Mentoring

From my perspective, mentorship is defined by who is asking the questions, which can be categorized into one of two roles:

Between 1902 and 1908, poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote ten letters to nineteen-year-old Franz Kappus, who was attending Rilke’s alma mater and was similarly studying poetry. These letters offered counsel to Kappus on how to look at life through the eyes of an authentic, fearless, and searching poet.

I’m beginning to think I should have renamed my recent book, “Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder,” with “How Boomers Boo-Boo With Millennials.” How often have we seen older workers lecture younger workers on how the world works? The irony is that nearly 70% of those in their mid-50s have a boss younger than them today.

I was twelve years old when I first heard this survival tip from a wilderness ed instructor. “If you’re ever lost at night and don’t have a compass, you can find your way back with a sewing kit and a magnet.”

Nature is a remarkable teacher, and we use her lessons all the time at the Modern Elder Academy. The fine art of rock balancing can teach us a lot about mentoring. Rocks are precariously sturdy yet fragile, inert yet living, and they have the capacity to fit together if you know how to match-make the stones.

What do you know now that you wish you’d known ten years ago? That’s a powerful prep question for you to imagine what you might need to know in a decade that you could learn now. For example, given that our MEA beachfront campus is in Mexico and I have a home here, I’m finally learning Spanish (yes, I was that odd kid in LA who studied French, which did have one collateral benefit; 8 years after high school, I chose a sexy, unique French name for my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre).

An MEA alum Jeff wrote me this, “When we shift from ‘can do it’ to conduit, we're not working anymore. We're flowing.” Wise words and a good reminder that we need to get out of our own way, and shift our mindset from that “kick down the door and plow through anything” mentality and allow ourselves to become a fluid channel for supporting others. How can you become more of a channel supporting others and less of a rugged “I can do it” individualist?

As I say in this two-minute clip from a speech I gave at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, I never met my two most profound mentors: Southwest Airlines Founding CEO Herb Kelleher and management theorist Peter Drucker. But, I carried on a pen pal relationship with the former for ten years and tapped into the latter as I was writing my first book.

Context is everything. The rule of thumb for social media videos is to keep them less than 2 minutes. And, yet, there’s a plethora of podcasters aping my friend Tim Ferriss whose interviews are nearly 2 hours. If you have a message, understand the context. Empathize with the recipient. It's Monday: that’s why I’m gonna keep this one short. LOL.

Being a mentor begins by teaching ourselves how to be present for those who show up in our lives. This is easier said than done. We have become a society of technological screen addicts who treasure multitasking and productivity over genuine interactions with others. Somewhere along the line, we have transferred multi-tasking from our jobs to the relationships in our lives. We keep one eye on the person we’re with, and one eye on the door. And if not the door, the cellphone, the next appointment, the piece of chocolate pie.