"The meetings are phenomenal! The nutrition meeting literally changed my life! I shared the information with my family and we all started training and planning our diets together. Thank you!"

Leaders are self initiators and create. At Virtue Academy we recommend you start a mastermind group in which you discuss the topic of that class, practice your interpersonal meeting skills and deliver reports on your goals. The New York Metro group meets every two weeks. Most meetings you go to in life, the topic is a project or an issue. The difference between those types of meetings and a VA mastermind meeting is that we discuss the development of the individuals in the group. We have a meeting agenda, however, recommend improving it as your group sees fit. It is your organization and you should have control of it.

The road to strong leadership, particularly entrepreneurship, is long, hard and lonely at times. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, however, so persevere. You will notice that the friends you make in your mastermind group, as well as in the forum, become very close to you because they share the struggles and joys of your journey with you. True friends are there when you are doing poorly as well as when you are doing great. During the journey of living your dreams you may face poor times, both financially and emotionally, the true friends you have, especially the friends in your mastermind group, stick with you and support you all the way.

By no means do you have to set up a group. We recommend starting one for the personal interaction. Regardless if you set up a group or not, we do recommend you join the forum. The forum was established to talk about the ideas you learned in the audio books and is especially a place where you can ask important questions regarding leadership challenges you will face. For example, if you had questions on how to structure your startup venture, many of our members already have set them up, perhaps they could add a comment to your question that will take them a minute for them, but would take you 10 years for you to discover on your own.

The whole idea of the meetings is to set up times when you meet up to discuss the direction of your life. Surprisingly, many people do not ever even consider this topic. The New York Metro group meets on Mondays. The meetings are amazing and are more therapeutic than watching a movie or TV. We are trying to help people understand that either you manage your time and events, or allow them to be managed by others. This philosophy is firmly established in the Audio Book Syllabus. Simply put, we would rather work on our goals than watch TV.

Once you have a group together, you may want to ask guests to speak to the group, or hire professionals to teach your group specific topics. This is the only time we ask that our members contribute money. These for-pay courses are not mandatory, but a fee is necessary to pay the instructor. For example, our New York Metro group hired a ballroom dancing professional to teach us and several people signed up for the course. We all contributed to pay her and learned the Waltz, Tango, Salsa and many more dances. It was worth every penny. We are thinking of holding a public speaking seminar next to hone our public speaking skills. We recommend you do the same with your group. We hope you realize that you determine the skills you want. If you truly want to develop those skills, find a book on it and/or hire a local instructor who can teach you. It is that easy! Some of the topics our group identified follow. You may want to discuss these ideas in your meetings and may want to find professionals who can help you improve your skills in specific areas. Again, the level of knowledge you wish to acquire is up to you. The NYM focal areas of development are: