 Welcome to this edition of my podcast. Today's podcast is a replay of a webinar that I did called Six Keys to a Great Mentoring Relationship. I think more of us than ever are aware of a need for a well-chosen mentorship voice into our lives, or our organizations, or businesses. But we're not sure when we need that, why we need that, or how to find a great match for the needs that we have. I'm answering these and other questions in today's podcast. I want to say to you how much I have loved the first eight months of my online mentorship group. I want to invite you to join that tribe with us. To that end, I am giving an exclusive offer just for you in this podcast. You'll find more information in the notes about that. I'd love you to join our mentorship group tribe. Thank you. Please enjoy today's podcast. Let me get to these six ideas I have, these six ingredients, these six elements that I think should be in a great mentoring relationship. The first thing I want to tell you about number one is mentoring isn't coaching. I want to establish a difference between mentoring and coaching. These two words, as you guys know, are often used interchangeably. Mentoring and coaching are not the same thing. I am mentoring, I am not coaching. Mentoring is about personal development. It is relational in nature. It is about being not doing, which is what coaching is about. Coaching is about performance and task and doing and achieving outcomes with those metrics in mind. So a coach will coach a sports team or a company or an organization. And we're coaching you about things that are measurable, more orders, more business, more profit, more followers, more influence, more wins for the team. Coaching is to do with those things. Mentoring is to do with you as a person. Therefore, the role of a mentor is more to do with helping you flourish, helping you be the best version of you you can be rather than what you do. This is why I love mentoring too, because I mentor a whole range of people from all kinds of walks of life and callings and professions and vocations. And it kind of doesn't matter to me what these guys do, because I'm not coaching them in what they do. It doesn't matter to me that they're an accountant. I'm not trying to help them with accountancy or they're an actor. I'm not trying to help them be a better actor. They can get coaching from people with their expertise. I am helping them grow as a person. Of course, if I'm mentoring someone and my skill set and theirs is similar, then I can be much more useful as a mentor in communication. For instance, or in cultural engineering or team building or personal growth or leadership, I can be of much more help there because it happens to be also my expertise. But if it's not a like-for-like expertise, I don't care because I'm mentoring and helping you grow as a person. I think the other difference between mentoring and coaching is usually coaches are chosen for you. Coaching is brought in externally by someone that decides that on your behalf. Mentors are chosen by you. So mentoring from the beginning is already much more personal and relational than the coaching choice tends to be. And so I think the differences between the two are important at the outset. I am offering mentoring to you guys. I am mentoring you today. You'll see through the Q&A and my style is not just answering a question to get a thing better. I am invested in you. I am trying to help and empower you. I am trying to show you where the light switch is for your own illumination. I am not wanting to become the light switcher honor for you. I don't want to be the person that illuminates you only when you are having time with me. That would be a fail to me. That makes you too dependent on me. And mentors, great mentors are already empowering you from the beginning to know how to turn the light on for yourself when I'm not there rather than waiting for me to be with you again in the next mentoring session. And I think mentoring is very different for all those reasons. All right. So mentoring and coaching are different. I wanted to say that upfront as number one of these six things. Number two, timing. Timing is massively important to a successful mentoring relationship. You've all heard the statement, heard the quote, when the students ready, the teacher appears. And I think what I'm trying to do as a mentor in recent years and now even more with the mentorship group is I am wanting to be the teacher who appears. I wanted to appear to find out who are the students that are ready for my voice in their life. I think I'm trying to remove one of the problems that we have of who mentors those how do we find a mentor where our mentors. I am appearing. I'm putting myself out there as a mentor so that when you feel ready for that voice in your life, I may be one of the options available to you that you wouldn't know about. If I didn't go public with a mentoring offer towards you guys. So timing is everything. And it's like a book mentoring to me is like a book. People often ask me and probably ask you to recommend books and I recommend the book and I've had books recommended to me as have you. And I'll read the book that was recommended to me and I think it's rubbish. Why did that dude recommend that book to me and was so enthusiastic about what I get out of the book. I didn't get anything out of the book. Then I read the book six months or a year later and I can't put the book down. So the book hasn't changed. I have changed and my life has moved into a different season of inquiry and interest and curiosity and maybe stuckness. And then the book suddenly comes alive because when the person recommended the book to me, they were in the season I happened to be now a year later. And that's the thing with mentoring. People can talk to you about mentoring at a stage of like nah, I don't have time for that. I don't think I need that. Then there will come a moment in your life where you so feel desperate for a certain voice that understands you, that can help you, that can get you unstuck, that can help you to the next level. And so you have to be ready for that. And so mentoring is all about timing to be involved in a mentoring relationship when you don't feel in need for that is a disaster. It's just a complete waste of time and energy. And it's kind of an endurance that you're on. You can't be in a mentoring relationship when someone else thinks you should be. It has to be something you feel ready for. Maybe you don't know what you're ready for. And so to give the language of mentoring to what perhaps is the niche and nuance you need lets you know, yes, I think I need that in my voice. Now mentors don't need to be like we're doing this now. Mentoring can be in a podcast or a book or an event or someone you have coffee with every week. There are many forms of mentoring, but you need to elevate its status by calling it that and telling the person they are back to you so that the mentoring becomes more intentional or more purpose driven rather than a casual coffee we have every week. So a mentoring can be a range of expressions and delivery systems, but I think the timing has to be common to all forms of however you find the end your life. So the drive if you like, the passion, the desire, the buy in the want to has to come from you. Can't come from the mentor has to become from the mentee who feels this is my time to have that voice into my life because mentoring doesn't work if it's trying to answer questions that you are not in the season of your life to want to ask. Bad mentoring is trying to answer things that you won't be ready to talk about for a year yet. So part of the being ready is that you are aware that I have lots of questions I don't have answers for and then the teacher appears which is what I'm trying to do about offering this mentoring. I'm trying to do the appearing bit so that when the timing is right for you the other part of who shall I turn to I'm already offering that as an option for you so that the difficult part of where do I find a mentor at least I'm trying to narrow those angles for you so that the equation comes together easier. What I mean by timing too and I found this in my life and maybe you have as well you can be in a mentoring relationship and then you hear a random voice in a podcast or a webinar or a book or an event you go to and that voice in 10 minutes helps you more than your official mentor mentor has for months or years. That's what I mean is that when you listen to a voice that tunes into a frequency with you that has a meaning and a significance to you that those who you are already been mentored by don't have then it tells you that you are ready for that voice and you're wasting your time with those other voices. I think it's that's the way that you realize you're ready and the way you find mentoring voices people ask me all the time how do you find a mentoring voice I'll tell you how by people that are mentoring you already but they don't know they're doing that and no one's called it that you feel mentored and helped and empowered and illuminated and led and guided by some random voice that you heard or occasionally heard or you started following on social media and almost everything they talk about it's like whoa lights are coming on everywhere but you don't know this person then you go and have an hour this week with your official mentor and you're bored and it's not so if you're interested in it's not keying into what you most need that's what I mean so you have to keep your radar on and so ready ready means to to use that word ready again relative to timing ready means that you have developed enough self-awareness as a human being to know which voices you need from those you don't need ready is having the enough self-awareness to think okay I don't know who these people are I don't know who this guy is who this woman is who these people are but I know when I listen to them today I got more out of that book or that podcast or that webinar I got more out of that conversation in the car or over coffee than I have done with these mentors in my life for years it's having enough self-awareness to know that these are the voices you need more than the voices who tell you you need them that's what I mean by timing you know Jesus one time said to the disciples I've got lots of things to tell you but you're not ready to hear that you're not ready to hear them yet and what he's saying is that the gift of a mentor is really confined and limited by the degree to which you are ready to hear what they have to say to you I mean to people all the time on a one-on-one basis now when we'll continue to do that as I said and I'm often thinking there's so much I want to say to you but you're not ready to hear it so there's no point in me saying it ahead of its time that's what I mean by answering questions no one's asking but this readiness thing that's connected to timing is a huge massive X-factor ingredient in what makes mentoring fantastic or what makes it pointless and a waste of time and some official arrangement that you're in because you feel you should have a mentor or you should have a voice in your life or you should have accountability in your life what you talk about is really nothing that you're interested in so timing is everything alright hope you guys are okay number three openness and vulnerability for mentoring to work it has to be open and vulnerable from me to you and from you to me or whoever the mentoring voice is in your life both of us have to cut the bullshit cut the BS and get down to it we have to have this openness and this vulnerability if not then the mentoring stays artificial and stays at this surface level and we're never really getting down to what really matters and what we really need to talk about and I can't grow and you can't grow in a mentoring relationship where we have not both agreed to have sufficient sense and level of openness and vulnerability for us to really talk about what matters and to give you an example of this I was somewhere around the world recently and in this case it was a leader a pastor and he said to me you know anything you've spotted while you were here we're in the green room having a coffee anything you've spotted while you're here please tell me now I've been around church long enough to know most pastors when they say that don't mean it because usually when I've said to them things I've noticed they never talk to me again don't invite me back so I realized most pastors don't mean it they're trying to sound teachable which itself is not authentic in the first place this guy's a good guy I thought he really means it and I said well now you've asked me I've only been here two days and I was there for four days I'm just gonna give you a couple of things to top my head I said first of all how come when we were at dinner last night you were on your phone all night I said I'd just flown in internationally I was jet light I didn't want to do dinner because I was really tired but you insisted on doing this dinner together so I came to the dinner but well without the dinner which I didn't want to be at you were on your phone all night so what is that about why were you there at the insistence of me been there too with this time that you considered precious you kept telling me I'm so appreciative of your time you kept telling me how much you appreciated my time but your body language when you time on the phone told me you couldn't care less about time with me and I'm sitting there thinking I know there are people who would give anything to have two hours with me there are people I would give anything to have two hours with I would not be on my phone if I had two hours with some people even 30 minutes or 10 minutes I would not be distracted at all but you in spite of saying you wanted this time with me were on your phone all night when I told him that I could see he was instantly stunned because when he said have you noticed anything I didn't think he thought I'd say anything remotely to do with that I think he'd be thinking of did I have some strategic input did I have some great grand idea about how to grow his church I think he was thinking I would mention things like that because he wasn't thinking what I would say would be open and vulnerable and go straight to the heart of it in the conference we were at and he was in charge of people were doing the offering and the guy that took the offering that night took 15 minutes so I said the second thing I noticed was this guy that took the offering why is he going on forever did you not give him a time limit he said yes I was upset about that I gave him five minutes I said well he took 10 minutes over the time you gave him so you asked me what I noticed I'm noticing these guys are taking advantage of you what are you doing about it and he said the guy did it last night as well I wasn't there that night and so you telling me that you were set in boundaries these guys are ignoring them what are you doing about it you are not leading you are not protecting us it knocks everything on the time schedule gets knocked on which means we're all there later than we should be which means we're all not sleeping as much as we can and we're not in good shape the next morning because you are not managing the schedule of the day so you're not leading you are a leader and so as you can imagine so I had three things and I thought after the first one I was trying to be genuine and vulnerable and open and asking the same from him so those things I've got to be a given mentoring will not work if it's BS level and we are not being authentic and open I think that's why the apostle by the way said and this is what I mean by you might have lots of voices in your life but you're not growing Paul said you have many teachers but not many fathers I want to be at this age in stage 62 at this age in stage of life I've been doing this a long time I want to be a father I think my vibe is parental and is nurturing and is leading and is empowering and is can we get right down to it I don't have the time to mess around I think I want to be a father I suppose in my leadership in my mentoring voice rather than just somebody telling you what you want to hear and stroking well I hope you enjoyed today's episode on six keys to great mentoring relationship don't forget to comment and subscribe and don't forget to check out this special mentorship group offer in the show notes thanks for listening