Strengthening relationships in challenging times
Hard seasons do not weaken real alliances. They reveal which ones were real. What the pandemic actually exposed about mastermind groups, and why the lesson outlasts the moment.
The pandemic did not invent virtual mastermind groups. It exposed which groups had real structure and which were social ties pretending to be communities.
When in-person stopped being possible in 2020, every group claiming to be a “community” got a stress test it had not signed up for. Some rooms moved to Zoom on the same cadence and kept producing for years afterward. Others held a few awkward video calls and quietly dissolved. The difference was never the platform. It was whether the room was held together by structure or by proximity. Proximity-held rooms could not survive the loss of proximity. Structure-held rooms barely noticed it.
That distinction is the lesson, and it survives the moment. It applies to every relationship that has to hold under pressure — pandemics, moves, life changes, business cycles, hard seasons of any kind.
What hard seasons actually do to alliances
Most adult relationships exist on a default of low-effort contact. You see each other at things you would have been at anyway. You bump into each other through shared circles. The relationship maintains itself because the surrounding environment does the maintenance work. Most people never notice this because they have never had it removed.
Hard seasons remove it. The shared environment goes away, or compresses, or stops producing the casual contact that had been doing the work. What remains is whatever the relationship actually was underneath the environment. For many relationships, the answer is “not very much.” Those relationships fade — sometimes gradually, sometimes overnight when the environment changes. For a smaller number, the answer is “a real connection that has its own internal weight.” Those hold, often strengthen, when external scaffolding goes away.
A working alliance is the second kind. It has internal weight. The cadence is deliberate, not accidental. The members show up because they decided to, not because the environment routed them there.
This is also why hard seasons sometimes make alliances. Two people who would have stayed acquaintances will sometimes, under pressure, decide to do the work of staying in deliberate contact, and the relationship becomes something it would never have been in easy times. The same is true of small groups. The constraint reveals who is willing to maintain the connection deliberately, and the maintenance itself produces something stronger than what existed before.
What working mastermind groups did during the pandemic
The rooms that kept running through 2020 and 2021 had a small number of properties in common, none of them about technology.
They had a real cadence, and they held it. Every other week meant every other week, even when nobody had anything to report, even when half the room was exhausted, even when meeting felt pointless. Holding cadence in low seasons is how groups stay groups; abandoning cadence is how they dissolve.
They had a format that did not depend on the room being physical. Hot seats translated to Zoom without modification. Commitments reviews worked the same on a screen. Rooms whose value came from “the energy of being in a room together” did not translate; rooms whose value came from the working format did.
They had real work to bring. Members who came because they had something to work on — a decision, a problem, a stuck project — kept showing up because the room produced something useful. Members who came mostly for the social texture had less reason to keep showing up once the social texture got harder.
They had facilitation, even informally. Someone held time, surfaced what was being avoided, brought the meeting to a close. Rooms running on collective good intentions without an explicit facilitator decayed faster.
These are the same properties that distinguish working rooms in easy times. The pandemic just made them visible by removing everything else the room had been resting on.
The mistake of crediting the platform
After the pandemic, there was a wave of writing crediting Zoom, Slack, and similar platforms with “saving” connection. This gets the direction of causation wrong.
The platforms made it possible for rooms with real structure to continue. They did not produce structure where none existed. Rooms that had been substantive translated and continued; rooms that had been mostly proximity-driven did not, regardless of which tool they tried.
This matters because the same mistake repeats whenever a new tool appears. The new tool is supposed to “solve” connection — Slack channels, Circle communities, group chats, paid Discord servers, async video. None of them solve connection. The structure does the work; the tool only carries it. A working room can be carried by almost any tool. A non-working room cannot be saved by any of them.
The right way to think about platforms: they are mediums, not generators. They transmit what is there. They do not produce what is not.
What the lesson means going forward
The pandemic was a particular hard season. There will be others — for individual members, for industries, for whole regions. The lesson does not require a pandemic to be useful.
The actionable form of it: if a relationship matters, build the structure that lets it survive without environmental support. This means deliberate cadence rather than incidental contact. It means real work, real commitment, real format — for two-person friendships as much as for six-person rooms. It means treating the alliance the way you would treat any other piece of important infrastructure: maintained intentionally, not assumed to maintain itself.
In practice this looks like: a monthly call you actually hold. A recurring meeting that does not get rescheduled when something else comes up. A working group that uses the same agenda every time. A friendship where someone has decided to be the person who initiates. The form varies; the deliberate maintenance does not.
Where this sits in the method
Alliances are Pillar 4 of the Mastery Method. The reason the pillar exists — and the reason it sits next to Mastermind Groups (Pillar 5) — is that most of what matters in a life or a career happens through other people, and the way to make that durable is to build relationships with internal structure rather than relying on environments to do the work.
Hard seasons are the test, not the source, of strong alliances. They reveal what was already there. The work is to build something there before the test comes.
See also: What is a mastermind alliance? · Optimizing your network — Dunbar’s number · The power of accountability in mastermind groups · Mastermind groups and collective potential