How To Find A Mentor

In this episode of the Soulfully You Podcast, Coach Chris explores the importance of mentorship and the challenges of finding trustworthy mentors.

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• 00:00 Welcome to the Soulfully You Podcast
• 00:44 The Challenge of Finding a Mentor
• 01:42 Understanding the Role of a Mentor
• 02:42 Mentorship in Popular Culture
• 04:06 The Importance of Letting Go
• 05:12 Mentorship in the Workplace
• 08:21 The Role of Elders and Ancestors
• 11:21 Questions to Identify Potential Mentors
• 13:04 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

0:05

Hey friend. Welcome to the Soulfully You Podcast with Coach Chris Rodriguez. I'm a movement and mindset coach, and I believe in a deeper way of living, a more soulful way of being. Join me each week for conversations about how to put a little more soul. Into our work, our relationships in our everyday lives. When people look at my generation, sometimes they see us as a group of people who do not want to be led by others, but that's not the case when I'm talking to some of my clients and students. A conversation that I have all the time is how hard it is to find a mentor that they trust. And there's a lot of reasons why you can look at our political leaders over the years. A lot of people who have come into my world, they have their share of church hurt. They have their share of. Being a part of organizations and watching leaders have moral failures. If you're somebody who knows, you need a mentor to give you game on life and how to move forward in your work in your relationships and in your personal life, but you don't know where to look. In this episode. I'm gonna break down the role of a mentor, how to find a mentor, and. What mentorship can look like in your personal life. So what is a mentor? There's a bunch of definitions for it. I'm gonna give you a few that work for me. For me, a mentor is somebody that has seen the path already. Right? They've done some things. They've gone out into the world, they went through this life, saw the roadblocks, saw the pitfalls, and coming back with a little wisdom they can look at you at your present state and help you see vision for your life, hopefully without you making all the pitfalls that they made. Throughout history, throughout mythology and throughout literature, the most common mentor we see is the mentor that comes along on the hero's journey and meets a person in their ordinary world and calls them to adventure. When this happens, the mentor usually doesn't look like a mentor at all. A lot of times they look like a trickster. They look like a magician, or they look like an old fool. Take some of our classic movies. Take some of our classic books. All right, check it out. The Karate Kid, Daniel's son goes to Mr. Miyagi because he wants to learn how to fight. What does Mr. Miyagi do? He says, all right, bet. Paint the fence. Brush up and down. He says, wax the car, wax on, wax off. And that's the lesson. And after a bunch of these lessons, Daniel's son, he's so frustrated. He said, Hey, I came here. I thought you were gonna teach me how to fight. And then he throws a punch and he says, paint the fence. Well wax on, wax off. And he didn't realize he was learning all these skills just by doing these things that he thought were foolish. Another example is Jackie Chan's, legend of the drunken master, Where he goes to this guy who seems like an old fool in the village. Always looks like he's drunk, but he doesn't realized that this master isn't a fool at all. He's playing the fool to gain an advantage over his opponents when the mentor looks like a trickster. In classic theater, the role of the trickster or the joker is to turn the ordinary world upside down. They are literally the plot device and they're just doing things to turn the story of ry. Sometimes you need your mentor to be that person that's gonna kind of shake things up in your world. I remember when I was going through my life coaching credentials. And we had to do these mentor coaching sessions where we'd get feedback from our mentors about how our coaching session went. And I'll never forget when my mentor coach told me, Chris. You're a great coach. You're a great listener, but the one problem I have with your session and all the sessions that I observe from you is that you hold your client's hand too much. Sometimes you have to. Trust them enough to let them fall. When looking for a mentor, you want somebody that's gonna let you fall enough that you can learn on your own. Your mentor shouldn't. Spoon feed you the path because there's something that you need to learn in the process. I don't think life should be hard just for the sake of hard. Like no, I'm not going to teach you anything. No. If they got some wisdom, if they got some direction, hey, maybe let's not do that. From my experience, that might be a bad move. It's okay to get some of that, but you don't want your mentor to tell you everything. And when I think of mentorship and the context of coaching. The difference between a consultant and a coach is a consultant. You pay them to spoonfeed you the information. And sometimes they come in and implement those things for you. Whereas in coaching, you're trying to pull something outta them from within themselves. The best mentors can throw on that coaching hat and pull the things inside of you that you didn't know were in you. Now, another way you can see a mentor is in the form of an elder. This is not language that we use a lot. A lot of times the older and senior version of mentorship that we see, that we kind of compare this to in the modern western world is kind of like a board of trustees of a company, I'm out in Silicon Valley. a lot of times We see this relationship when you have some young person who has a startup, and they raise a lot of capital to fund this venture. So they have these investors and the investors put together an advisory board to advise this person on what they should do, what moves they should make for the company. The problem is this advisory board, they aren't necessarily invested into mentoring this person for their wellbeing, even for their personal success. They want to mentor this person to the point where they can get the company profitable enough that they can sell it so that stakeholders, the people who invested into the company, can actually make money. These are not good mentors. They don't have your best interests in mind. They have their bottom line, they have their pockets of mind. They're saying like, Hey, we want to see you make us our money back with interest. So a good mentor is not somebody that has this financial stake in your future. And a lot of times that's why mentorship at work doesn't work well when you are the subordinate and you have a boss, or you're the boss and you have a subordinate, a lot of times that mentorship relationship doesn't work because at the end of the day, an employee's poor performance can influence and impact that relationship. Right. Your boss does not care about you. For you. They care about you for the efficiency that you can bring to the organization. They care about you doing your job well. That's not a pure mentorship relationship, right? There's something in it for them and it's not a bad thing, but that's just a boss employee relationship and we need to understand. The difference between that and mentorship. Now, can your mentor come from your work? Yes, they can. If they do, they should probably come from another team. They should probably come from a different part of the organization, but it rarely works when they are the ones that you directly report to because there's too much mingled and there's too much at stake. Back to this idea of elders. We don't see it a lot in the modern Western world, But the place we still do see it a lot of times is an organized religion. Churches have a board of elders who advise pastors. And I've been involved in a lot of church plants and a lot of times what I see the conversations with elders being like is arguments and conversations and board meetings about when can we get the church sign fixed or do we have enough money to fix the lighting? And not really conversations about how to care for the people and specifically not really conversations on how to care for the person in leadership. This too doesn't always end up being the best mentor relationship. But historically there was a role of the elders, Back in the tribe, back in the village, the elder was the standard bearer. They were the ones that led ceremonies. They also were the ones that held the stories. I talk about this a lot. My mother, my aunties, my uncles, they gave me stories of who I am and the people I come from. And there was always some kind of lesson in them in ceremony. They were the ones that initiated the rites of passage, right? They were the ones that held the ceremonies for grieving, for celebration In all of the different ways of processing through life. Your mentor can have that component for you as you're trying to figure out your own coming of age and you're making sense of the problems and the pains of life. The mentor in the form of an elder can help you hold space for how to process through difficult moments as I've gotten older. And have moved further away from the communities that I grew up in. I found it really hard to find elders in my life and in some ways, me being a 30 something year old, I end up being the elder for a lot of folks. So when you can't find elders. You can look to ancestors. Now, elders are the ones who hold the stories for you and they're still here with you. But ancestors, those are the people who have passed on to the next life. Some of'em you've known, some of'em you don't. I share a lot about the ancestors in my life who I am mentored by their bodies of work. I'm mentored by their writing. I am mentored by their movies, their poetry. I am mentored by what I learned about their heroic acts and history. So when I need bravery, I can look and I can say, what would Maya Angelou do? What would Bell Hooks do? What would Audrey Lord do? I can look back and say, what would Bruce Lee do? I can look back and say, what would my grandma Gladys do? How would they maneuver through these situations? So when you're looking for a mentor, here are some great questions you can ask yourself. One in your life right now? Who are the people who push you to take more risks and play bigger than you're willing to play? Two, who are the people in your life who, when you watch the way they move through their world, they model a bravery that you want to possess? I. Three in your workplace, who is somebody who is a little more senior than you, that you admire their character? And you would want to have coffee with. Four. Whose words do you find yourself needing to quote in times of difficulty, in times of struggle, in times of pain, And a part B to that question is. Whose life have you read about? And when you read more about'em, you're like, ah, I need to read more about their ideas and figure out ways to apply those to my own life. Five. Is there an elder person in your life that you would love to figure out how to spend more time with? And six, who's somebody in your life who you see who has overcome something difficult and still remains kind? These are the kind of people that you want to follow. I know it's hard when you look outside, look around and you see. A lot of people you don't want to be like, and it seems like sometimes we have more examples of what not to do than what to do to move forward in our lives. But there are people out there who have done some things who are worth following and have the bandwidth and the desire to pour into you. Thank you for listening to the Soulfully You Podcast with Coach Chris Rodriguez. If you like the show, help others find me by subscribing and leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. And don't forget to connect with me on Instagram at Coach underscore Chris Rodriguez. For more episodes along with all of my coaching programs, visit me@www.coach chris rodriguez.com. Special thanks to my team behind the scenes music by Dan Smith. And remember, whatever you do, wherever you find yourself today, make sure you put some soul in it.