 Are you mentoring anyone right now? If not, it's time to start. Welcome back, and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. We often hear people talking a lot about mentoring, but it's hard to point to good examples where mentoring is done successfully. Real mentoring comes from a place of genuine interest in the success of someone else. And the real payoff for us as leaders when we mentor someone is we get to see our protege succeed. Our organization also benefits because of the newly evolved capabilities of the protege. There are a lot of misconceptions about what mentoring is. Some of the things that mentoring is not, mentoring is not simply periodically checking in with your protege just to see how they're doing. And it's also not making your protege provide periodic updates about what they're working on to you. It's not just one way criticism and feedback, and it's not just taking corrective action when the protege does something wrong. While all of these things can be part of an effective mentoring session, true mentoring goes much deeper. Effective mentoring is characterized by passing knowledge and wisdom down to your protege and sharing different perspectives with them. A true mentor-protege relationship is a reciprocal one where the mentor and the protege develop a true rapport with each other. This rapport becomes the foundation of a further mentoring relationship. One of the first goals of the mentor is to help the protege develop their strengths and overcome their weaknesses. And the best way we can do this is to tell our own stories, to share our successes and failures with our protegees and help them use those lessons on their journey. It's important to remember that true mentorship consists of two-way communication, and we need to actively listen to our protegees as they tell us about their long-term personal and career goals. We need to help them meet the challenges they face in achieving these goals and not just provide them quick answers to their short-term problems. One final note about mentorship. It's important for us as mentors to try to seek out protegees who come from different backgrounds and experiences from our own. Seeking out diversity in our protegees can help teach us as leaders and help us see the world from different perspectives. Hey, if you found this useful, follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and check out our website EvilGeniusLeadership.com. Click off on the globe to the right, that'll get you subscribed to our email list and that'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. And don't forget to join us Friday's 10 a.m. Pacific Time on Blab for an interactive leadership discussion. Thanks for watching everybody, I really appreciate it, and remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.