What do people say behind your back?

What do people say behind your back?

A few years ago, I paid a psychologist named Jack Skeen to interview my then-wife, closest friends, and co-workers, then write a 360-degree review of my whole life.

What came back was brutal.

By page three, I wanted to crawl under my desk.

It was a non-stop dossier laying out my flaws as a human being.

And while it was miserable to read and triggered a midlife crisis, it was also one of the most valuable things I've ever done.

It felt like ten years of therapy in a month.

The problem with being a human is that you don't experience yourself.

You experience your intentions and the stories you invent to explain your behaviour.

Everyone else experiences your actual behaviour.

Sometimes those are very, very different.

Once a week, I go to a boardroom with six to eight other men, and we talk about our lives.

Personal. Family. Business. Everything.

Everything said is confidential, and the structure keeps the meeting from turning into a very expensive group chat.

It's called a forum, and I started doing it through Entrepreneurs' Organization in 2009.

It's basically group therapy, but if you called it that, nobody would join. So we call it forum.

I love it so much that I've started five of them.

Some of my forum mates know me better than my closest friends.

They've watched me get married, divorced, start companies, break down, get defrauded, have kids, make stupid decisions, and occasionally learn from them.

If you want to start one, don't overcomplicate it.

Find six to eight people you respect, agree that everything stays in the room, meet every month, and ban prescriptive advice unless someone asks for it.

But I noticed a problem:

Things sometimes go unsaid.

The same person talks too much every meeting.

Someone else hides aggression behind a joke.

One person brings the same problem for five years and never does anything about it.

You all notice, but nobody wants to be the asshole who says it.

So I built Forum360 to help my forums do what Jack did for me.

It's really simple: once a year, every member gives feedback to every other member as well as the group itself.

The app anonymizes everything they say using AI, combines it into private reports, and rewrites it so someone can hear the truth without immediately wanting to kill the person who wrote it.

Each person gets the stuff they're great at, the blind spots everyone else can see, and a few concrete things to work on.

The forum gets its own health report and a meeting agenda for talking about what needs to change.

If you're in YPO, EO, Vistage, Hampton, or any other executive forum, I'd love it if you tried it.

Then go make your friends talk about you behind your back.

It's good for you.

Try Forum360 here. I'd love to hear what you think.

PS: This works for any type of group like this. Book club. Wine nights. Anything where you have a group of 5-10 people who get together regularly and want to improve.

Originally published in the Are you guys hanging out without me? issue of Never Enough.