Understand the Upside and Downside of a Mentor

A mentor is a person who invests time and energy in getting to know you over an extended period and offers you insights on how to perform better.

Almost every extraordinary performer acknowledges the importance of mentors in his or her life and describes how they made an enormous difference along the way.

I encourage you to actively seek out mentors. You don't need to call them mentors and they don't have to have a formal relationship with you. If a person spends time with you and offers you helpful insights and suggestions, then he or she is being a mentor for you.

In my lifetime I've had about a half dozen wonderful mentors, individuals who dramatically impacted my thinking about my personal and professional life. Much of what I am doing today and the way in which I am doing it can be traced to an insight I gained from one of my mentors.

However, I've also learned some mistakes I've made with my mentors. It's not what they did to me, it's what I did in response to them.

Mistake #1: I tried to be like them.

Whenever I did this I was always disappointed in my performance. I felt that I was being a fake and I felt as though I could never be as good as the other person. I was right on both accounts. I was being a fake because I wasn't being myself, and I was never going to be as good at being the other person as that person was going to be. The purpose of a mentor is not for you to try to replicate him or her. The purpose is for you to gain insights from that person that you can consider incorporating into your approach that might improve performance.

Mistake #2: I expected them to be flawless.

Many times I got frustrated with my mentors when I realized they were not perfect. I had built them up in my mind to be superheros. Don't make that mistake. Mentors are humans. Learn what you can from the individual that can help you to be a better performer. But don't be unrealistic. No human being is perfect. It's unrealistic to expect you are going to learn how to perform better from every aspect of another person. Value the value you gain from the person and then accept that person for who he or she is as a person.