Welcome to day 3! We're going to continue breaking down all the concepts of the game of allyship today, and this is one of the most exciting bits: this is where we get to really define what the game is and how you win. Everyone wants to win. But if you don't know what it means to win, you can't do it. So let's give you that good, good definition shall we?
In general, people want to be helpful in ways that are easy and intuitive. They want to be able to see something and do something. That sounds awesome, right? Unfortunately most issues surrounding allyship are things we don't have tons of power around. We don't have great ways to interface with them. The game of allyship is finding effective interface systems to the problems you see.
Ok. How do you do that?
Your allyship superpower.
I hear you. You're out there saying "my fucking what?" Don't worry. You'll get the deep dive in the book, but here's the short version:
Something you can do in 30 minutes that will save someone 9 months of time.
30 minutes is a really nice, small amount of time to volunteer: 30 minutes a week or month isn't too overwhelming. Plus you can track it!
The goal is that it's also something you really enjoy. Typically, people's allyship is doing things they don't enjoy doing, that isn't appreciated, and that doesn't have a huge impact. Instead we're all focused on suffering and martyrdom. That's all the wrong things.
Now since we're talking about the GAME of allyship, that means that there has to be a win condition.
In standard understandings of allyship, there is no win condition: it's tetris. You play until you lose. We're constantly helping people to better and better lives. Maybe you still keep that conception of allyship as the larger game. That's totally ok! It gives you a lot of challenges and can be a fun type of game to play.
But to keep yourself motivated and moving forward, it helps a LOT to create smaller games within the game of allyship. Each of them has their own win condition. One great example is what we just talked about: finding your allyship superpower.
Actually, guess what: you have a new game today. Find your allyship superpower. When you've done that, you've won! Go out, reward yourself. Buy some champagne. You deserve it.
Fun fact: you probably will fail a lot of the time. That's a huge part of the practice. Generally we don't spend the whole time we're playing a game winning, and that's fine. You just keep finding new games with concrete win conditions (what specific things do I want to do for specific people) and rewarding yourself when you achieve them. Whoop!
Comments