Mentors can take on various forms for those ready to learn.
—
Finding mentors can be a challenge. Locating the right person at the right time isn’t easy. It is risky to put yourself out there. It feels scary to share your voice with someone else on a regular basis, to ask them to invest in you.
I had gone through most of my life alone with my thoughts and experiences. I needed other people, specifically men who has already walked through the territory I was moving through, to help me process events as they unfolded. If you haven’t found a life-giving mentor, don’t worry. Keep looking and asking. In the meantime, find people who are doing or have done what you want to do. Follow them on social media, read their books, watch their YouTube videos. Learn as much as you can from them.
I enjoy reading. I’ve read 25 books a year for the last several years. I gained a lot of wisdom from what I was reading but I hesitated to call these authors mentors. I didn’t have direct contact with them so I didn’t want to give them the title of mentor.
That is until one day, I was listening to a podcast with Ryan Holiday, an author and media strategist. He was talking about mentors and how they can show up in various forms. Whether they were in-person meetings or authors he’d never met but gained insight from, he called them mentors. He learned from them. It didn’t matter how the information came his way; he was gaining wisdom and increasing his resources. He was being mentored.
Mentoring isn’t about grand gestures and material possessions, it’s about time. Investing in the life of another. A quick email or a two- hour conversation, they all matter. And I am grateful for those people who invested their time in me.
Find a mentor. Be a mentor.
Life change occurs when we connect and share life. I witnessed this first hand at the Long Live Mentoring Conference hosted by The Mentoring Project (TMP). John Sowers, the President of TMP, kicked off the conference explaining how he hoped our time together would be more like Kevin Durant’s MVP speech than intellectual keynotes where we process and download step after step and procedure after procedure.
I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant. By the end of the week I had a realization. Mentoring is difficult because life is difficult. But all mentors win by doing one thing: showing up. That’s all it takes. Then there are the moments that go above and beyond; special events, perfectly timed words in a challenging conversations, etc. Those are peak events.
What changed people who were mentored was someone showing up for them. To show up says to people without words, “I see you. You matter. You matter to me. You are worthy of my time. You have value.”
Every guest on the line up affirmed this idea. Donald Miller, Jamie Tworkowski, Shaun Alexander, Rodney Atkins, Ed Eason, Josh Shipp and others all spoke of someone who at some point in their life showed up for them. One person changed the trajectory of their life. All by showing up.
The words weren’t especially perfect a first. They were looking for trust. Can I trust this person to be here for me? Are they playing me or do they really care? So many people go through life not knowing how much they matter. Life giving mentors show up bestowing honor as life is exchanged from one person to another.
Where would I be without mentors in my life? Who knows? I am better off because someone showed up for me. They showed up for my voice.
◊♦◊
This is an excerpt from Tyler Williams’ I Have A Voice.
Photo: Tyler Williams
And thank you for sharing this.