Mentorship is important.
Whether you’re just starting out in your career, or you’re a seasoned entrepreneur, having a mentor can help you navigate the waters and achieve your goals.
But being a great mentee is key to making the most of the relationship – here are a few tips to help get you started!
Find a great mentor
Once you’ve got the right mentor, then it all comes down to, can you be a great mentee?
Can you truly be an awesome mentee?
I’ve been a mentor and I’ve been a mentee.
In fact, I’ve had mentors in my life since I was a little kid, and I know what it’s like to be a mentee and to be a good mentee.
The mentor’s job is to give you a system for successful learning.
The mentor often has experiences.
They’ve got failures, and life’s lessons that they pass on to you.
They’ve got this wisdom and it’s your job as a mentee, to then be their best student.
Be a great mentee and student
Being a great mentee is to be their best student.
It means you’ve gotta collect that wisdom and take that wisdom and do something with it.
You’ve got to implement it.
One of my mentors, Kevin Harrington, wrote a book titled Act Now.
What great advice for any mentee to take, which is whatever wisdom you get from your mentor, intentially act on it right away.
Even if you don’t understand it, even if you don’t know what they’ve taught you, move forward follow their instructions.
Sometimes we learn more in failure than we learn in success.
Occasionally, our mentors want us to experience some failure so that they can help us understand and learn from that failure.
They’ve got the wisdom.
You then become their best student.
Pass along what you’ve learned
Lastly, you’ve got to pass these teachings and lessons along.
You’ve got to teach other people.
Become the mentor!
Here is a real-life analogy using the brick wall in the video above.
The brick wall is real.
The brick wall really represents everything I just talked about in being a great mentee.
It’s the mentor’s job to give you these bricks.
That’s their job.
They’ve got the bricks of wisdom, the bricks of failure, the bricks of success, and they give them to you and you collect them.
Now I have to tell you a brick wall, even a stack of bricks without this concrete mortar in there, anyone can knock that down.
So if you just collect it, if you don’t do anything with it, then it’s kind of worthless.
In fact, it’s worse than worthless.
It just takes up space.
So where do you get that concrete?
Where do you get that mortar that holds it together?
That’s by taking everything you’ve learned from your mentor and teaching it to other people.
When you teach other people what you’ve learned from your mentor, that’s what locks it in.
That’s what turns it into a brick wall and a brick wall.
You can build things on, you can build a house, you can build a business, you can build a family, you can build a life.
So remember when you are looking for the right mentor and you become a mentee, just remember this brick analogy that it’s their job to give you the bricks.
It’s your job to collect those many of those bricks as you can, but then how you lock it all in is by giving those bricks and passing them along.