 You'd like to connect with a mentor, but you're not sure what your next steps are. I'm going to outline what you need to do to make your next introduction and potentially start your next mentoring relationship. Stick around. Hey, it's Leanne from LeanneColderwood.com and if you've done your business plan for the year, I'm really hopeful that you put mentorship high on your list of priorities. Finding a mentor or two is one of the best ways to learn about our industry and navigate this crazy place we call meetings and events. I did a post and a video actually quite a while ago about the importance of mentorship and you can access that video here and the blog post below and I've always been a proponent of mentorship. I've volunteered on a number of mentorship committees because there's so much value in it. There's so much value in learning from peers and colleagues and people in our industry and even outside of our industry to offer us insight on what our next steps can be in order to further our career and grow our skill set. So we're going to talk today about how to find a mentor and some questions that you should be asking yourself before you even approach an individual. So here we go. Your first step before even reaching out to anyone is to take a step back and set the goals you want for the relationship. What is it that you want to learn and what do you want to get out of this relationship? It is a professional relationship so it's perfectly fair to put these guidelines and these goals in place. So please do that before you even reach out and make an introduction. Secondly, define the qualities you want in a mentor, whether that's their values system or their skill sets. What are things that you are looking for in that person? So create almost an ideal mentor profile about what that person looks like and what they're going to bring the table to teach you. Thirdly is to sketch out your career path and start to plot out all the different steps, be it a job title or a responsibility change that leads you up to that end goal and start to look at the individuals that already have those roles up your personal career ladder. That way you might be able to find some mentors that are on the rungs above you already and can help you reach that next run yourself. Fourthly is to look at your calendar and decide how often you can actually meet with a mentor. Some mentors don't have a lot of time to give, some have plenty of time to give. So finding someone that aligns with your personal expectations as well is really important but before you do that you need to figure out what that is and what that looks like in your calendar. So make some quick notes on how often you could potentially meet with your next mentor. The fifth tip, start to sketch out where you can meet this mentor and don't be limited by physical places where you can meet them but perhaps you can have an online mentoring relationship as well. Now if you work from home and you don't have an office setting that you can meet someone in, I did do a video way back about places that you can network when you work from home and you can access that video here. So there's a plethora of ideas on where you can potentially meet up with your mentor and again don't forget that it could be online as well. The sixth tip is to maybe define how many mentors that you would like to connect with. So looking at the goals you've set in tip one, the qualities that you've used set in tip two and even the career path that you've set for yourself, maybe there's a few different individuals that you want to connect with. So decide how many mentors that you can take on in your calendar currently and what each mentor would potentially bring to that relationship. And my final tip for you, and this is my favorite tip, is to redefine who it is that we learn from. When we think of mentors, we tend to think of people who are older than us or have more experience than us. But often there is a bevy of things that we can be learning from people who are new to the industry, younger than us or have skill sets that we have yet to develop. A great example of this is the younger generations coming into the workforce have a great grasp of social media. And so us baby boomers and Gen Xers who aren't as well versed in social media as some of our younger colleagues, there's a lot that we can learn there from those colleagues. So redefine who it is that we can learn from and that will open up a world of possibilities for you. Mentoring can take so many different forms which is why it's critical for you to do this groundwork before you just launch into sending invitations and starting up new mentoring relationships. And if you're in a current mentoring relationship right now, I would love to know how the two of you came to connect. Did you follow any of these tips or are there other pieces of advice that you can give to mentees on their journey to find a mentor themselves? Will you please comment below this video or even just send me an email over at my website at leoncaldorwood.com so that I can share your tips and tricks about mentoring to everyone else. I hope you enjoyed this week's video and if you know someone who's looking to find a mentor maybe just slide this video and blog post over to them so that they can take a look as they head out on their own journey. I post videos and blog posts each week over at leoncaldorwood.com and I hope to see you over there. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. Bye for now.