The Invisible Mentor

The Ultimate Mentor Part One

May 12th, 2011 |

One of the best ways to attain professional success is to study what other accomplished people have done, and adapt the parts of their success plan that make sense for our unique situation. The Invisible Mentor interviews are very in-depth, and the reader may miss important pieces of information because there is simply so much content. So for today and tomorrow, I will extract excerpts from recent interviews and align the responses of a few interviewees to the same questions. I will focus on the mentoring and career related questions.

Today we are featuring:

Paulette Ensign, TipsBooklet.com

John Klotz, President, Northwood Mortgage Life Insurance Corporation

Mary Schnack, Mary Schnack & Associates

Sarah Speake, Strategic Marketing Director, Google UK

Andrew Warner, Mixergy.com

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Paulette Ensign: Mostly in good ways. The president of the music college that I attended for my undergraduate work said, “You go to a concert for two reasons: to find out what you like and to find out what you don’t like.” My mentors helped with that regardless of what profession I was in. And I had mentors in each of my three careers. They helped me to see what I liked that I wanted to emulate, expand and expound on, and they helped me see and sift through the things that really were not a match for me.

My mentors helped me to see who I am, respect it and build on it. For instance, they taught me to honour what my gift, personality and approach was all about. I am a go-getter kind of a person and for me to be a soft spoken person, is not the primary nature of who I am.

John Klotz: I’ve always had mentors. One of the mentors I have now is my partner Art Appleberg, who has basically taken Northwood Mortgage the brokerage he started 20 years ago and grew it into a 200 person sales force. We’ve set up a model on the insurance side that is similar to but not identical to the mortgage brokerage business. But I’m trying to follow – Art is full of all this wisdom – how to build a brokerage. He has done it on the brokerage side and I’m doing it on the insurance and investment side. He is a great mentor so it’s always good to go in and tell him what’s working and what’s not. The thing about mentors is that it’s not all about glory. You also have to talk about what’s not working. That’s been really great for me.

I’ve had other mentors along the way. At my last employment the owner and I were very tight and I always talked to him about how I would do things. Mentors have always helped me.

Mary Schnack: Mentors influenced my life and continue to influence my life. I have two or three probably more different mentors that I work with all the time, and thank goodness I have those sounding boards, the people giving me advice. I would say they’ve had a great influence both in living my life personally and businesswise.

Sarah Speake: Posing good questions first and foremost so that I challenged myself. And that’s also for formal mentors in the business community that I’ve had. Equally I have a close set of girlfriends, many of whom I have known for over 20 years, and in a less formal sense I see them as my mentors too. The two give me very different sets of advice in a way because they know me in a different context, but they definitely influence my life in a very positive way and allowed me to challenge myself by posing questions that I would probably be a bit reticent to ask of myself without a bit of prodding.

Andrew Warner: I didn’t have enough of them unfortunately and I wish that I had more along the way. I know that there were times when I couldn’t see that having four or five big clients was dangerous for my business. I had them, I was doing well, I turned away other customers because I couldn’t fit them all in. That was a big mistake, then a few of them went out of business, and if three of them went out of business, 60 percent of my revenue was shot.

If I had a mentor, he would have looked at it and said, “Look Andrew, I know you are doing well but you’d be better off with less money but securing your future by locking in multiple sponsors,” or they would have said, “Andrew, you should diversify away from this business and have other product lines,” and I just didn’t have that. That was a big mistake.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Paulette Ensign: The old Nike slogan to “Just Do It.” The core message is that I do not need approval from other people to do and be who I am, and that who I am really is something that needs to be shared with people who are open to receiving that. I am not everybody’s cup of tea, and that’s the good news.

John Klotz: Never say die, constantly improve, and that whole kaizen that the Japanese constantly look for better ways to do things. Always keep your eyes open, always act professionally like I told you about that “Good Loser” letter. That’s professional, if a client says, “I don’t want you as my adviser,” instead of being snotty, respond with a “Good Loser” letter. I never send angry emails, ever. I’ve received them, but I never send them because that’s on record forever.

Mary Schnack: I continue to receive messages from them. One of the first messages I received was to continue to learn, to continue to expand. With something like social media, you think, “I’m too old for that, I don’t want to deal with that.” We have to continue to learn, and continue to be educated, and grow as people, and grow as businesses, and it’s also a lot of fun.

Sarah Speake: Be authentic and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I’m naturally a perfectionist and a bit of a control freak if I’m being brutally honest, and I think the advice around not being scared to make mistakes allowed one to learn more than constantly thinking that I have to do everything perfectly and 200 percent. I think I’ve actually learned as much from my mistakes as my accomplishments.

Andrew Warner: I still have to say that I do not have them. The closest I could get to a mentor was when I went to my old college professor and I asked him for advice, and I don’t even remember getting it. And the problem was I didn’t make it formal. He didn’t have anything to give me at that point, I didn’t come back to him in the future because there wasn’t an agreement to do so and that was it.

Avil Beckford: An Invisible Mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from a distance, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Paulette Ensign: One of the things that have been very consistently voiced over the year that I have been involved with Tips Booklets specifically is the concern of people already knowing what the booklet author is thinking about putting in the booklet, or the question, “Gee, doesn’t everyone know this already and why should I bother to do this?” And I see and hear this so often that I continue to encourage people to think in terms of the fact that each of us has lived with, breathed with and slept with our own expertise, so we know it very differently than people who are coming to us for the first time. So that the folks who are coming to us, whether invisible, or visible, interactive or passive.

Think in terms of the fact that some people know some of what you know, some know a lot of what you know, and some don’t know any of what you know. It is really valuable to put your knowledge out there because if they don’t know anything at all about your expertise, that’s great; if they know some of what you know, you can definitely function as a good reminder to them and if they know a lot of what you know, confirmation is certainly valuable to people so do yours anyway. That’s what I think can be of great value to readers about what they can do to move forward in only the best way.

John Klotz: There are different readers, so let’s say I’m thinking about someone who is going into a career. One of the things that I did is that I wrote down a list of the things that I wanted in a career. And I knew when I entered this business that I wanted something with an education path; that was important to me. And I knew that I wanted something where there was no limit to your upside potential. And I knew that I wanted something where I could grow old with my clients so it wasn’t always a new sale every week it was about building relationships. And I didn’t want things like territories, but I wanted to be able to move all over the place. And I wanted something with real scope.

I wrote that 20 years ago, I created that list, I wanted an education path, I wanted a career with no limit on the ceiling, I wanted open territories and I wanted the opportunity to be a professional, to really embrace something. So what I would say to people listening to this is if you are looking at some sort of career, whatever, I would say know what you want because if you know what you want you will pursue it.

One of the failures I had is a job that didn’t work out, they let me go. I was selling office equipment and I didn’t enjoy it. So 20 years ago, I wrote down what I wanted in a new career, so I would say know what you want, write it down and set a plan.

Mary Schnack: My one piece of advice is to really look at your successes and let people know what they are, and that doesn’t mean sitting back and bragging about yourself. But it does mean sharing your wisdom, and having people understand why you are sharing that wisdom because you have that experience. When I do my speeches overseas, we also hear this in the United States, but when I do my speeches overseas even more so, “My culture doesn’t allow that, I could never do that.” And my response is “By you sharing your successes there might be a 10-year old girl out there that hears your story and says, ‘Wow, I can go after my dreams.’” And what a shame it is if you miss the chance to inspire that 10-year old girl.

Sarah Speake: I’m a huge believer in self-assessment, to constantly strive to better one’s self. I’ve just talked about the idea of being authentic, which is a piece of advice that I have been given on a number of occasions by mentors in the past. I think self-assessment is very difficult to do regularly but I think that by holding the mirror up to one’s self and truly looking at what am I good at, what am I not so good at, does it actually matter if I have a few weaknesses? Probably not, but keeping check of the direction that you are going in and going through that process is really important. And it’s something that I do on a regular basis to keep myself on track, equally, asking people for feedback. I think it’s very difficult to be authentic unless you genuinely understand how you’re viewed by others, and that includes the positive and the negative. So taking feedback and not necessarily seeing it as a personal slight, it’s actually taking it on board and working on it by going through the process of looking through the mirror.

Andrew Warner: Be willing to fail. The biggest ideas we have we were often not willing to act on because we weren’t willing to fail. When I started doing video interviews I almost didn’t do them because I said, “What if people see me online in video and they laugh at me and think I’m ridiculous or funny looking on camera. Or who is this guy, he wants to be some kind of Hollywood guy so he is starting to do videos?”

But I just kept at it, I fight that fight despite what would happen if I failed in public and I’m so glad that I did because through interviews I have gotten to know over 400 successful entrepreneurs. I see hundreds of thousands of people every month who are influenced by the work I do and I’m seeing more and more entrepreneurs build businesses because of the work I do so I’m so glad I didn’t stop because of that. And I would say the same thing to everyone who is paying attention to the interview, just be willing to fail.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Image Credit: Avil Beckford

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