Everyone in the room thinks they’re the only one struggling

The connective ritual behind my closest friendships and the best teams asks the same question: What are you working on that you need help with?

During my PhD, I regularly participated in something called Shut Up and Write. The idea was (wait for it) to be quiet and work, but in a room full of people doing the same. Two hours, sometimes three, broken into 25-minute blocks with five-minute breaks and coffee in between.

I went to my first one because I was stuck, but also because I was promised free coffee. New to the Australian version of go-fast bean juice, I happily accepted the invitation but was skeptical that I needed a room full of strangers to help me work. So I showed up to this little café buried on the top floor of the music school, eight people huddled around a table with screens up and cords everywhere. And we got down to work.

Something interesting happened during the first break. People around the table asked, “What are you working on?” The woman across from me was three months into a chapter rewrite she hated. Somebody else had been stuck in the lab for most of the year. I mentioned in passing that I was still looking at my research question and had no idea how to begin narrowing it down, honestly wondering whether I could do this doctorate thing.

Then people started recommending things. Check out this book. Talk to this person who did her fieldwork on exactly that. In a five-minute break, I received more help than I had in the last three months. But most importantly, what I heard was: You are not alone.

Until that morning, I had one data point on what was stuck. Me. I must not be doing enough. I compared other people’s finished chapters to my drafts, and between the two, the only explanation for the state of my work was, again, me. It wasn’t good enough; therefore, I must not be good enough. Do I even belong here?

But being in a room full of people in the same situation — the hell a PhD program can be — there was something deeply connective. These people “got it.” Had no one asked, “What are you working on?”, we would have stayed in what Dale Miller and Deborah Prentice call pluralistic ignorance: a group of people who privately hold the same doubt, each reading everyone else’s quiet as evidence that they are the only one skeptical. Nobody says the thing, so the condition maintains itself: We suffer in silence together.

Shut Up and Write was a vehicle for the opposite. For the first time, I was around people who understood the difficulty and knew it wasn’t a personal failing. When everyone in a room is working on something difficult and can be honest about it — this is hard because it is hard, not because I am bad — that awareness raises the level for everyone in the room. The PhD tends to be highly isolating, but over the next two years, I had people from across that university who could and would help me. That rarely happens.

How this happens at work

Years later, I was consulting, and every week all of the learning designers got on a team call. The focus was always the same: What are you working on that you need help with?

No one was attached to ego. Here’s what I see; try this. I’d move this breakout to 20 minutes. I’d cut this framework and reference this article here. The best collaborative work I’ve been a part of came out of those calls, and so did the best working relationships I’ve ever had. It was consistently the highlight of our week and a demonstration that we were the type of team that cared most about doing great work for the client, rather than taking credit.

Daniel Coyle, who has spent years inside groups that outperformed their talent, describes the mechanism the way someone might describe exercise. Groups get stronger the same way bodies do, by doing hard things together, and sometimes the hardest things are the emotional ones. The teams he studied created those moments by putting them on the schedule and giving people the chance to share their stories, put themselves in vulnerable positions, and ask for help. Through these “reps” of sharing a hard thing, we create psychological safety, a property of high-performing teams and cultures.

This means the room I ended up in because of delicious, free, superior Australian coffee (I said it, fight me) is something we can create in our own lives.

Try the smallest version

The simplest version of this is something I’ve come to call “Ask and Offer,” where you say to a group of people what you’re working on and where you’re stuck. They help. Then you listen for where you can help somebody else. Everybody gets a turn.

At work it’s easier because you can organize by function. Put people together who do versions of the same job, and the help gets specific fast. That was the learning designers’ weekly call, and we kicked ass on our work and grew incredibly close quite quickly. If done right, this is performance and culture building on steroids.

And to be clear, this doesn’t have to be two hours of mostly silence like Shut Up and Write if that’s not your bag. In my current role, my colleagues across the company and I now run a session called Eat the Frog, early in the morning every two weeks, to do the things we’ve been avoiding.

Outside of work, I’ve found something like this harder to get going at first. There’s no internal function to organize around, no deliverables, and no calendar telling you when you have to meet that week. But if you can make it happen, I’ve also found this to be one of the best parts of my year: sitting with friends and asking, “What are you working on that you need help with?”

For the last few years, four of my friends and I have taken a weekend together. Sometimes it looks like a lot of drawing on a whiteboard in a breakout room; sometimes it’s someone screen-sharing their latest website on a TV in an Airbnb living room. The get-together all started because I wanted more time with two friends who both cared about me and could help me, and that combination is rarer than it sounds. Most of the weekend goes to Ask and Offer, where each has dedicated space to put whatever he’s working on in front of everybody and ask the group, “What do you see? How can you help?” Business. Relationships. I don’t know what I want next. All equally welcome.

I’ve known two of those men for three years now, and in such a short amount of face time, they’re among my closest friends. We built a weekend where Ask and Offer is on the agenda. We did the hard work, put in our emotional reps, and then kept showing up.

To practice this, you don’t need a weekend or a PhD program. You need an hour, some people doing hard things, and somebody willing to go first.

What are you working on that you need help with?

This article is featured on Big Think.