was not a polished vision statement, and it was not a productivity headline. It was a quiet admission that the conditions for doing meaningful work were not yet in place.
That tone set the standard for the room. Participants shared foundations, not ambitions. Systems for managing overwhelming inboxes. Building a pipeline of meaningful work. Getting enough rest. Finding alignment between daily activity and personal values. These were the quiet structural concerns that rarely surface in conversations but sit underneath almost everything else. Without them, larger goals tend to stall.
The exercise revealed something important. When people are given permission to name what actually matters, rather than what sounds impressive, the conversation changes immediately. Depth becomes possible because the starting point is already honest. The room no longer has to perform its way into connection. It can begin there.
How to Practice It:
- Ask participants to identify the top five percent of what matters, not the urgent or reactive
- Model the answer first with something personal and specific rather than aspirational
- Give space for foundations and systems, not just visible goals
Surfacing Obstacles with Sarah Schairer and Stephen Jaye
Turning honest self observation into a specific ask
Once intentions were named, the conversation moved one level deeper. What is actually getting in the way?
This is the question most peer groups skip. It is easier to talk about goals than to name the specific blocker that keeps returning. Goals feel expansive and forward looking. Obstacles feel uncomfortable because they often reveal something about us that we would rather not examine. Yet without naming the obstacle, any support the group offers is aimed at the wrong target.
Sarah Schairer modelled the shift by speaking about a familiar pattern. Her work depends on steady business development, yet business development is the activity she consistently deprioritizes. It is always the last thing on the calendar, and somehow it always disappears from it. Stephen Jaye named something different but equally honest. His obstacle was not a task but a reflex. The anticipation of negative feedback that quietly shapes what he chooses to put into the world, and what he holds back.
Both examples did something useful. They framed the obstacle as a pattern rather than a single incident. This reframing matters. A one time setback invites sympathy but not much else. A pattern invites real engagement from peers who recognize it in themselves. It also gives the person naming it a more accurate view of what they are actually dealing with, which is rarely a circumstance and usually a behavior.
Participants were then asked to do two things. Name the obstacle, and translate it into a specific ask. What question would they want to put to the group? What outcome would they hope for? This step prevented the conversation from drifting into general complaint, which is where unstructured peer conversations tend to settle. It gave each participant a clear request that peers could actually respond to, and it gave the person speaking a sense of agency over the support they were about to receive.
The observation from the room was consistent. When obstacles are named as patterns and paired with a specific ask, the people listening stop feeling like bystanders and start feeling like collaborators. The energy shifts from sympathy to engagement, and the conversation becomes a working space rather than a venting one.
How to Practice It:
- Ask participants to name the obstacle as a pattern rather than a single incident
- Require each person to translate the obstacle into a specific question or desired outcome
- Frame the exercise as preparation for receiving support, not as venting
Sharing Experience Instead of Advice with JGo Gordon and Tim Jones
Replacing solutioning with honest personal stories
The final act is where the mastermind format becomes distinctive, and where it most often feels counterintuitive.
JGo Gordon took the presenter seat. He spoke about preparing for a new role as the principal of a middle school, carrying both the excitement of a long held dream and the quiet anxiety of walking into a staff who had seen several principals come and go in a short space of time. He had sent welcoming emails and received no replies. The silence was already doing its work on him, and he named a familiar pattern of his own. When something does not go the way he expects, his instinct is to retreat rather than persist. The context was new, but the response to it was not.
What happened next was the heart of the design. JGo turned his camera and microphone off. The presenter stepped out of the centre of the conversation. This physical act, small as it seems, does something significant. It removes the pressure of performance from the person who just made themselves vulnerable, and it frees the group to speak without the usual instinct to soften or tailor their words to the listener in the room.
Tim Jones then shared a personal story from his own work. Not as advice, but as lived experience. He described walking into a group of professionals who had not engaged with his pre-work, and making a conscious choice to stop trying to prove value and start showing up with care. He described bringing in childhood photos, inviting people to share what had made them come alive when they were young. He described the shift from transactional to relational, and the trust that followed. The story was complete in itself. It offered no instruction for what JGo should do next.
This structure protects something important. When advice is offered directly, the person receiving it often feels evaluated. Walls go up. A quiet internal response kicks in that asks, do they understand my situation, do they think I have not already considered this, are they actually listening. When experience is shared instead, the same insight can be offered without the implicit judgement. The listener gets to extract their own meaning from someone else’s story, and that meaning tends to be more durable than any instruction could have been because they arrived at it themselves.
The host named this distinction explicitly during the session. Advice invites defence. Experience invites reflection. Participants reflected afterwards that the act of telling their own stories, not just hearing others, had surprised them. In articulating what they had lived through, they noticed wisdom in their own history that they had not previously credited themselves with.
How to Practice It:
- Have the presenter turn off camera and microphone so the group is not performing for them
- Ask each participant to share a personal experience that relates, using I statements only
- Close the loop by asking the presenter what they are taking away and what support would look like
Thank You for Joining Us
A heartfelt thank you to the founder team facilitators who shaped this mastermind and to every participant who brought their obstacles, their questions, and their stories into the room. The willingness to be specific, to ask clearly, and to share without fixing is what made the session what it was.
The format reinforced a simple truth. Peer groups become powerful not when members give each other better answers, but when they trust each other enough to share honest experience and let the other person draw their own conclusions.
We look forward to continuing to build spaces where people can ask for support, receive it generously, and take something real away, one conversation at a time.
