Part II: The Antidote: 7 Cups
Chapter 5: Join the Care Revolution
The second half of this book helps you break out of denial and distraction. The 7 Cups program will help you begin to reach out to others, solve the problems that are hounding you and become part of a movement that is slowly changing the world. The program has emerged from current research, the helping professions, secular and sacred traditions, and our experience with 7 Cups over the last two and half years. This is the best of everything. This is what works.
Our aim is to break down this process of personal growth to help you and millions of others change their lives and make the world a better place. We learned a lot about this process through building the 7 Cups community. Let’s start with the 7 Cups story.
The 7 Cups Story
Looking back over my life, I can see that the idea for 7 Cups has emerged from my different experiences in non-profit work and also in my role as a psychologist. But it wasn’t until I became a start-up entrepreneur and began to understand how the Internet can be used to make everything we do more immersive, that the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. If we could take everything we knew about how to help people, and put it on the Internet, then help could scale, it could reach everybody, everywhere like never before. But how? I only knew that it had to be very simple and very effective.
One night, I was sitting at my kitchen table, drinking tea and talking to my wife about a business problem. It was really challenging. As always, she was empathically listening to me. Her care helped me see the problem in a different light so that I could solve it. It was at that point that the clouds parted, the sun shone through, and I had the insight I had been waiting on.
What if, any time you needed it, you could access a person who would listen to you and care about your problem?
We talked about this idea for the rest of the night and, 7 cups of tea later...as they say, the rest is history.
I was fortunate enough to be invited to be part of the Silicon Valley startup accelerator, YCombinator, and was able to raise the funds as well as get a real crash-course in startup life, which helped me get 7 Cups off the ground.
Since then, 7 Cups has grown tremendously. When it was just my wife and I, we were doing 50 conversations a week. Now, we are doing over 130,000. Our team has gone from just me in a small room over my garage to an amazing team of people I admire, respect, and look forward to working with each day. Today we are building a free, global, emotional support system and that is amazing to me. But what is even more amazing is what 7 Cups has taught me, all of the unexpected truths about being human that I have learned, that have deepened my respect for us as a species. I want to share with you what the true magic of 7 Cups is.
When we first launched 7 Cups we could never find enough listeners. We always had way too much demand. One of our early listeners suggested that we put up a little blue banner that said, “Did you know that one of the best ways to help yourself is to help somebody else? Consider becoming a listener today.” I balked at this initially. I was in the stodgy psychologist camp and this was outside of the box for me in a big way. Eventually, he won me over. We put up the blue banner and our listener population began to grow dramatically.
“The thing that struck me the most was how incredibly human everyone was. I was amazed by the ease with which I could relate to someone, even if their issue wasn’t something I’d experienced personally. We all have feelings and it’s so easy to feel like you are the only one who feels this angry, or this confused, or this specific combination of futile sadness and numb rolled into one. But we’re all so much less alone that we think. More than once, members described feelings to me that I’d felt myself at some point, but had never put into words. It was surreal. It was healing. Each chat left me feeling a more fulfilled, a little stronger and dare I say it, a little wiser. Foolishly, I’d been thinking I was doing the world a favour by signing up to be a listener, but it turned out they were doing me the biggest favour of all. I felt deeply privileged that people felt safe to share their story with me. Being a listener was an honour. I felt more connected to humankind than I ever had in my entire life.” Quote from a 7 Cups Listener
This story is really symbolic of how 7 Cups has evolved in a couple of ways. First, it didn’t take me too long to figure out that all of us are much smarter than any of us. I started actively telling everyone who joined us that 7 Cups is like a great big sphere. You fit somewhere on this sphere. Mark off your territory and figure out how to make that space better. Run experiments, try things, struggle, and fail. See a problem on 7 Cups that bothers you? Then try to solve it. It wasn’t long before we had an extensive leadership system built out and teams to manage all the different components that made the overall ecosystem of 7 Cups flourish.
The 100% truth is that 7 Cups is what it is because of our community. No one brilliant person came up with a strategic plan and implemented 7 Cups. Rather, 7 Cups has emerged through trial and a lot of error and a lot of feedback and insight from our devoted community. Out of that messy and sometimes rocky process, this brilliant system has emerged.
The second important thing that we learned, the thing that changed the way we view the world and people was that these new members-turned-listeners started telling me that becoming a listener is what really changed their lives. Even while still hurting, they were able to love others in an effective way. And, loving others in turn brought healing to them.
It is the community that makes 7 Cups magical. We have gone through our own learning process as we have overcome challenges and had the opportunity to love this community. Many people come to 7 Cups, come because they need help. They don’t have it all together, they sometimes don’t fit into the world as it is right now. Our society doesn’t teach us to respect hurting people. A lot of our society’s help is sometimes given in a not-very-well-veiled sense of contempt. But in this place, at 7 Cups, where hurting people give time, love and respect to other hurting people, a true magic happens. When a person is safe and respected, their unique talents can emerge. Our community is made up of people from every walk of life. All of us together make this place something truly special.
What does all of this have to do with you?
Well, what we’ve had the privilege to learn is that each person is important, from the highest functioning, most successful, to those who are struggling the most, to the most eccentric. However you would describe yourself...we need you here. We need each and every person plugged in, using their talents, strengths, and unique perspectives to help us grow. Studies have shown that people from all ranges of intelligence perform better than a group of all highly intelligent people. Homogeneity is a real liability in the world we now live in. We need people from all backgrounds and we need them to be their unique and interesting selves. There are a lot of hurting, lonely people in this world, and a lot of people trapped in denial and systems of distraction. It is a real and legitimate crisis. We need your unique perspective, engaged and plugged in, in order to solve it.
And we need to solve this problem of how to reach out and engage one another as human beings in order to solve all of the other pressing issues of our time as well.
The message I’m sending to you is that you are wearing a t-shirt with an image of Planet Earth on it. It says “Crew Member” on the back. You are important. You matter. People can be jerks. They may have said hateful things to you. They were wrong.
We believe you have greatness in you. You may be aware of this greatness, but afraid to believe it. It is time to let go of those old unhelpful fears because we need you to join our team. You have uncommon talents that will help move us all forward.
“There’s always something to do on 7 Cups. There’s always someone who wants to talk, a new listener looking for help, an interesting project to get involved in, or an exciting new leadership role to apply for. You can provide peer support to fellow listeners and help them to cool off after a difficult chat session. You can work towards being a mentor and get involved with training new listeners and improving chat quality. If you spot a problem, you can stretch your brain to come up with a solution, and then implement it and see your very own plans in action. Being trusted and allowed to experiment was incredibly empowering to me. I had never felt so meaningfully successful, so regularly, than I had on 7 Cups. There are so many ways to flourish, so many ways to become the best version of yourself, and so many people willing to help you do it. The community will cheer you on every step of the way.” - Quote from a 7 Cups Mentor
This process of unlocking the greatness in you is both simple and hard. It is simple in that it consists of facing your problems and caring for other people. It is hard in that there are lots of distractions that are hungry for your attention and want to keep you from personal growth.
We have created the 7 Cups Program to support and guide you. Strong, healing relationships with positive people are essential. We all need a strong community. You can find a support network of people on 7cups.com. Some of us have been working this program for quite a while. Others are just starting. It doesn’t matter. When one of us moves forward, we all move forward together.
The Program is modeled after the famous 7 Cups of Tea poem, by Lu Tong. The basic idea is that each cup provides a different level of awareness, wellness, and healing. It is a process that you return to regularly, much like sitting down and having a cup of tea with a good friend. Learning to face your problems and care for others is an art and a practice. It will be challenging, but the key is that we will walk with you each step of the way.
7 Cups Program
Cup 1: Open: Share what is on your heart
Cup 2: Attune Attune to love
Cup 3: Practice: Practice skills to increase calm
Cup 4: Live: Sleep, exercise and eat well
Cup 5: Accept: Accept what life brings you
Cup 6: Care: Care for others that need support
Cup 7: Commit: Live according to what is important
“My first chat was a young man going through a very difficult time with an abusive relative. I listened to him for 45 minutes and during the chat, I felt something in my chest opening up. It was a strange feeling, but not a bad one. It was like I could actually feel myself making space in my heart to hold him and care for him as he shared his troubles with me. I was surprised by how much I could relate to him, and how much I cared. I genuinely wanted him to be okay. I’d thought of myself as quite a cool, detached person up until now, but here I was caring for a complete stranger and meaning it. At the end of the chat he left me a review. ‘She made my heart feel warmer,’ he’d written. I cried.” Quote from a 7 Cups Listener
