Your Next Clear Move
Welcome to Your Next Clear Move™—the podcast for leaders, professionals, and high-capacity humans who are done “getting ready” and ready to move.
I’m Debbie Peterson, Leadership Readiness Expert, and in each episode I deliver grounded insight, clarity-driven mindset strategies, and one actionable step to help you stop the drift and lead yourself forward.
This isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It’s about reconnecting to what matters—and making decisions that align with who you are and how you want to lead next.
Subscribe for weekly clarity drops that fuel your next level—with confidence.
Your Next Clear Move
The Gift of Mentors: Why You Don’t Rise Alone
Ready rarely arrives on schedule. We talk about the hidden engine behind real career momentum: mentors who let you borrow their belief until your own kicks in. Through personal stories, practical tools, and a simple exercise you can use today, we show how the right people shorten your learning curve, expand your options, and help you act before doubt slows you down.
First, we redefine mentoring beyond formal programs. Mentors can be bosses, peers, or brief encounters that change your trajectory. You’ll hear how a timely nudge toward a promotion and an early push into transformational training sparked leaps that titles alone never could. Then we name the quiet trap leaders fall into—trying to have everything figured out—and how that isolation drains energy, locks you into yesterday’s strategies, and makes progress feel harder than it has to be.
From there, we offer five practical moves to make mentoring part of your leadership. Borrow belief when credible voices say you’re ready. Build a “thrive with five” circle that includes someone two steps ahead and someone who keeps you grounded. Expand thinking by asking for perspective and close with, “How can I support you?” Practice the reciprocity rule and run an energy audit to choose relationships that lift you higher. Finally, we show how to model mentoring across your team: ask for help in the open, invite cross-team expertise into meetings, and normalize peer mentoring so readiness becomes a shared practice, not a private burden.
We wrap with the Support Circle: define your next move, why it matters now, who can help, and one action you’ll take in 48 hours. Direction beats perfection, and the right people make the path clear. If the message resonates, follow and share the show, and tell us: which mentor’s belief helped you take your biggest leap? Subscribe, leave a review, and send this to a leader who needs a boost today.
Hey, hello, and welcome back. I am Debbie Peterson of Getting to Clarity, and this is another episode of the Getting to Clarity Show. This is the place where I help you to make your next clear move. You don't have to figure out everything, you just have to know your next step, or what I call your next clear move. And today we're talking about a topic, uh, something that has shaped just about every part of my career, my leadership journey, and my business. And that is mentors. And I want you to understand that um leadership isn't a solo sport, and you don't get to where you want to go alone.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome to the Getting to Clarity Podcast.
SPEAKER_02:The place where busy leaders discover how to create more success in their leadership journey with less sacrifice in their life.
SPEAKER_01:Here's your host, Debbie Peterson of Getting to Clarity.
SPEAKER_00:I would bet that this has shaped your career too, even if you haven't named it yet, uh, or realize the power of mentors. Now, before you start picturing a formal program where there's a lengthy application process or where they match people into these perfect little pairs of professionals, please hold. That's not what I mean. What I'm talking about is more general than that. It is the humans that have been there for you, the ones who have believed in you when you couldn't quite get there by yourself, um, those kinds of people. And let me just say that I've had a lot of different titles over the years, but the biggest leaps that I have ever made did not come from uh the titles or the job descriptions. They came from the people. So early in my corporate career, one of my bosses encouraged me to apply for a job that was posted on the board, a promotion. And I never would have done it on my own. I didn't think I was qualified. I didn't think that I was ready, but he clearly saw something that I didn't. And because I trusted him, I went for it and I got it. So years later, it happened again. I had a another boss who sent me to my first NLP training, um, NLP Neurolinguistic Programming. It changed my life. Um, and he also sent me to my HUNA training. And when I asked him later on, I said, why did you send me? And his answer was because you were ready. And I knew I couldn't wait for you to feel ready. So he believed I was ready long before I believed it myself. And that decision, what he saw, that moment, changed the entire trajectory of my life. I literally wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today. It set me on the path that I'm walking today. And it didn't stop there. There were contracts that I uh entered into, there were board appointments that I stepped into, um, speaking in rooms where I once only dreamed of, you know, every stretch, every step forward became a realization because of someone who poured themselves into me, someone that made sure that I had what I needed so that I could rise into the moment. And some of those people were mentors, some of those people weren't, but every single one of them was a turning point. And essentially that's what we're talking about today, not the formal programs, not the checklists and the applications. What we're talking about are actual people who help you grow, the people who let you borrow their belief until your own kicks in. Now, why does this even matter? So, somewhere along the way, what I have witnessed is leaders thinking that they are supposed to have everything all figured out. Like asking for help is um some sort of weakness that they're slipping. Um, you know, that uncertainty or questioning is a liability. And let me just say this very plainly: the higher you go, the more you need people around you. And it's not because you can't do it alone, but it's because you shouldn't. Leadership is a learning curve, and we rarely give ourselves the permission to have it. So when we don't ask for help, here's what happens: we will stay stuck longer than we need to. We will cling to strategies that got us to where we are, but won't get us to where we want to go. We will isolate ourselves, we'll go inward because we don't want anyone to see that we don't have it all figured out. Um we'll try to live on our own confidence and it won't be enough. Essentially, that'll just drain. And we'll work harder instead of smarter. So mentors break that cycle. They show you what's possible, they help you cut through the noise, they hand you clarity when you can't find it yourself. And it's not mentoring relationships aren't about hierarchy, okay? It's not about age. What it's about is experience and wisdom. You know, it doesn't have to be a long-term relationship, and you don't need to know all the answers first, just a direction will work. So, mentoring, the definition is simply uh an experienced and trusted advisor who's gonna share that experience and wisdom with you, and they're willing to share it with you so that you can move forward, and that's it. Make it simple. So, here are a few ways to bring mentoring into your leadership right now. So, here's what I want you to consider. Excuse me. First, borrow belief. When someone that you deem credible says, You're ready. I want you to listen. I need you to just pause and consider the possibility that they may be right. Borrow their belief until your own catches up. Second, strive to thrive with five. So I want you to think about five people who lift you higher. And if you don't have five names, that's okay. Start maybe with a description of the types of people that you need. Someone who already has done what you want to do, someone who's two steps ahead of you, someone who challenges you to think differently, someone who keeps you grounded, someone who believes in you. Name those five people. Third, expand your thinking. So here's what I mean by this. Sometimes we only go with what we know. What I'd like you to do is consider reaching out to someone in your network and say, hey, I'm exploring something. Can I get your perspective? I need some help and I'd like your opinion. I would like what you think about this. You're not asking someone for a job, you know, you're just asking them for a favor. You're asking them to share their perspective. You're asking them to help you. And then always end that conversation with, how can I support you? You know, that keeps it reciprocal. That one question builds more goodwill than you can ever imagine. Fourth, the reciprocity rule. So here's what I mean by that: give support to others, even when you don't need anything, because that sort of goodwill always comes back around. Fifth, I want you to consider an energy audit when you think about the people that you allow into your life personally and professionally. So who fills your tank, you know, and who drains it? Mentoring is still a relationship. So when you're thinking about someone that you would like to enter into a mentoring relationship with, make sure it's the people who feel um or help you to feel more like yourself or help you to think a little bit differently, or um help you aspire to something. They lift you up. Now, as a leader, how do you apply this? Because I always want to provide these tips for you, but I want you to be able to pick them up and take them back to your team as well. So, how does this apply to you as a leader? You model it. Okay. So, what that means is that you normalize asking for help. You know, there's got to be people on your team that understand something at a deeper level or better than you. There's got to be a topic that you're not the expert in. How can you approach them and ask them for help? How is it that you can model this going to other people on other teams and maybe inviting them into a meeting? And when your C your team sees you modeling this, then then they know it's okay to ask for help too. So it is a person, it is cross-team connection, it is peer mentoring, it is little mentoring moments and meetings. This is ways that you can normalize all of this, that people can see mentoring in action and know that it's okay because you're demonstrating it as the team lead. So you show your team that leadership, that being ready, uh is a team sport. It's not a solo sport. You don't get there alone. And that they shouldn't have to do that either. So I want to leave you with an exercise, a simple exercise. It's something that I call the support circle. So I want you to think about the next move that you want to make in your leadership, in your career, with your team, on a project, whatever it is. So I want you to think about that specific thing. And then I want you to think about why that matters right now. Like what is the impetus? What is the underlying foundation of it, of why it matters right now? And then when you thought about that, now think about who are the people that can help you move in that direction? Who are the people that you know? What is the what are the characteristics of the person that you need to invite in? And then make a move in the next 48 hours. That's it. That is your next clear move. You don't have to have everything figured out, you just need the direction that you want to go in. And then you can determine the people who are going to help you get there. So if this message hit home, if you would like more tools or clarity-driven leadership, then head on over to my website at www.debi Petersonspeaks.com, and I would love to know what you're working on and how I can help support you. In the meantime, be good to yourself, and here is wishing you all the clarity that you deserve. Take care. Bye-bye for now.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for listening to this episode of the Getting to Clarity Podcast with Debbie Peterson.
SPEAKER_02:If you enjoyed this show, please rate and recommend it on iTunes or wherever you enjoy your podcast.
SPEAKER_01:To learn more about how you can bring Debbie and her transformational clarity leadership strategies to your organization, visit Debbie PetersonSpeaks.com.
