Finding a great mentor, 5 essential tips.

Mentoring is amazing. I have been blessed to have wonderful mentoring relationships through my life that have really helped me to leap forward and create massive success.
Here’s the thing though…

Mentoring is NOT coaching.

There are a few very crucial distinctions that can make all the difference.

Mentors have subject matter expertise.

Coaches have human performance & psychology expertise.

Mentors give advice and share counsel in an area where they have had personal or professional success. In coaching this is different. Coaches do not need to have expertise in the subject matter, because they are experts in helping you find the genius within yourself.

Mentoring with someone who has walked the path before you has many benefits…

• They can short-cut your path with well timed advice and counsel.
• They help you benefit from their mistakes.
• Share their professional contacts with you. Introduce you to an inner circle.
• Help with best-practice templates, strategies and tactics.
• Mentors give you a short-cut to knowledge and experience in a particular area.
• Mentors can give much needed encouragement at critical times because they know how it feels to be in your shoes.

However mentoring is not a formal process, and you do not need to have qualifications to call yourself a mentor.
 

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So here’s what you need to look out for in a great Mentor

1. Find a mentor who has genuine success & mastery.

Unfortunately there are lots of newbie coaches or mentors, who have done a slick marketing course and are presenting themselves as if they have successful businesses when they don’t. Everyone has to start somewhere, yet there are many of these kinds of “mentors” out there advertising on social media pretending to be something they are not, and teaching about business and abundance when they can’t even pay their own bills and are secretly afraid that if this campaign doesn’t work they will need to go back to get a job again. Look for a mentor who has a long-term track record of success, otherwise they can’t teach you what they don’t know themselves. Or worse, they are just regurgitating something they have only just learned from someone else.

2. Find a mentor who has similar values to you.

There is no use following the advice of someone who has had success in the area you wish to progress in, but has done it in a way that you don’t like. I can tell you this one from experience. I bought some expensive consulting advice from a business mentor who was very successful in business, yet they were quite polarising and confrontational in their approach. I thought they must know something I didn’t, because of how their business looked from the outside. The business advice they gave me was not suited at all to my values, and it ended up causing me more problems than it solved.

3. Find a mentor who you admire as a person.

When you enter into a mentoring relationship, you are agreeing to be influenced by this person. They will be influencing you with their values, their beliefs and their model of the world. When they are successful, confident and encouraging this is wonderful, because they can help instil you with the confidence that you can do it too. Just ensure that you actually do find the mentor aspirational in many ways, not just in one. If you want a balanced life with finances, career, love, family, friends and health all firing, then you need to find a mentor who walks their talk in ALL these areas. Follow your potential mentor for a while on social media and check that they do have similar values to you, otherwise their advice will not probably work for you.

4. Find a mentor who is also qualified coach.

Sometimes you need a mentor, and sometimes you really need a coach. Someone giving you advice when you have come up hard against a limiting belief or sabotage pattern is just not going to be enough to help you change. Mentoring is just one way of facilitating change; among coaching, consulting, therapy, counselling, teaching, healing. If your mentor is also a qualified mindset coach / therapist, they will be able to recognise when you are sabotaging yourself and either coach you through it or recommend that you get some coaching for the issue.

5. Find a mentor who is a great teacher.

Mentoring is often about a “here’s what I did…” teaching approach. The problem is often that the mentor cannot successfully reverse engineer exactly what made up their success, or teach it in an easily understandable, easy to follow way. If you find a mentor who is also a great teacher then you are onto a winner, as they can easily switch hats to give you what you need.

Getting a mentor / coach / teacher who can short-cut your path to personal and professional success is an investment that will repay ten-fold. You just need to do your due diligence and find someone who matches your values and can lead you to the success you want, in the way you want it.

Want to talk to me personally to see if learning NLP and being mentored by me would help you in your life?

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