How to shorten the road to your goal using your mentor’s help
Mentorship is not a modern trend that came from the West. Mentors have been needed since the old days. It was a matter of survival. Experienced elders conveyed their knowledge to the youth, teaching them the difference between edible and poisonous mushrooms and berries, and the recipes of herbal medicines.
The word “mentor” runs back to the Homer’s “Odyssey”. Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, had a tutor and teacher named Mentor, his father’s old friend. Since that time this name has become a common noun referring to an experienced skillful person who can give advice and recommendations to others.
Telemachus and Mentor
Who Needs a Mentor in the 21st Century?
A mentor in the modern world is first of all a person that helps you grow professionally. And it doesn’t matter what step of the career ladder you are at. You may have just graduated from University and started searching for a job. You may be a top manager that feels that he has hit the ceiling and has no idea where to grow next. Or you have started your own business and faced the first challenges. All these cases are a perfect occasion to come to a mentor.
Some statistics*
30% startups are closed during their first 2 years.
50% of them are closed during their first 5 years.
70% of mentored businesses work successfully for more than 5 years.
*Based on the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) research.
You don’t have to choose a mentor from “the best of the best”, a person from the Forbes list. You just need to find someone who is one or two levers higher than you. Who has already travelled your way and knows perfectly what to do and how to reach the goals you have set for yourself.
The main objective of mentorship is your professional growth. But you can’t develop your professional skills without upgrading your personal qualities at the same time. So mentorship also includes elements of life coaching that result in changing your mentality and the way you treat yourself and others. Emotional intellect, self-esteem, leadership skills – get ready for a huge upgrade in all areas.
How Can a Mentor Be Useful?
He supports you in the process of decision-making, shares his experience unconditionally and prevents your mistakes. Besides, he recommends you valuable business contacts and connects you to the people you need. A mentor also:
- Works with you on goal-setting
- Helps “cut the distance” and reach your goals dramatically faster
- Inspires and supports you
- Determines resources that you already have and recommends you where to find what you lack
- Connects you to other people and makes you a more outstanding person
How Is Your Interaction Organized?
Many people start searching a mentor with a wrong idea in mind: “I’ll find a mentor and he will make me successful”. As a matter of fact, the correlation is quite the opposite: “I will become successful and it will help me find a mentor”.
You can’t make your mentor interested in you if you don’t stand out of the crowd. If you want a person to become your mentor, show him how up-and-coming you are, offer help, become a volunteer in his project.
For example, after I decided that I wanted Tony Robbins, №1 world trainer, to become my mentor, I started to bring Russian people to his events. It all started with 30 persons a year, and now this number exceeds 1000. The Russian delegation is the largest in the world among all the participants of Tony’s seminars. No surprise that Tony wanted to meet me personally, and later on he became my mentor.
Tony Robbins and Gil Petersil
By the way, it was Tony who told me once: “Stop managing businesses. You are a speaker. This is what you should concentrate on”. So I focused on public speaking and never once regretted it. This advice helped me save years of life and efforts that could have been wasted, should I have taken the wrong path.
So here is one of the crucial points in working with a mentor: follow his recommendations. You get a specific task to implement, and you go and do it. Believe me, it works. I wish everyone to find their perfect mentor!
Scribing by Alexander Zotkin