Guests Take Us Home

Every team meeting is like a small hero's journey.

A hero's journey ends with a Homecoming, in which the hero brings his trophy (symbolically a sword) back to his original world (his home). The "trophy" (also called takeaway or paycheck) from a team meeting is often something that a man learned, or an achievement of growth or healing which can be expressed by a brief testamonial such as "I let go of some of my anger about my father".

As such, in our Confidentiality agreements we generally invite Men to "take what they learned for/about themselves out into the world". A guest often is fairly new to this work, and this meeting might constitute one of his first 10-100 hero's journeys. He is likely to have learned something for/about himself and so he can be invited to close the meeting with a statement of this type:

What I learned about myself as a result of being here tonight is... (tell the thing learned or describe the growth achieved)

Some of my own takeaways have been:

Given that I tend to eagerly interrupt, tonight I have learned that one very effective way to practise not interrupting is to attend a team meeting being conducted in another language. (In this instance I was completely able to understand everything being said, but as I was dependent on realtime translation with a 5-second delay, by the time I had anything to say the speaker would have already moved on to the next thought)

This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF, and was last updated on 2026 Jan 16.

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