The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Mentor’

For National Mentoring Month, consider creating your Personal Board of Mentors. Having one mentor is seldom ever enough these days, because no one person can assist you with all your mentoring needs. It is your responsibility to ensure that all your needs are taken care of. Your Personal Board of Mentors is similar to an organization’s Board of Directors, except in this instance, you are the organization. You don’t have to meet with all the members on your Board of Mentors like an organization’s board would, but you do have to be in contact with them.

Before you choose the members of your personal board, you have to first assess your needs based on where you’d like to end up in life. Whatever you do should be a part of your life plan and subsequently take you closer to achieving your big goals.

Mentoring Needs Assessment

1. What are your vision, mission and purpose in life?
2. In the next three years, where would you like to be in your personal and professional life? Are you committed to achieving your personal and professional goals listed above?
3. Think about your professional goals, what gaps exist between where you are now, to where you would like to be in the next three years?
4. What actions do you have to take to fill those gaps?
5. Who are the experts that you can learn from, and what are their areas of expertise?
6. Of the experts that you identified, which ones do you respect and are respected by others?
7. Why do you need a mentor? What can a mentor help you with?
8. If trusted friends could introduce you to five people who would be ideal mentors for you, who would you choose?
9. Would your ideal mentors be similar to the experts you identified above?
10. Could your ideal mentors assist you with achieving your identified goals, and close the gap you identified above.

After you have answered the questions above, you are in a better position to find the appropriate persons to assist you in filling those gaps. There are also specific types of people who you should have on your Personal Board of Mentors.

• Connector: A well-respected person in the community who has influence, authority and access to an extensive network of people.
• Industry Expert: Someone who has already traveled the path that you are now on, and is willing to share her experiences, both good and bad with you.
• The Listener: Someone who you can call when you are having a down day, who will allow you to rant for a while, to get things off your “chest,” so that you can focus on your next steps.
• Tough Lover: An objective person who is willing to tell you like it is, holding you accountable to keep your promises and remain on track to achieve your goals.
• Sponsor: A senior level person in your organization who will open doors for you. But the catch is that you have to make yourself memorable so that he will choose you. Typically you choose your mentors, but sponsors choose you. An example of how to make yourself memorable is to take on difficult projects that others do not want, then do them successfully.
• And one other person who will also help you to achieve your goals based on the needs you identified above.

All the people on your Board should care about your success, and be willing to accept a quick call from you. Be very honest and clear with the members of your Board, let them know exactly what you require from them, and make it very easy for them to help you. Mentoring is about give and take, so find ways to give back to your mentors, and always let them know how much you appreciate what they are doing for you.

When you have decided who you would like to be on your Board, ask them if they would be willing to mentor you, and explain what’s required. It goes without saying that you should take some time to get to know them first before asking for a favour. And it is even better if there is someone who could provide an introduction. With social media, this is a lot easier to do today than it was five short years ago.

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.

Related Posts

• Adventures in Learning: DIY Mentoring Program
• Adventures in Learning: DIY Mentoring Program, Episode Two
• Adventures in Learning: DIY Mentoring Program, Episode Three
• Five People You Need On Your Personal Board of Directors
• Forget Mentors: Employ a Personal Board of Directors
• Looking Out for Number One
• Create a Personal Board of Directors
• A Personal Board of Directors

Interviewee Name: Heather White, Director Membership – Large & Mid Markets

Company Name: Board of Trade

Website: http://www.bot.com 

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Heather White: I’m a wife, mother, volunteer and a hardworking professional doing a job that I really like. I am married to a guy I really love and have two kids that I really love.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Heather White: Typically my day starts with family stuff. My kids are young so it’s combing hair, getting breakfast, packing lunches and going to work. My job involves a lot of phone time, meetings, and emails. My day ends with family. The last part of my day involves me-time – meditation, reviewing my day and reading.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Heather White: My biggest motivation comes from my values as a Christian. I must say that that’s what drives me each day. I start my day with devotional time, which is getting into the scriptures; I’m very big on that and it sets the tone for my day and I spend some time in prayer. I review what I need to do for the day, what are some of the challenges I perceive, or that are real and how I’m going to work through them, and what it is that I am doing that I need to stay focused on. My motivation comes from that aspect of my day because it helps me to focus on the main things.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Heather White: It’s good that you asked this question because for a career, I think I would have been an engineer, if I had to do it over again, that’s a profession that I would have pursued. I could have invested more time into some relationships.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Heather White: The biggest thing I discovered about myself in the past year is that some people you just cannot change. Though you think it’s important for your own personal development and growth in life, and you want things to be different, you can’t change some people and you have to move on, you cannot allow them to stop you from pursuing your own development and growth, or other things that you need to do.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Heather White:

1. Lack of time: It seems as if I do not have enough time in the day to do what I think is important.
2. Too many interests: I think I have too many interests.
3. Leadership: To survive in our business you need to be in the top three as leaders. That is a challenge in our business and we are working hard at establishing ourselves as the fore runner.

What I am doing about these three threats is that I am trying to be more organized. I am organizing my time better. I am also working on narrowing my interests.  As a leader I am part of the process and I need to spend time looking at the winning ways.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Heather White: I am a relationship builder. I am very good at it and I am very big on people, listening to them and making connections. I’m very good at floating between the very senior crowd, to a blue collar like a dry cleaner. This is something that I’m extremely good at. I’m passionate about people, but I’m also able to relate very well with them and it’s because I have a wide range of interests and I read about a wide range of subject matter so it’s easy for me to relate to people on an individual basis.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Heather White: The biggest challenge I had in life had to do with an aging parent – my mom. She was getting older, weaker, and Alzheimer was creeping in. You grew up seeing your mom beautiful. She was so amazing doing so many things, and then the roles reversed. Instead of us depending on her as children, she was dependent on us. It was challenging because I made the decision against my husband’s better judgment to move my mom to live with us because she was living by herself. You think you don’t have enough time in the day, but you find the time. My mom became my me-time at the end of the day so when she became hospitalized, I would visit the hospital after I put the kids to bed. That was a major challenge because I had to work and sometimes I was at the hospital all night.

The challenge resolved itself because my mom died, but the lessons I learned from that, is that people in general have an amazing capacity to do more than they think they can. I faced decisions about pulling the plug, and people have different opinions about some of these things, but you have to do what you believe in and what you can live with. And I didn’t have to do that because I do not believe in pulling the plug on a life, so for me that was pretty amazing that it resolved itself so I didn’t have to face that decision. I also had some very amazing friends that in that difficult time of my life people who I don’t even do anything for were able to rise to the occasion and assisted in some pretty amazing ways. Financially as well it was a challenge but my faith helped me each day. A lot of people at work did not even know that I was going through that difficult circumstance but it was major and lasted for more than a year. It took a lot out of me but I’m really glad that I had the opportunity to do it.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Heather White: I’ve had two really big breaks in life that I’m very appreciative for. I consider myself blessed. I sit on a board for a university that’s new in Ontario. The break came through someone I had met through work who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. She saw the opportunity and advised me to apply for it, and she wrote a recommendation for me. I can’t imagine not having this wonderful experience on this board. It’s my second time on a board but it’s a really amazing experience. This was a big break because it affirmed what I thought. Sometimes you do not get a chance to connect to some of these things during your normal work day.

The second break was a really good opportunity I got at work for a promotion that was against the odds. I had a boss who I am eternally grateful for because he made a recommendation for me in a pretty tough situation that has now put me in a different spot in a progressive position.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Heather White: One of the biggest failures I’ve had was I used to sell paper bags – cement bags in South America. The company I was working for in the scheme of things would fit better as a second supplier, not the main supplier for a large company. I went to a large cement manufacturer in a Spanish speaking country – I’m fluent in Spanish – but I was new to this kind of thing so I went in, there was some likability factor with me coming into that country, and getting the chance to meet with some of these senior guys.

I met with them and they gave me the opportunity to become a second supplier, so they said, “Let’s test your product.” We went for a trial and the bags failed, they didn’t conform to specs. Of course that was a huge loss for me, anyway I was persistent and they gave me a second chance because they really wanted me to be a second supplier. The first time why it failed is that I didn’t do a proper quality control check before the bags were shipped to this company.

The second time around I did the check, I asked the guys if the bags conformed to specs, and there was no way of me necessarily checking, but the quality control guys had the reports that said  the bags conformed to specs. The bags failed again on the second trial. That was such an embarrassment! It was also a lost opportunity, and I wasn’t able to explain myself to a very senior audience. That was one of the most embarrassing and biggest challenges I had.

If I were to do it all over again, and I’ve done that ever since because of the lesson I learned is that if something is that important to you, you need to get independent check points in place for situations that you cannot check. It would have been pretty easy for me to go somewhere else and get the specs on the bags checked before they were sent off, just for my own comfort. That lesson has stuck with me in life, so now I don’t leave things to chance. I’m always questioning to make sure that things are in order, especially if it’s important to me.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Heather White: I used to work with Ontario Hydro, and it was one of the best places I had ever worked. There were lots of resources at your disposal, lots of challenges happening and I was secretary for their review board where the public complained about issues to do with hydro plants in their area, or electricity issues. I really loved that job but they were downsizing, and it was one of the largest downsizings in the company’s history, and probably one of the largest in Canada. I was afraid of being cut and they were giving a really attractive package, so I took the package. It worked out to be a good decision because I started schools doing a Masters so the package helped me to pay for my education, which was a positive thing, but it was very difficult to cut loose from an organization that I loved and a job that I was enjoying.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Heather White:

1. Having children.
2. Becoming a Christian at a young age put me on the path I’m on right now.
3. The board I currently sit on and the church I attend are neck-and-neck in terms of the impact that they are having on my life and my future.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Heather White:  My kids. They are well balanced and have a wide range of interests. They are very social and I really like that.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Heather White:  They were very affirming and honest and gave me a sense of direction. I didn’t have mentors until fairly late in my life because I never thought about it. You have people who you admire and respect but I really never thought about mentors per se. It’s later on that I found people who were really honest with me about stuff, you respect them and they bring real life situations to bear based on their own experiences. I really encourage people to have mentors and I am one myself.

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

Heather White: Focus on the main thing. Keep the main thing the main thing is the core message I have received from my mentors.

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

Heather White:  Spend some time to set your goals that you want for yourself, work on them and keep referring back to them. Some of them can be personal goals because I think that there are personal goals that can impact your entire life.

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.

Interviewee Name: Shirley Adrain, COO

Company Name: Asia Pacific Technology at Societe Generale

Website: http://www.societegenerale.com 

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Shirley Adrain:  I’m a mom and wife and I’ve got a career in investment banking information technology. In addition to that I sing, paint, cook and try to keep fit.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Shirley Adrain: I get up quite early and get into work by 8 o’clock. I don’t get to see my daughter because she doesn’t get up until 8:30 am. I do quite a bit of work before my team arrives after 9 am. Then I have a pretty busy day with meetings, meeting people, doing work and I basically never know what’s coming from one day to the next. I deal with crises in my job as Chief Operating Office, so there are basic things that I need to get done and there are things that come up which makes life exciting and I feel like I’ve lived a year in every week that I work. I try to do some exercise which I’m struggling to fit in at the moment and I usually leave the office just after 7 pm. It takes me 10 minutes to get home and then I just like to relax, see my husband and get something to eat. I just started a new job so I’m still developing a typical day.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Shirley Adrain:  I focus on doing things I love. I make sure I spend as much time as possible doing things I enjoy. I plan everything and I make lists and make sure that I cover every thing on my list. For me it’s important to keeps thing under control.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Shirley Adrain:  I would have focused more on my strengths and found out what my strengths were earlier. I’m not worried about having all the skills that people around me have. I am focusing on what I am good at and not so much on what I’m not good at.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Shirley Adrain: I went back to work after a long absence. I had my daughter two-and-half years ago and I was quite worried about how I would adapt, and what I would have forgotten, and whether it was the right thing to go back to work, but I discovered that it was like I had never taken any time off at all. I went straight back into it and am enjoying it. I think I wasted time worrying about something that didn’t become a reality. I guess I learned that it’s actually not that hard to go back to work after we’ve had children. I think we think it’s going to be worse than it’s going to be and convince ourselves that we can never do a high flying role again when actually if you had the skills to do it once you can do it again.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Shirley Adrain:

1. Personally, dealing with a different culture, I work for a French bank and I’m Scottish.
2. Being true to my strengths and not reinventing myself around an organization.
3. Maintaining a proper work-life balance.

How I’m handling them is I’m learning about different cultures and that’s definitely going to take quite a bit of time, but it’s fun learning. Being true to my strengths is probably the easiest one because I just have to keep focused and make sure I’m doing the right things. Maintaining a proper work-life balance is taking a bit of time but I’m convinced that I’ll get there, I’ve got a plan on that and I expect in the next few weeks to get things under control.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Shirley Adrain: What’s unique about my role is that my focus is on people and harnessing the talent in an organization, so it’s very much about employee engagement. While not unique, it’s normally not the key focus of the COO, the COO is usually focused on rolling out standards and procedures and that’s where I’m slightly different.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Shirley Adrain: A major challenge I had was after 9/11, the end of 2001 I was made redundant. That was a huge shock to me because I was doing quite well at work and I thought only low performers would be chosen for redundancy. But I quickly realized that I had finished a project and was waiting on a new project to work on that I was not critical to the business, so I was an obvious choice for redundancy. That was a bit of a shock and it almost felt like a divorce, but I decided to look on the bright side, which I always try to do.

I was also determined to get a better job than I’d had before, so I created a plan and timetabled my plan to keep me focused so I had specific things that I did every day. It actually took me a whole year to get another job but it turned out to be a really good move for me in my career, and I also learned not to define myself based on my job. And I appreciated the other things that make me happy in life, and the way I contribute and it’s not all about work.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Shirley Adrain: My biggest break was the first time I really got some help because I’m quite independent. I think I got through life by doing what I wanted to do and doing it by myself. But when I was about 28 years old, I got some help and that was when a boss offered me a role on Wall Street in the 1990s. I had been looking for something more challenging to do and he offered me a role to set-up a team working on the trading floor. I had never been to the US before so it was quite a big move for me but I turned up there not quite knowing what it was going to be like, but I absolutely loved it. I think it probably took my career to a different level knowing that I could do something like that and it was quite an exciting thing to go on my own and live in another country and do a bit of a different role. I think that gave me a level of confidence, and it really propelled my career.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Shirley Adrain:  I took on a new job and it wasn’t what was described in the job spec which obviously can happen. I hadn’t asked enough questions and didn’t do enough probing and it turned out not to be the right job for me. It was quite a struggle and the way the business set up wasn’t really effective to make my role a success. It was managing a large IT project and there wasn’t a huge amount I could do in the role. I tried to change the way the business was structured but I couldn’t succeed while I was in that role. But what I did do was talk to my boss and say it was a struggle and he gave me some other interesting things to do, some side projects that got me going. After 18 months, a particular project that I was on went live and I managed to move on to something else and I managed over time to influence how the business was being run so it was operating more effectively.

The experience made me appreciate that before you start a job you have to do a lot of research and when you get inside, and when you find yourself in a sticky situation you have to grit your teeth and see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Shirley Adrain:  Leaving a relationship actually. I was in a nice, comfortable relationship and we had a house together. It was all quite cozy but I realized that my horizons had expanded and it wasn’t the right relationship for me and everyone else was convinced that it was. It was a big move to leave that relationship when everybody around me was saying, “No, you’ve made the wrong decision.” That was quite tough but I had to have courage in my convictions. I had to keep convincing myself that I was going to meet Mr. Right. It took a really long time after leaving that relationship, but it happened in the end. It was about not giving up hope that eventually I would meet that perfect man.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Shirley Adrain:

1. Losing my university funding the second year: During my second year at university they took away my grant, and my parents couldn’t afford to send me to university, so I either had to leave university or find a way around it. I got myself a job in a restaurant and I worked 35 hours in a week doing split shifts, working weekends and evenings and that allowed me to fund myself through two degrees back-to-back. That was a big thing for me and that’s when I became completely independent.
2. Moving into investment banking from working in industry: I think I was really struggling working in London, working in an industry not making much money and it was very much about surviving month-to-month. I decided this wasn’t what I wanted to do and I wanted a more challenging job. So, I managed to get myself a job in investment banking in IT and I learned so much working for JP Morgan. It was very tough for the first six months moving into that high-powered environment with such talented people. I struggled for the first six months but I grew in confidence and I really enjoyed it. It was a tough but character building move.
3. Giving birth as an older mom: I was nearly 40 when I have birth and I’d given up by then that I was going to have kids. I managed it and what surprised me is that I’m quite relaxed about the whole motherhood thing and it’s been quite a lot easier and more fun than what people will say, but I’ve actually really enjoyed it.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Shirley Adrain:  Singing at my own wedding. I sing classically and have sung at friend’s weddings and I’ve gone to friends’ weddings where there was a singer and I always thought I’d like to do that at my own wedding. And then when I was getting married I spoke to the vicar and he said, “You wouldn’t sing at your own wedding, nobody does that.” And my friends and parents said that, “You can’t sing at your own wedding, someone else has to sing, you have enough stress at the wedding you can’t do it.” And I thought about it for a while but it was something I wanted to do. I wanted to sing a beautiful song to my husband, a classical song, and I wanted to do it in the church. So I just practiced, and practiced and practiced and kept it quiet to my family until the wedding rehearsal, and I just had to keep the confidence up. I practiced a lot the morning of the wedding to do it, but I’m really glad that I did it. It’s something that I can look back on, and it was a nice thing to have done. And it made the day a bit more unique.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Shirley Adrain:  I’ve had a lot of great mentors. I think it is really important to have a mentor to give you confidence in yourself, and to remind you of what your strengths are, and keep you going in difficult times. I’ve had a lot of support from mentors and I would recommend to everybody that they find at least one good mentor.

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

Shirley Adrain: I would say that it’s act as if it were impossible to fail, and then you won’t let failure become your reality. So you just assume that you’re going to succeed and it is much better, and if you act like it’s impossible to fail you are going to succeed.

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

Shirley Adrain:  Work out what your strengths are, ask people if you are not sure, and focus on continually developing them. Find the job that you love, something that you are passionate about. I think that’s the important thing to focus on.

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.

Interviewee Name: Mike DeSousa

Website: http://www.mikedesousa.ca

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Mike DeSousa:  I am a Career Social Media specialist who helps recruiters & employers find superior employee talent FAST using Social Media.  As well, I am a Public Speaker who trains Non-Profit Agency staff on how to market their job-seeking clients, helping them to find work FAST.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Mike DeSousa: Waking up at 6am, work at 7am reviewing daily goals set the night before, create presentations, researching clients online/phone networking, sourcing opportunities, setting up appointments, cleaning up paperwork, invoicing clients/following up on  building an online presence & my community, and learning new Social Media.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Mike DeSousa:  I focus on attainable short-term & long-term goals that move me towards my desire outcomes that I list on my Vision Board. Also I LOVE learning about new resources (Social Media & other), acting on new opportunities, and CREATING innovative opportunities & successes. Speaking to me puts me in the Zone, especially when my audience appreciates both the knowledge that I impart and my entertainment value (“edu-tainment”).  About 5-10 people approach me after one of my presentations, which tells me that I’m adding value to their lives and helping them out, as a “Social-preneur”. I love helping others, using my gifts — this is what makes me happy and I strive for in my legacy: being of service to others and making an empowering impact in their lives that moves them forward toward their committed goals. Conversely, I dislike working with people who state their goals, though are not committed to do the prep, work to reach them, and expect these goals to magically appear.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Mike DeSousa:  Take entrepreneurial courses, found business mentors, apprenticed under great people, start my own part-time business earlier, set compelling goals with deadlines, act on my gut instinct — I saw the value in the web in the early 90s, before it was mainstream, and my lack of action to follow my gut instinct cost me huge financial opportunities.  Never waste time crying over spilt milk: there are always other opportunities — look, observe, read, ask questions, study…don’t wait for them to find you: find them and create them.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Mike DeSousa: That I can do and achieve great things NOW (vs. in the future) and that I need to leverage the power of volunteers and interns to help me get there.  Setting aggressive goals and finding ways to achieve them are critical.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Mike DeSousa: 1. Not acting fast enough 2. Self-limiting beliefs 3. Not working on priorities & getting caught up with trivia.  I resolve these three threats by:

1. Waking up earlier to get more work done
2. Giving myself positive self-talk, and
3. Focusing on 1-3 long-term, capacity-building priorities each day (am getting time management software to help me with this last one).

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Mike DeSousa:

1. The creative way that I combine many different sources & the way that I show people how to apply this (vs. theoretical knowledge)
2. Innovative workshops on the latest programs, before most people have heard about them (early adopter)
3. Imparting wisdom while entertaining/motivating my audience & challenging them to take one action step right after the seminar

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Mike DeSousa: Failing swimming classes as a kid and watching other kids get their swim badges was a pivotal moment and great learning experience for me.  It resolved me to work harder, set goals, persist, get help, have patience with myself, and persevere in front of a challenge.  To this day, when I am faced with a challenge, I draw upon this experience to remind myself of the habits that caused me to climb out of a valley of a “learning experience”, into a successful mountain peak.  Failing a few swimming lessons as a kid was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it allowed me to react positively to it and gave me a great background that I use to this very day. Incidentally, the determination that I gained from these early “learning experiences” propelled me to eventually train/teach swimming instructors and lifeguards, rank in the finals of one Provincial Lifeguard Competition in Spinal rescues, and complete an Olympic Distance & IronGuard triathlon.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Mike DeSousa: My Best Friends kept on pestering me to act on my Public Speaking gifts, and I finally listened to them when I realized that other speakers who were less polished and knowledgeable than me were making a great living because they were marketing better.  My Best Friends take credit for my “Big Break” with helping me to ‘reprogram’ my self-limiting beliefs, reminding me of my strengths, and encouraging me to take action.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Mike DeSousa: One of my biggest failures was entering a depression (which I didn’t recognize or know what a “depression” or its symptoms were, so it remained undiagnosed) and consequently failing first year university.  I took an inventory of all the lessons that I learned that year, knowing that I would eventually return. When I did return, I took out my “lesson sheet” and created an action plan that fuelled my work ethic, goal-setting, and discipline, and propelled me to the top of my class.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Mike DeSousa:  One of the toughest decisions I’ve had to make was to face the fact that I “quit” in a couple of key pivotal moments in my life, when I promised myself that I would never do this.  With reflection and journaling, I discovered that sometimes, there is nothing wrong with “quitting”, as long as you learn something, grow from it, re-frame your experiences, strive to be a better person, help others, develop patience, compassion, kindness, and understanding for both yourself and for others.  I developed new meaning from this to learn the “assumptions” that informed my “quitting”:

1. Avoid comparing myself to others in certain ways (rather than to myself and seeking to focus on my own “Personal Bests”)
2. Not finding and communicating with a mentor who could explain to me how my self-limiting beliefs were holding me back.
3. Not willing to admit/refusing to admit my weaknesses to myself or to others

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Mike DeSousa:

1. Moving to Toronto as a teenager, and having to re-start my life in a new environment, having to make new Friends from scratch, and emerging successful from a tough transition
2. Going into Leadership Aquatics, which developed my teaching skills, speaking skills, and supervisory skills
3. Going back to school (university) as a mature student, which opened up new opportunities to me, helped get self-limiting beliefs and the monkey off my back, increase my awareness of undiagnosed depression in my life (which I got help for, keeping me healthy and stable for the past 4 years) and propelled my career in a new direction.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Mike DeSousa: Winning a 1,200m high-school wide running race as a 15 year-old. I had just had a growth spurt after being a pudgy kid, and I resolved to become more athletic.  I had a great cross-country fall running season, and a good track training season.  I trained in track and got some advice from our gym teacher (“stick with the race leaders from the beginning”).  At the starting line, I tripped and fell. I picked myself up and started jogging, when all of a sudden I felt a roar inside me “NO!!!” (Don’t give up), and knew that I would give it my all, and that I would rather fail this way than to just throw in the towel. I caught the race leader on the 1st lap, and stayed with him for the whole race, despite feeling like I was going to die.  Each time someone cheered for him, it strengthened my resolve and I pretended that they were cheering for me.  I breezed past him in the final 300m.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Mike DeSousa:  I’ve learned many great things and unique lessons from different mentors.

1. As a youngster, I would read the (kids version) biographies of Great People (e.g. Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, Benjamin Franklin, etc.), fables and stories, and Marvel Comic Books, all of which made me feel that there was World-Class Greatness and a Hero inside of me awaiting to emerge — in what area I didn’t know, though I knew it in my gut and Soul that I “had it, whatever this area of greatness was.”
2. Peter Fujiwara, my most important mentor and high-school teacher taught me to strive for Excellence in all aspects of one’s life, to seek balance, and to believe that you could do anything and not to listen to the “experts” or take self-limiting advice from “mentors.”
3. Mr. Dixon, another mentor high-school teacher taught me the value of hard work (“Brains without hard work is wasted talent, Mike.”).
4. Alexander the Great taught me to be strategic. A common lesson each of these taught me was to wake up early and outwork others.

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

Mike DeSousa: Outwork, out-strategize, and be of service to others.

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

Mike DeSousa:  Pick an invisible mentor from one of the “Greats” of all time and an existing one who resonates with your personality, your needs, and/or your direction.  Read everything you can and learn from each. Picture them talking to you, giving you advice.  Contact the “existing/living” mentor!

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.

Yesterday and today, I present excerpts from recent interviews and align the responses of a few interviewees to the same questions. I focus on the mentoring and career related questions. Read the excerpts and zero in on the information that applies to you.

Today we are featuring:

Paulette Ensign, TipsBooklet.com

Mary Schnack, Mary Schnack & Associates

Sarah Speake, Strategic Marketing Director, Google UK

Andrew Warner, Mixergy.com

Avil Beckford: What are the steps you took to succeed in your field?

Paulette Ensign: This is going to sound glib and I don’t mean it to be, but the steps that I’ve taken to succeed have been literally to keep going. I know that may sound like an amazing grasp of the obvious, but when things have not worked, where either the quantity of the sales hasn’t been what I would like or where the prices just weren’t lining up, with what my market said was a good idea, or where I’ve created a product that nobody wanted, I have kept going, either I’ve said, “This isn’t a match at all,” “Let’s just put it off to the side,” or I’ve taken a look to see what I can change to test to see how this will work.

For instance, a couple of year ago I created a membership program, and I took what my people had been doing with Tips Booklets and went beyond that into a bigger realm regarding publishing. It really did not get to the point where I would like for it to have gotten to on two levels. One, I never really got the number of people to make it financially at the level that I was planning for it to be. And I got feedback that was extremely helpful from people who had been traveling with me for a while on this booklet journey. They said that even though the people that I interviewed, other experts in the field of publishing, while they were good, they felt that the general publishing information was not as powerful, and didn’t have as much of a punch as the information I was personally putting out about booklets.

In the process of doing that I risked diluting what my brand was with booklets and I risked alienating people who had been very keen on knowing more about booklets. However, you asked the question earlier about regret, and I don’t regret having done that, because had I not done that I wouldn’t have known that that was a path that was not for me to go down. It took a year of experimenting on that to see that part of it worked, part of it didn’t. Some of that is important to be aware of and acknowledge.

Mary Schnack: I was a good writer so I had a lot of the basics, and I was a creative thinker. I would say those are the two things that have helped the most with success.

Sarah Speake: I guess three different things: One was networking and I can’t ever play down how important networking is, and in fact my first boss said to me, and I’m sure he regrets it to this day, we were going to a work event in the evening and he said, “You need to get better at networking,” and I was very early in my career in that stage and I networked so well that I ended up headhunted by a competitor firm, so networking I think is critical because it gives one a perspective of how other organizations work, how other job functions work, what other people think, how they operate, and also give you an ability to potentially further your career by introducing yourself to potential mentors, potential employers, and potential friends as well. So I think networking is really key.

I think over delivery without over effort is really important so I worked hard but I think I’ve learned over the years, and particularly after my daughter’s death to work efficiently and effectively rather than slogging over silly work hours. So I think ensuring that you are constantly delivering if not over delivering is important.

Being authentic, which I talked about earlier, but I think that for me having worked in the tech sector for the majority of my career, I have statistically always have been in the minority and therefore tried different ways of behaving in a male dominated sector, none of which worked because they didn’t fit very comfortably, so I think the piece around authenticity is absolutely important in career success because only then it brings in my view proper self-fulfillment.

Andrew Warner: Showing up every day. Even when I started out as an entrepreneur earlier on, my friends who didn’t have jobs, or happen to have a day off would ask me to go and hang out, and I remember saying, “I’m working, why are you even asking,” and they’d say, “Because you’re not really working, you’re working for yourself, you don’t have a boss. There is no reason for you to show up today, you can show up tomorrow. You can always make up for it the next day. Or do work on the weekends or in the evenings.” And if you start doing that you never really catch up. But if you show up for every single day, and you think about your job as a mission then you do grow every day. And everyone around you starts to respect what you’re doing, as you respect it yourself.

Avil Beckford: What advice do you have for someone just starting out in your field?

Paulette Ensign: I’m someone who enjoys instant gratification, and I would be lying to say otherwise. However, a lot of what I say defies that, and when someone comes to me and wants to know how they can make lots and lots of money in 30 days, I say to them, “I’m the wrong person for you to ask.” Spend time exploring, and finding nooks and crannies and who your people are, and I’m not going to say who your market is. You may find certain people in a variety of markets who resonate with who you are and what you are about. I advise people to keep going and that 99 times out of a hundred you are going to find that where your starting point is as logical as it may have seemed, is rarely your finish line.

Let me give you an example that’s very easy to understand. When I wrote my booklet, 110 Ideas for Organizing Your Business Life, I was in a very senior leadership position in the profession of professional organizing. I was the National President of the Association of Professional Organizers when I wrote my booklet and when I made the cross-country move.

I had access to the major office supply manufactures worldwide at that point because of my involvement in that association, and it was very appropriate access that I had. I was not usurping my position in anyway. It was typical interaction that we had within the association. So I thought this was going to be a really easy thing to have office supply manufacturers clamouring for my booklet, well, it wasn’t the case. As it turned out, there were others entities that ended up buying many copies of my booklets. Financial planners for instance, found that it was a great thing to send as that year’s holiday gift to their list of people, and other industries viewed it similarly. That’s the kind of thing which reinforces the issue of to keep going.

Mary Schnack: They should have some good basic business skills. Not that they necessarily need to have all the skills, but whether it’s finance, writing or strategic planning, strategic thinking. They have to have some good basics as their foundation and then to go out and network and meet people, and talk and explore. I think those would be the most important things.

Sarah Speake: I would give them the three areas that I mentioned above, but I would also encourage them to ask as many questions as possible. I think that particularly early in one’s career there is a feeling that you have to be brilliant immediately and learn the ropes quickly and I think that’s unrealistic. So I would encourage people to ask as many questions as possible, and also work out which behaviours one admires and would want to aspire towards, and which skills you see other people possessing that you don’t necessarily have yourself and if you think that’s appropriate to further your own career, then go for it and find someone who can help you acquire those skills.

Andrew Warner: Show up every single day. If you do something every single day you’ll get better and better.

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