Welcome to day 1 of my Mastering the Game of Allyship blog series! You may have noticed that this spiffy new website launched right around the same time that I announced I'm going to be running a Kickstarter to fund a book of the Mastering the Game of Allyship program. What a weird, strange coincidence. As part of that weird, strange coincidence, I'm also sharing short videos and blogs of what Mastering the Game of Allyship actually IS to help get you hype (March 1, 2022 kids; bookmark it and get ready to head to kickstarter). So here is my first tidbit for y'all: what IS allyship?
When I first made the program I tried to be cute and make my clients define allyship, but it turns out that's kind of a cop out. So let's start with one big shift: we want to be effective allies. Lots of us come to allyship wanting to be good people, and that brings a lot of baggage with it. Being an effective ally changes the game. It gives you actual win conditions for allyship, and lets you focus on what you do well, which helps keep you out of the shame/guilt/avoidance spiral (more on that in later posts).
Effective allyship is applied friendship. You can also think of it as applied helpfulness if that works for you.
Most of us have some concept of how to be a good friend intuitively: having aligned goals with someone and helping them get there. Bada bing bada boom: that's allyship.
Most of our allyship fails because we try and ally with people whose trust we haven’t earned and who we have no rapport with. On top of that we try and do it from a place of weakness and smallness instead of using our strengths to help people get huge results.
Because of this allyship is considered to be fraught, stressful and generally not fun. But you know what IS fun? Being dope around your friend. Using your unique skills to create massive impact in people's lives. Helping because you enjoy it and NOT to avoid negative consequences.
When we approach allyship as applied friendship, then we're just chilling with our buds instead of self-flagellating and that's a win for everyone.
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