Meet The New TPM Moderator & Coach: Ali Scarlett

Quote from Lucio Buffalmano on December 11, 2022, 5:08 am

Quick announcement:

Ali Scarlett is now a forum moderator, and we're talking to add Ali's coaching to TPM's offering.

I've been thinking about how to involve Ali more in TPM, including in more concrete forms.

So when I "popped the question" yesterday I was very glad he accepted :).

Forum Admin / Moderation

You probably noticed this:

With a community of cool, high-quality eagles, moderation is rarely needed here -and 99% of it is moving a thread or changing a title-.

So it's not as much a case of "help was needed for moderation", but more of a public acknowledgment and recognition of Ali's role and contribution in TPM -plus, it goes well with the coaching as it adds a tiny layer of publicly visible "authority"-.

Just some of the traits/skills/personality I've seen over time that make Ali a great fit:

• Early joiner with staying power: one of the earliest joiners, still here
  • Flew past the turbulences: impeccable behavior over time. He flew past the small turbulences that are almost bound to happen in any online community. He maintained solid relationships, quickly put the issue behind without grudges, and steamed on
• Growth: most people here, me included, grew. Some showed incredible growth over time. Ali is also part of that club.
  • Example of what's possible: we mentioned this in the interview for The Social Strategist. When the forum was open for non-alumni several threads with questions and case studies made me think "ouch". But I've only seen one going from there, to "wow"
• A doer: to quip Steve Jobs, Ali ships :).
• Domain expertise & authority: there are several high-credibility folks in the forum, and Ali is surely one of them. Besides the forum more common topics, Ali has also become a top expert in domains such as:
  • Networking: Ali took several principles of power dynamics, mixed and added other sources and his own sauce, and applies them to a new field. That's how you take a groundbreaking discipline and popularize it and expand it horizontally (rather than vertically, as I mostly focus on)
  • Marketing / copywriting: an important niche of influence & persuasion and part of the larger drive to self-development (he also re-did 99% of the current Power University sales page. And you can bet he'd have done a much more thorough job for this post's picture 🙂 )
• Social capital (liked & respected): there are many forum members that are both liked and respected (call it "power and warmth"), and Ali is surely one of them
• Level-headedness & balance, albeit moderation isn't much needed, it's still important to have a level-headed person to handle it in a moderator role in case it may be necessary one day.
  But even more important than the extreme and unlikely cases, you want a good example in a moderator role for what it says about the place itself. A level-headed individual is crucial to provide any environment with the confidence, trust, and stability that allow it to thrive over the long run (at a national level, it's one of the reasons why stable democracies with stable countries outperform unstable non-democracies)

Forum Admin / Moderation

As for the coaching, we just started talking.

It may start first as a product to book a 1:1 chat/call with Ali.

And I thought about an upsell to Power University.
It could be a great option for those who appreciate guidance in clarifying the concepts, applying them in real life, internalizing them and becoming a higher quality person, or discussing how they can solve their own very individual challenges.

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Future Collabs

Ali was an obvious choice for the reasons above, the contributions, and also that he went on a similar path of self-employment in the social skills / self-development area.

Some other great folks here have full-time jobs, but I'd be happy to include more good people, and extend more collaborations in the future.

That includes product reviews, as we did with @mats-g.

Or bigger projects.

In the past, we started a project on developing emotional / social intelligence and foundational socialization skills with Matthew.

And we talked with Transitioned about applying power dynamics principles to project management / workplaces.

We haven't gone the distance on those (yet), but happy to see more cool ideas and projects blossom in the future.