Modern Mentor: How to Find a Mentor and Make It Work
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About this ebook
When it comes to finding an amazing mentor you have two choices:
1) you can wait for a fairy-godmother like mentor to see your potential and pull you out of your current situation, or 2) you can learn how to be an amazing protégé and get the most out of the mentors around you.
You are closer to success than you think and there are mentors who really want to help you get there. The catch is... they have no idea how to mentor you. But don't worry, you can make those mentorships work by jumping in the driver's seat and owning the role of a protégé by: learning "how to learn", setting strategic goals, developing a plan, watching for gaps in the process, asking better questions, and measuring your progress.
Modern Mentor: How to find a mentor and make it work, walks through a prescriptive process for identifying quality mentors and establishing strong mentoring relationships from the role of a protégé. By first recognizing the different stages of learning described as acquiring knowledge, developing skill, and then demonstrating ability, the first section, Learning how to Learn, will recalibrate the way readers think about learning new things. Section two, Making a Mentor, reviews the different types of advisors available: consultants, coaches, mentors, and trainers; how these advisors stack up against different learning needs; and how to get the ball rolling with a new mentor. The final and largest section, Becoming a Better Protégé, walks readers through established processes, tips, and routines that increase the quality and output of any mentoring relationship.
Included as a free resource are several downloadable worksheets and exercises that directly align with the Becoming a Better Protégé model.
Email 559.jhopper@gmail.com for worksheet copies.
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Book preview
Modern Mentor - Jason C. Hopper
INTRODUCTION
Amentoring relationship is completely different from every other type of professional relationship.
In most learning relationships, the person with more experience leads the way. Mentoring doesn’t work like this. In a mentorship, the more experienced person plays a passive role, while the protégé takes responsibility for moving the relationship forward. Of course, the mentor brings personal experience, wisdom, and knowledge—this is what makes them such a great mentor in the first place! However, it’s the protégé’s job to extract what they learn from the mentor and put it to use. This balance is absolutely critical for the relationship to work. If you’ve ever been in a mentoring relationship that didn’t work out, there’s a good chance the protégé had no idea that they were the one in the driver’s seat.
Is that what you expected to read? Probably not. It wasn’t what I expected to find out when I started this whole process. I used to think that finding a great mentor was the secret to ultimate success because all of my heroes growing up had some sort of mentor to show them the way.
THE SEARCH FOR A MENTOR
When I was about five or six, all I wanted in life was to be Daniel LaRusso, the Karate Kid. I remember sparing with a friend one night, demonstrating my complete mastery of the Crane Kick. It’s too bad he had not seen the movie yet because he would have totally seen that move coming—instead he stepped in closer and I ended up kicking him right in the shin. As he lay there sobbing over his leg, I realized two things;
1) I was way better at karate than I thought, and
2) I was going to be in major trouble when my dad found out.
But then I remembered how Mr. Miyagi, Daniel’s wise mentor, healed him when he was injured. With the composure of a karate master, I knelt down next to my friend, clapped my hands together, and rubbed really, really fast. It only took a few therapeutic seconds of me holding my sweaty, friction warmed hands on his leg before he stopped crying and swore that it didn’t hurt anymore. Turns out I was really, really good at Karate.
The Karate Kid was exciting not just because Daniel, the underdog new kid
was able to master a skill that helped him take down his enemies and win the girl, but because Mr. Miyagi chose to help Daniel step into greatness. It made me feel like I was not alone and that I, like Daniel, had potential; that I was special. Of course, I didn’t really think I would become a karate champion, but I started to believe that someday I would find a mentor that would unlock my destiny—whatever that was. I bet you had a Karate Kid moment growing up. Maybe you weren’t out looking for your own Mr. Miyagi like I was, but there had to be a story you identified where a normal everyday person moved on to do amazing things because a mentor showed them how. This is an ancient, cross-cultural theme in storytelling that leads us to believe the secret to doing great things is finding the perfect mentor who will show us the way.
The problem is that in real life, mentors are just normal people with busy lives. They aren’t the wise, untouchable gurus depicted in fiction. Most don’t know the first thing about preparing a protégé for greatness. In real life, the secret to doing great things isn’t finding the right mentor but mastering the ability to be mentored.
MY FAIRY GODMOTHER
This book wasn’t written to make mentors better mentors. Instead, I’m going to insist that the quality of a mentoring relationship is directly proportional to the effort of the protégé. The first section, Learning How to Learn, reveals our inner motivations in mentoring and then deconstructs the learning process itself so that we better understand how and why mentoring works. Section two, Making a Mentor, takes a look at the difference between mentors and every other type of learning relationship and why you should approach them differently. It outlines when to look for a mentor, what to look for, and how to get things started. The third section, Becoming a Better Protégé, is a practical guide to owning the role of protégé. There are several places where I will encourage you to take action, such as set goals or develop a plan. To make these exercises easier, I have prepared downloadable files that you can print out and use over and over again as you refine your process. Be sure to look for them in the appendix. You will see that a protégé is so much more than just a student or a client, and by developing the important ability of self-leadership, you will be able to get more out of mentoring relationships, work, and life.
Needless to say, I never found my Mr. Miyagi. I was surrounded by successful people who seemed more than willing to share their knowledge and experience but for some reason, I just couldn’t get them to slow down enough to mentor me. And so, I waited. I thought that if I invested myself in my work, a supervisor would eventually see my potential and take me under their wing. Year after year no one did, and I began to wonder if I had been wrong about having potential in the first place. Perhaps I misread the situation and I really wasn’t special. After all, not everybody gets to be the Karate Kid. I had no idea that many of the successful leaders in my life did see potential, and often gave me opportunities to grow. They were grooming me for success but I didn’t recognize those opportunities for what they were and missed the opportunity to ask for a formal mentorship. The few that I did ask (usually because a school or work program required me to) said, Yes! Absolutely!
However, since I had no idea what I was doing, those really enthusiastic mentor relationships lost momentum and