How Mentorship Enhances Life's Transitions and Opportunities with Dr. Deborah Heiser

Transcript

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Warriors fall in.

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It's time for formation Folks.

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Today I'm joined with the founder and CEO and author of the Mentor Project.

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Deborah Hesser is joining me on today's podcast, and today we're going to talk about something that I really feel like we should underline more than once, maybe twice, maybe three times and it's mentorship maybe twice, maybe three times.

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In its mentorship, debra has actually been a TEDx speaker, a consultant author and, again, she was the founder of the Mentor Project, where they really suggest folks out there should take a look at.

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It's a really outstanding opportunity for folks to really get inside the conversation with other professionals out there.

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That might be where you want to go at some point at time in your life.

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And, debra, thank you for joining me on the Morning Formation podcast today.

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Thank you for having me.

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I'm really excited to be here.

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The honor is all mine.

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I mean, I was looking at some of your experiences, your education, your history overall when we matched up and I was extremely impressed and I can tell you that I really feel like mentorship is a lost art in today's society, especially with our younger generation, and I truly blame myself, I blame, uh, my generation, for not doing a better job at trying to light the torch, uh, so that they, the uh next group coming up behind us, can actually see the path to do better than what I had done and what we had done.

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But before we get into that, Debra, I just want to give you an opportunity to tell folks out there that are listening a little bit about you.

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Sure, thank you.

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I am an applied developmental psychologist.

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That's a little bit different than what most people think of as a psychologist, a clinical psychologist.

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A clinical psychologist is looking at pathology and I look at everything that we can expect in our lifespan and that's usually good stuff, you know.

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Like if you look at development, that's walking and talking and part of that in the middle is mentoring, and I'll get to that in just a second.

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But for the most part, I'm a researcher, I write, I write for Psychology Today and I look at what we have to look forward to in the second half of life.

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So most of us look at our lives as a physical trajectory where we look at walking and talking and doing all of the things that make us really strong and amazing physically in our early 20s and up to 30.

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And then we all think of life as having a slow, steady decline in the second half of life, or even more than the second half of life.

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And I look at the emotional trajectory that we have, which starts the same time at birth and it only goes up.

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It goes up our entire lives.

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This is why when you're you know 10, you don't throw yourself on the floor and have a tantrum.

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We're learning how to deal with things throughout our lives, and in the military especially.

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You really do learn how to cope with things.

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You have to it's necessary and so there's a great emotional formation that happens with us as we get older.

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By the time we're at the end of our lives.

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If you think of us as a tree that develops over time, we've got all that fruit that's finally ready to come off and be given as knowledge to others.

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So our lifespan trajectory is what I look at.

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I look at the midlife and how we can look at our emotions in our midlife, and that's really the point where we hit the turning point, where we start to get happier than we ever were and that only increases.

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So that's a little bit about myself.

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That's where mentoring comes into place.

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Mentoring is that midlife thing that happens to us.

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We're built to want to give back.

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If we don't do it, we're like Ebenezer Scrooge.

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You can have everything on paper, you can be a millionaire and have a mansion servants taking care of all your needs, but you will probably be unhappy.

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It's not until you give back that you start to feel joy, and that's a little bit about what I do and where I come from.

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Do you think there's a lot of folks out there around midlife?

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You say that's around 40 years old.

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Do you think?

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Yeah.

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Do you think there's folks out there?

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Because I've noticed this over the years Some folks have more of a thirst or a hunger to do that and I've ran into some folks out there that have more of like a 15 minute.

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They'll just talk about it but they really won't do anything type of mentality.

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But what are your thoughts on that overall?

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What would drive someone more to want to give back versus?

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This is kind of a five minute like sounds cool conversation but in reality I'm not going to do anything.

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I have some thoughts about this.

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There were a few things.

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One is you know, when I'm in my 50s, when I was young, we had civic engagement that we got involved in, where you had to go outside yourself and give back.

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Like there, I was at the tail end of when they had candy stripers and people who would go in and volunteer in the hospitals and go and volunteer to do other things in the communities.

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That sort of fell by the wayside and people are less service-minded so we don't know how to engage in that.

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It's harder to know if you haven't been doing it for a long time.

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So the emphasis had been for decades listen, go your own route in a sort of a silo.

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Don't help others, help yourself, get ahead.

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You need to see how you know we can interact with others and feel comfortable about it.

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You're not.

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You're not.

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If someone else succeeds next to you, it doesn't mean you're a failure.

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And getting that mentality back into the our own spaces and how we think about helping others and mentoring.

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Yeah yeah, sort of what you're talking about.

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There is kind of imposter syndrome.

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There's folks out there that feel like they're not a success or they're not good enough to mentor or to offer any any kind of mentoring to anybody else.

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Like, who am I to tell anyone?

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Uh, you know what is the blueprint, uh, on a professional career or life in general, but have you seen any type of character trait or is there anything specifically character wise that a good mentor would make?

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I'm going to tell you, every single person is a mentor, and they don't know it, so it's everybody's character.

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It's just when it kicks in, even like Ebenezer Scrooge became a mentor and they don't know it.

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So it's everybody's character.

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It's just when it kicks in, even like Ebenezer Scrooge became a mentor.

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He ended up doing it after a long time of not having it kick in.

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But I'm going to give you some examples because we're all doing it and we never know.

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I interviewed 45 people before starting the mentor project to see what mentors look like.

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I interviewed somebody like a four-star general to a grandma.

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Every tradition that you ever have that you go to a holiday meal and you eat the same food every time for that holiday.

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It smells like the holiday because of the cooking and whatever else is there.

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That is mentorship.

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When I go to make Thanksgiving dinner, I am making it off of a card that my grandmother hand wrote the recipe for everything.

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If I leave anything out, it doesn't feel like the holiday.

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That is being passed down generation to generation.

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My kids are going to get that card.

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That will get passed down.

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Religion is passed down for centuries.

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That's mentorship.

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It doesn't get reinvented all the time.

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It's these sort of things that we take for granted in our lives that we think are just happening for no reason.

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But it's really mentorship.

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I just want to say one other thing that when we talk about imposter syndrome, so many people feel like, if they haven't been exposed to something or that they aren't an expert in it that somehow they are unworthy.

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I've had so many people that say to me well, I'm not a doctor, a lawyer, I can't mentor.

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Well, of course you can.

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You've been doing things all along that people are following, and that can be values.

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People don't think of values as being mentoring, but yes, that is, it's values, it's our morals, it's our traditions, and one of the biggest things that I've noticed and it's in the book is talking about the military and mentorship there.

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It's a natural part of it.

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You cannot get through the military without mentorship, and mentorship is hierarchical in many ways that we think about it.

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So in regular times, you have somebody above you, you want to raise in the ranks or whatever.

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It's very hierarchical.

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As soon as some trouble hits, there's a crisis, those walls come down and now there's a lateral mentoring.

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You are looking to your left and you're looking to your right for other experts and other disciplines that might even be other areas of the military or wherever you can find it to solve the problem that's in the crisis.

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Once that crisis is solved, those walls go back up and you're doing hierarchical mentoring again.

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The military is one of the few places that engages in multiple facets of mentoring that most people don't talk about.

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Nobody talks about lateral mentoring.

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I write about that, I talk about that extensively, and the military is one of the few that does that seamlessly, and so I love I know that people who come out of the military are born mentors.

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They are ready, they're ripe to mentor.

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They may seem too young.

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No, you're not.

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You're a lateral mentor to somebody else.

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If somebody says, hey, give me the expertise that you have in what you do, you're going to give it, you're going to help somebody.

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You're not even going to think about it.

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That's mentoring.

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And so that person now holds that info.

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And so what are your thoughts or what is your message to folks out there that think that they're not good enough to mentor because they've messed up?

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They've screwed up, they made a mistake, whether it was, you know, in the military.

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They got a UCMJ, which is a uniform code of military justice, punishment.

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What is your message to those folks out there?

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Go find somebody who hasn't messed up.

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That's my first thing to say.

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Find anyone out there in the world who hasn't messed up.

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You know everyone has messed up.

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That's my first thing to say.

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Find anyone out there in the world who hasn't messed up.

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You know everyone has messed up and that's just part of the journey.

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You pick yourself up and you go.

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Of course, you can mentor.

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You can mentor people and how you got through messing up.

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You can mentor people and how to avoid messing up.

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There's a lot that you can do, but truly go out and find any one person.

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Come back to me and tell me, and I'll give you a load of money If you can find somebody who's never messed up.

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There's no one who hasn't, so that is not something that keeps anybody from mentoring.

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You know, that's the number one thing that I think I've learned in my professional career is it's not necessarily all about making the right decisions at the right times and being a perfect human being, because that just doesn't happen.

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It's more about picking yourself back up, brushing yourself back off and getting back on it and going forward and keep moving, keep progressing, keep fighting and not giving up.

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And you're right, there are a lot of people out there who will count themselves out, but they need to make sure that they find that motivation to keep on going.

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And for folks out there that you know, I really feel like a lot of folks that join the military either come from mid-income housing or less.

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They're poor, they come from broken homes, less than ideal situations.

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A lot of folks that joined the military.

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For folks out there that may not have been mentored growing up and they're trying to figure it out for themselves, have you ever had anyone or experienced anything before where you had someone that was trying to break a cycle, whether it was domestic abuse or it was just poor mentoring?

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Maybe mom and dad weren't really in the picture?

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What is your message to folks out there that are in the military?

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They have a difficult time seeing themselves succeed, and they really want to break that cycle anyone can break that cycle.

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I will tell you that a mentor is the best way to break that cycle.

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I broke it.

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My parents didn't go to college, um, and when I got my PhD, my mom said to me is a PhD the same as an EMT?

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And you know, that's just that no one knew, like it wasn't something that was talked about in my family.

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Um, so does that mean you can't go do things?

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No, is it a pipe dream to think that you can, you know, do something that you want to do?

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No, but get a mentor.

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Because that person, when I was in college, for example, it was a college professor who said to me you know what?

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You're not doing great in anything right now.

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And it was because I just it wasn't, I didn't know what I wanted to do.

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And she said either drop out of school or do your best and get through it.

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And I was like, okay, I'll do my best, you know, but it took somebody to tell me that and to lay it on the line, and I don't tell this story to people, but honestly, I'm not alone in that.

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I'm sure that people have been somewhere where they're like kind of muddling along in something and it's because they don't have a path that's clear ahead of them.

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I didn't know what I'd ever want to do with stuff because there was nobody ahead of me in my family that did stuff like that, so I had to look outside of my family for mentorship.

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And that college professor, peggy DeCook, really turned things around for me, because I looked at my future trajectory as something I didn't even know existed before that moment.

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Yeah, that was kind of a personal question I come from.

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My father was pretty much the only one that was around when I was growing up for the most part, and everyone outside of that was kind of in and out of my life.

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My siblings aren't doing too well, and so now I talk to my niece and the one thing I keep telling her is you need to break that cycle, find a mentor, put yourself in position to win Like, unfortunately, you weren't given the template on success.

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You don't know what a good personal relationship looks like.

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You're never challenged to do better.

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But inherently she has something inside of her that makes her want to do better, and that's my consistent advice to her is to find a mentor to help her break that cycle, and I'm one of her mentors, but she needs to find someone that is somewhere where she wants to be eventually.

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I guess and that was sort of a personal question on my end and it kind of leads me to this next question of folks need to really understand what is good mentoring and what isn't good mentoring.

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So I'm going to give you the five things that make a mentor, and anybody can be a good mentor.

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It's like saying what's a good friend?

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Is a good friend somebody who talks behind your back?

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No, is a good friend somebody who listens?

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Yes, if we think of friend, we can say what a good friend is or isn't.

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Without a doubt, it's in our minds.

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So think of mentorship as this there has to be somebody who's generative.

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That's the mentor.

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Starting with that right, the person has to want to give away a bit of their knowledge to someone else and expect that that person wants to receive that knowledge.

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So if I talk about generativity, people think that's being generous sometimes, but it's not.

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Generosity is you go to the ice cream store, somebody gives you an extra scoop of ice cream and you say thank you, you eat it and it's gone.

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Generativity is you're giving a little bit of your knowledge to somebody that lives on in them forever.

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It's a value, it's a, it's some kind of a skill, it's a talent, it's whatever it is that you have an in and giving them and it lives in them.

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So, in terms of being a good mentor, you have to want to come from that point.

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You're not expecting to get anything from anybody else.

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You're not getting paid, you're not getting an award, you're not getting a certificate or reward for this.

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You are doing it because you want to be generative.

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The mentee, in that case, to be a good mentee, has to be somebody who says I want it, I want this information that somebody is giving to me.

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Otherwise, it's like somebody is giving you a gift and you're like no, no, no, thanks, I've got enough gifts.

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That makes the person feel terrible.

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That tried to give it to you, right, and you know you're not expanding that.

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It's falling right on you and ending.

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The next thing you need is intrinsic motivation, and what that means is that you're motivated to do it without, like I mentioned before, an award or reward or anything like that.

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So again, it's not pay, it's nothing like that.

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I ask my students when I teach how many of you would work in a soup kitchen for free giving out food and beverages to people who are hungry and thirsty?

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And they all raise their hand.

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I say how many of you would go to Starbucks instead and go donate your time to give food and beverages to people who are thirsty and hungry?

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And they all say no, I wouldn't.

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That's crazy.

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That's intrinsic versus extrinsic.

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They have both very different feelings.

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So if you go to your job and you're getting paid you're not going to do that for free you feel like a sucker.

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But if you go and you donate and give something to somebody else, from your heart, from you know, intrinsically, you feel great about yourself.

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So the next thing is that you need to have a meaningful connection self.

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So the next thing is that you need to have a meaningful connection.

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If I don't think very highly of you, I'm looking at you as somebody who's just going to give me information.

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This is what most people say.

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They say go find a mentor that's a nameless, faceless individual.

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That is not a meaningful connection.

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If you're just looking to go get something from somebody, you have to like the person.

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You have to actually care about them and not just the mentor caring about the mentee going forward, because mentors always feel that.

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But a mentee has to feel like they are doing something with their knowledge or information that the mentor wants them to do.

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They have to think of that mentor and what the goal is for that mentor and what they're are they carrying that goal forward?

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Another thing is trust.

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How many times do you not trust somebody that is not a mentor?

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Then how often do you not trust a mentee?

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Are they going to steal your idea?

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You know?

00:18:43.384 --> 00:18:44.126
Are they going to?

00:18:44.667 --> 00:18:59.202
You know, if you're in some kind of a tech industry, you have to trust each other and this is why people think of hierarchical mentoring as having problems with it.

00:18:59.202 --> 00:19:11.787
Because if you don't trust being able to say to your boss or someone above you that you don't know how to do something, expressing a vulnerability, you think they're going to say I'm never going to promote them if they don't know how to do this, that trust is a barrier to mentorship.

00:19:11.787 --> 00:19:18.789
And in that case is where I say go to lateral mentoring somebody who's not your boss and get it that way.

00:19:18.789 --> 00:19:21.682
And then, finally, there has to be a goal.

00:19:21.682 --> 00:19:25.181
If somebody is just shooting a breeze with somebody, that's not mentoring.

00:19:25.181 --> 00:19:27.684
There has to be a goal with it and that goal can change.

00:19:27.684 --> 00:19:32.712
You can be mentored by somebody for decades, but and that goal will change with time.

00:19:33.314 --> 00:19:35.924
But that's what makes a good mentor and a good mentee.

00:19:35.924 --> 00:19:53.236
And I put them together the way I did, because if you separate it, people will say I'll do a few of these things and you might not have a matchup with the mentor and the mentee and you could be the best mentor out there, but if you have a crummy mentee or a mentee who's not engaged, it's not going to work.

00:19:53.236 --> 00:20:02.474
And the other thing that I like to say about being a good mentor or mentee is it's not always going to work, just like friends.

00:20:02.474 --> 00:20:05.042
Have you ever gone and met somebody and you're like not my person.

00:20:05.042 --> 00:20:07.931
They could be a fine person, they're just not somebody that you.

00:20:07.931 --> 00:20:15.289
You don't get their humor or there's just something that they that isn't interesting about them.

00:20:15.309 --> 00:20:18.963
That's the same thing that happens with mentorship and we put so much pressure on it and think it's a failure if it doesn't work out.

00:20:18.963 --> 00:20:22.681
No, it's like meeting somebody and you're like if I see him, I'll say hi.

00:20:22.681 --> 00:20:24.702
That's the same with mentorship.

00:20:24.702 --> 00:20:31.673
You should not be putting pressure on it and you shouldn't be thinking you should not be putting pressure on it and you shouldn't be thinking you should just have one mentor.

00:20:31.673 --> 00:20:33.034
You should have a million mentors.

00:20:33.034 --> 00:20:35.637
You should have as many as you can have.

00:20:38.082 --> 00:20:43.673
So sorry that was a long answer for that question, but very, very developed answer no, and I certainly agree with with a lot of what you said.

00:20:43.673 --> 00:20:45.502
Mentoring is a two way street.

00:20:45.502 --> 00:20:54.964
I mean it's you have to be and I've told people this before in order for me to mentor, you have to be a good mentee, um, it's not just a one-way street where I'm just feeding you and you're just taking it.

00:20:54.964 --> 00:20:57.092
Um, it's really a conversation.

00:20:57.092 --> 00:21:00.643
You do have to have a personality match to some extent.

00:21:00.643 --> 00:21:01.525
Um.

00:21:01.525 --> 00:21:12.661
Do you have any idea why it seems like most of the time, family members um, are not good mentors?

00:21:12.661 --> 00:21:19.281
Like, why is it that a lot of times, if something comes out of a family member's mouth and another person that's outside of the family says the same thing, it sounds better?

00:21:20.724 --> 00:21:21.205
Oh, please.

00:21:21.205 --> 00:21:25.032
I mean, I'm a parent, you know my, that's how it is.

00:21:25.032 --> 00:21:30.182
That's why I don't include parents as mentors, because you know you're expected to be doing that with your kids.

00:21:30.182 --> 00:21:31.704
You're really not expected.

00:21:31.704 --> 00:21:34.105
That's an expectation, right.

00:21:34.105 --> 00:21:38.469
But I do include grandparents and aunts and uncles and those sorts.

00:21:38.469 --> 00:21:55.088
There has to be a degree of separation, because when you are trying to get through the basics of life, you know a child or a parent that gets blurry and fuzzy what's mentorship and what's parenting, and so that can be removed if you go one degree away.

00:21:55.088 --> 00:22:00.125
So I will never say, hey, can there be mentorship within that family?

00:22:00.125 --> 00:22:07.249
You know immediate family parents and siblings, yes, but there's a whole lot of other stuff going on, good and bad, and families.

00:22:07.249 --> 00:22:13.029
That makes it so that mentorship is a little tricky and diluted and muddy in that respect.

00:22:14.039 --> 00:22:15.125
Yeah, no doubt about that.

00:22:15.125 --> 00:22:33.955
And in order for folks out there to seek mentorship, especially in their young professional careers, what's the best way to get them to either realize the importance of it or to simply come to the table to seek it?

00:22:35.300 --> 00:22:43.186
The first thing I suggest to people is go do something outside of yourself for somebody else, because then you can understand the position of the mentor.

00:22:43.186 --> 00:23:00.048
So if you are donating your time to you know, volunteer at a soup kitchen, midnight run maybe, and do it regularly like not once you're not going to get it from that, but go do something for somebody else and and don't do it when anybody knows you're doing it.

00:23:00.048 --> 00:23:09.567
Just go do it and then you're going to understand why a mentor wants to help you, because it feels unbelievably good to help somebody.

00:23:09.567 --> 00:23:21.529
So if somebody's young, I try to get them to see how important and good it feels to go help somebody out in some way, whatever that is, whatever that civic engagement is, to get involved in that.

00:23:21.529 --> 00:23:23.961
That's where I've seen the disconnect happen.

00:23:23.961 --> 00:23:30.351
You know is not being civically engaged, so people don't understand why a mentor would ever want to give their time.

00:23:30.351 --> 00:23:40.027
So if you are young, first start with your friends that you already trust them and like them and ask them.

00:23:40.027 --> 00:23:41.631
You know how would you solve this?

00:23:41.631 --> 00:23:42.332
How do you do this?

00:23:42.432 --> 00:23:47.769
Most of our most explosive impact that came from all of our big tech.

00:23:47.769 --> 00:23:51.481
You know explosive things that have happened were two friends.

00:23:51.481 --> 00:23:56.894
So I'm going to tell you an example of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

00:23:56.894 --> 00:24:00.205
Neither of them did anything alone.

00:24:00.205 --> 00:24:01.891
They did it with each other and they were friends.

00:24:01.891 --> 00:24:04.905
They didn't seek originally advice from somebody above them.

00:24:04.905 --> 00:24:08.930
They sought it laterally from each other and then they moved up.

00:24:08.930 --> 00:24:21.673
So if you're seeking a mentor, go to the person you feel most comfortable with and that's likely somebody who's lateral to you and then you can use those ideas to find the person above you that you say.

00:24:21.673 --> 00:24:24.165
That's somebody I'd like to reach out to, and it's easy enough.

00:24:24.165 --> 00:24:25.570
It doesn't have to be somebody you know.

00:24:25.570 --> 00:24:27.425
People respond to emails.

00:24:27.425 --> 00:24:30.119
They respond to social media requests.

00:24:30.119 --> 00:24:37.961
They are people in your schools, they're people in the workplace that aren't in your division or your department.

00:24:37.961 --> 00:24:40.688
They can be anybody anywhere.

00:24:40.688 --> 00:24:44.363
The world is a nice small place in that way that you can reach out to people.

00:24:46.366 --> 00:24:48.491
Yeah, that's really, really, really great advice.

00:24:48.491 --> 00:25:18.585
Um, and for folks out there that are mentors and have a tendency to get frustrated mainly because, uh, their advice is not, I guess what it is is, I've tried to mentor folks before and I'm trying to think about how to phrase this question, but I've tried to mentor folks before and have become very frustrated, like overall, with trying to get this person to consider doing something else.

00:25:18.585 --> 00:25:20.169
And then instead they do.

00:25:20.169 --> 00:25:23.021
They only take certain parts of the advice they don't.

00:25:23.021 --> 00:25:26.211
They like to pick and choose what they like and what they don't like.

00:25:26.211 --> 00:25:36.484
And me as a mentor, like I've been very frustrated before with that, with that overall concept, trying to convince them and then later down the road finding out that, yeah, I probably should have done it that way.

00:25:36.484 --> 00:25:39.092
Instead, what do you, what do you suggest?

00:25:39.092 --> 00:25:42.867
How do we cope with that, like as mentors, to overcome that frustration?

00:25:44.569 --> 00:25:45.671
You know that's a tricky one.

00:25:45.671 --> 00:25:47.731
I think that there's a lot of levels to that.

00:25:47.731 --> 00:25:52.374
The first thing I would say is that yes, there's a goal that we're working on.

00:25:52.374 --> 00:25:54.575
Was that goal established first?

00:25:54.575 --> 00:25:57.317
Was there a goal or was it an open ended thing?

00:25:57.317 --> 00:26:01.598
I'm going to give you this information and hope you do what you need to do with it.

00:26:01.598 --> 00:26:09.001
Like if I'm going to go ask somebody for help, I'm going to say, hey, I'm looking to solve this problem.

00:26:09.001 --> 00:26:10.423
I may not know how to get there.

00:26:10.423 --> 00:26:12.564
Do you know any route that I can get there?

00:26:12.564 --> 00:26:15.285
And then there's a goal that's stated there.

00:26:15.285 --> 00:26:18.086
That's one thing that may not have been stated.

00:26:18.926 --> 00:26:21.428
Maybe it was and somebody is only taking a little bit.

00:26:21.428 --> 00:26:23.592
Are they making progress?

00:26:23.592 --> 00:26:25.439
Are they still moving in the right direction?

00:26:25.439 --> 00:26:29.599
If they are, then you're doing your job.

00:26:29.599 --> 00:26:36.292
You know we don't have control over how quickly people absorb our information that we're giving and utilize it.

00:26:36.292 --> 00:26:39.866
We have to just make sure you're still going in the right direction.

00:26:39.866 --> 00:26:42.153
Are we working towards that goal that we had?

00:26:42.953 --> 00:26:45.659
Number two is it might be a bad fit.

00:26:45.659 --> 00:26:48.423
Maybe that person isn't ready.

00:26:48.423 --> 00:26:52.491
Two is it might be a bad fit.

00:26:52.491 --> 00:26:53.354
Maybe that person isn't ready.

00:26:53.354 --> 00:26:56.221
Maybe you're the person that's going to be good for them in six months, a year or maybe never.

00:26:56.221 --> 00:26:59.010
That's hard for mentors to see Sometimes.

00:26:59.010 --> 00:27:07.397
That's why I tell mentors and mentees to have many mentors and mentees, because it feels like all your eggs are in one basket.

00:27:07.397 --> 00:27:17.323
If you have only one and you, I bet that everyone who's listening and that you can think of a lot of different people who've helped you along the way.

00:27:17.323 --> 00:27:19.476
Imagine if you only had one.

00:27:19.476 --> 00:27:29.568
Your eyes get open to so many things when you have multiple mentors and mentees so that if one person has taken a little bit longer, you can feel really good about, maybe somebody else is moving in.

00:27:29.568 --> 00:27:29.882
One person is taken a little bit longer you can feel really good about.

00:27:29.882 --> 00:27:36.252
Maybe somebody else is moving in a little quicker, at a little bit of a quicker pace with something it makes.

00:27:36.252 --> 00:27:39.801
It takes that pressure off that there should never be when you're mentoring.

00:27:41.353 --> 00:27:43.609
Yeah, that that totally makes sense.

00:27:43.609 --> 00:27:48.876
I mean, getting different perspectives from different people can only amplify your overall.

00:27:48.876 --> 00:27:58.715
I guess mental lateral movement into thinking bigger and thinking outside the box To be a good mentor, in your opinion.

00:27:58.715 --> 00:28:01.823
Do you think that you need to be a little bit confrontational?

00:28:03.551 --> 00:28:05.880
Some people are confrontational and some people are not.

00:28:05.880 --> 00:28:10.518
I think it has to be your personality style and that should be matching up with your mentee.

00:28:10.518 --> 00:28:18.421
So in certain situations look, if you're in the military and you're not confrontational people have to all get to the same place.

00:28:18.421 --> 00:28:25.932
You know, at a certain time point you're going to need to be that way and there are certain areas that really resonate with that.

00:28:25.932 --> 00:28:32.864
That could be sports, that could be all kinds of different areas, but you have to know what's going to work with you and your mentee.

00:28:32.864 --> 00:28:39.643
If you're confrontational with a friendship and a friend doesn't like that, it's not going to be a really close friendship.

00:28:39.643 --> 00:28:43.518
You have to match it up, just like you would with friendship.

00:28:43.518 --> 00:29:03.683
Friendship and mentorship are not the same thing, but I like to talk about them similarly because everyone knows how to go make a friend and what feels good in a friendship and what doesn't, and when you feel that feeling, that's the same feeling you get with a good mentorship relationship.

00:29:05.550 --> 00:29:08.919
No, that makes a lot of sense and I've actually described people like that before.

00:29:08.919 --> 00:29:10.451
Well, I think that's a great guy, I think that's a lot of sense, and I've I've actually described people like that before.

00:29:10.451 --> 00:29:19.749
Well, I think that's a great guy, I think that's a great gal, but at the end of the day, like, they're just something, yeah, that I don't personally really like all right and it's just.

00:29:19.749 --> 00:29:29.386
It's not that they're bad, it's just something that that I don't personally whatever, like my own value system or my own beliefs don't match up with that.

00:29:29.386 --> 00:29:32.393
And overall, you talked about good fit.

00:29:32.393 --> 00:29:41.999
Maybe, if you're mentoring or mentee or whatever, whichever side of the road you're on, how do you know?

00:29:41.999 --> 00:29:44.243
Like, how do you know if you are a good fit?

00:29:44.243 --> 00:29:57.939
Is there like a test you could take or a questionnaire you could take, or is it just something that you inherently feel when you're conversating with somebody, sort of like you know, you and I, or whenever I'm talking to a guest?

00:29:57.939 --> 00:29:59.364
I guess is that how it goes?

00:30:00.047 --> 00:30:01.431
Yeah, it's exactly like that.

00:30:01.431 --> 00:30:07.715
You don't give your friend a questionnaire and say, let's see how good our fit is, and we don't do that with mentorship.

00:30:07.715 --> 00:30:09.810
A lot of places try to do that.

00:30:09.810 --> 00:30:16.534
They try to quantify mentorship, and if somebody tried to quantify my friendships it would be a disaster.

00:30:16.534 --> 00:30:20.522
You know, I like who I like, because there's some kind of chemistry there.

00:30:20.522 --> 00:30:22.673
And that's the same with mentorship.

00:30:22.673 --> 00:30:28.154
So you could look at something and on paper, a relationship would look great.

00:30:28.154 --> 00:30:39.303
This is why, if you go through a dating app, do you look at the dating app and the first person that comes up you go oh, we were matched, we're a fit, and if it doesn't work out, it's a failure.

00:30:39.303 --> 00:30:41.393
No, that's not how life works.

00:30:41.393 --> 00:30:47.270
So there's no tests that you can take, there's no questionnaire, it fits.

00:30:47.270 --> 00:30:49.276
It's like putting on a shoe.

00:30:49.276 --> 00:30:54.241
If you wear a size eight and you put on a size six, it's going to feel uncomfortable.

00:30:54.241 --> 00:30:57.314
If you put on a size 12, it'll feel uncomfortable.

00:30:57.314 --> 00:30:58.798
You really need the right fit.

00:30:59.970 --> 00:31:01.594
Right, that totally makes sense.

00:31:01.594 --> 00:31:04.480
I wish life came with an instruction manual.

00:31:04.480 --> 00:31:08.413
It'd be so much easier, right for everybody just to read and follow the instructions.

00:31:08.413 --> 00:31:10.416
But it doesn't quite work that way.

00:31:10.416 --> 00:31:54.152
And there's one more thing I wanted to ask too, because I've kind of talked about this before with other people, but for folks out there who especially like parents and things like that, if they haven't gone to college, do you think that there are times where certain people need to be very careful about offering advice or mentoring to folks, because they might be giving the same blueprint to the next generation and the blueprint may not be a blueprint of higher achievement be a blueprint of higher achievement.

00:31:54.192 --> 00:31:57.882
No, I, I, some of our mentors don't have college degrees and they've done world changing things and so I don't look.

00:31:57.882 --> 00:31:59.887
This is me personally.

00:31:59.887 --> 00:32:04.824
I do not look at a degree as making a person a higher achieving person.

00:32:04.824 --> 00:32:09.920
I couldn't have done what I do without you have to have a PhD to do what I do.

00:32:09.920 --> 00:32:12.316
I had to go that far, whether I wanted to or not.

00:32:12.316 --> 00:32:14.141
If I wanted to do this, I had to do it.

00:32:14.141 --> 00:32:22.714
But there's a million things people do that don't require a college degree and you can be super successful and achieve great things.

00:32:22.714 --> 00:32:26.602
So I caution against that.

00:32:26.602 --> 00:32:57.477
Everyone can be a mentor, no-transcript, and a degree may not be the answer to it.

00:32:57.477 --> 00:33:00.282
So am I saying don't go get a degree?

00:33:00.282 --> 00:33:02.855
I'm saying get a goal.

00:33:02.855 --> 00:33:05.101
That's what I'm saying Get a goal.

00:33:06.069 --> 00:33:08.163
You know, and I made that, I made that mistake.

00:33:08.163 --> 00:33:09.611
You're talking to someone right now.

00:33:09.611 --> 00:33:15.991
I have two graduate degrees and an undergraduate degree and I don't use any of my degrees.

00:33:15.991 --> 00:33:18.116
I mean I don't want to say I don't use them.

00:33:18.116 --> 00:33:24.157
I'm sure it's helped me along the way, but like a ship in the night, I kind of got a.

00:33:24.157 --> 00:33:31.281
I got a degree in MBA, in project management, msa, in organizational leadership, and then my undergrad is in criminal justice.

00:33:31.281 --> 00:33:37.710
So it's one of those things where I just thought that getting degrees was like going to make me successful.

00:33:37.710 --> 00:33:46.384
And in reality I know a lot of folks out there that run businesses that don't have degrees, that didn't get higher education.

00:33:46.384 --> 00:33:49.993
You know, and that's and that's.

00:33:50.013 --> 00:34:00.277
I'm glad that you mentioned that, because I tell folks that all the time I'm like you're looking at someone right now who thought that that was the measurement of success and in reality it's not.

00:34:00.277 --> 00:34:04.897
So I really try to impress upon people to do exactly what you just said.

00:34:04.897 --> 00:34:06.063
Don't look at that as something.

00:34:06.063 --> 00:34:07.288
Look at a goal.

00:34:07.288 --> 00:34:07.990
Where do you want to go?

00:34:07.990 --> 00:34:09.536
What do you want to do someday?

00:34:09.536 --> 00:34:11.000
Where do you want to be in life?

00:34:11.000 --> 00:34:22.300
But, debra, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about the mentorship edge, which is, which is your book, who, who is it for and who?

00:34:22.300 --> 00:34:26.795
Who should be the folks out there that buying it and reading it?

00:34:28.759 --> 00:34:29.139
Thank you.

00:34:29.139 --> 00:34:31.050
You know the Mentorship Edge was written.

00:34:31.050 --> 00:34:38.693
It was something that I felt compelled to write because I've been seeing mentorship used in the wrong ways.

00:34:38.693 --> 00:34:45.112
People are trying to quantify it or make a checkbox for it and it's not working in a lot of places.

00:34:45.112 --> 00:34:51.715
So people are thinking mentorship is something that you can fail at or that it can only be done in certain situations.

00:34:51.715 --> 00:34:56.291
So the mentorship edge is for anybody and everybody.

00:34:56.291 --> 00:35:02.130
It really is showing how we're built to mentor and it's from a mentor perspective.

00:35:02.130 --> 00:35:11.773
In many ways, we are built to want to do this and I give examples of people who have mentored successfully and been in mentoring situations.

00:35:11.773 --> 00:35:13.380
I also show what it's not.

00:35:13.380 --> 00:35:14.264
It's not coaching.

00:35:14.364 --> 00:35:19.099
People who are coaches often say well, I'm a mentor to, you're paid, you're not sorry, that's how it is.

00:35:19.099 --> 00:35:26.481
There are certain things that it's not, but you can use mentorship in conjunction with all of these different things.

00:35:26.481 --> 00:35:28.733
So it's what it is, what it isn't.

00:35:28.733 --> 00:35:35.181
It's a lot of stories from you know people like who've had their lives saved from mentorship.

00:35:35.181 --> 00:35:39.681
And it talks about lateral mentoring, not just hierarchical mentoring.

00:35:39.681 --> 00:35:46.920
So if you want to have better connections with people in work and in personal life, this is for you.

00:35:46.920 --> 00:35:48.411
If you want to mentor, this is for you.

00:35:48.411 --> 00:35:50.396
If you want to have a mentor, this is for you.

00:35:50.396 --> 00:35:56.630

How Mentorship Enhances Life's Transitions and Opportunities with Dr. Deborah Heiser

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