How You Can Find A Mentor Today
We live in a time where finding a mentor has never been more easy. Most people don’t realize that there are thousands of mentors just waiting to be their “experienced and trusted adviser.” We at The Life Edge have been blessed to have several mentors in several different areas of life. In this article we are going to share the simple steps we use to find a mentor.
By definition a mentor is an experienced and trusted adviser. To find a mentor today you need to do four things. First, choose the topic you want to be mentored in. Second, learn as much as you can about the topic by reading every book you can find on that subject. Third, choose the author that you trust the most and you feel is the most experienced. Lastly: Dive deep into every ounce of that authors content and learn everything you can from your new, trusted mentor.
Just a small disclaimer before we jump in. This will require some work on your part but remember you are worth it, your future is worth it. (Read to the end of this post for a small bonus)
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Choose A Topic
To start, you need to choose an area of life to be mentored. The reason we suggest an area and not just find a “life mentor,” is because no one person has it all figured out.
The key to finding a mentor quickly is to choose a topic that is broad yet specific enough to filter out the fluff.
For example, say the area you are lookin for guidance is Finance. This would not be specific enough. Are you looking for personal finance or maybe business finance, investing, taxes, savings, debt relief, wealth generation? The pool of options becomes too broad too quickly when you go with a vague topic. This will make it very difficult to narrow down the options in order to quickly choose the best mentor for you.
There is a flip side to this coin as you CAN be too specific. An example of this would be, looking for a mentor that is specialized in purchasing real estate to use as a tax deduction on financial gains from the sale of your NFT collection. This is too specific and will limit you to very few options, if any.
Your choice needs to be a decent balance of broad yet specific. Here is a good example of that search might like. Someone who is an expert in finance and growing wealth through real estate investing. This topic is broad enough to provide multiple options but narrow enough to filter out any noise.
Become An Expert Of The Experts In That Topic
Once you have decided on a topic, it’s time for some research.
How we like to do this is by finding all the books we can on the chosen topic. After that, we will group them by author. Next, we will start researching the authors to learn as much as we can about them. The goal is to find out what makes them an expert. What makes them a good candidate to be your trusted adviser?
Questions you should ask during your research are:
Do they have a website or offer an online course? Have they shared their knowledge on YouTube or other social media platforms?
You want to find every place that they are sharing their knowledge and consume their content. This will help give you more insight into who they are and what they have to offer in order to make a decision to move forward with them.
Pick Your Mentor
This is the fun part and just might be the easiest.
Choose your mentor. Pick from the list of people you just did all that research on.
When you are deciding, pick the one who best fits the role for the mentor you are looking for. Make sure that your personality matches their teaching style. This won’t work if you can’t stand how they write or how they talk. You need to be able to read and re-read their books over and over again. If they annoy you or write in a way that you can’t understand then it’s not going to work.
Same goes for their video content, if your learning style does not match their teaching style then you are going to struggle to stay focused throughout your journey. If their voice drives you crazy or their word choice isn’t what you like, then you will be distracted and won’t be able to get the mentorship you are looking for.
Choose wisely.
What is great about this process is if you choose incorrectly, you can always go back and try out someone else.
Go Deep
At this point you have your topic and you know who you want to learn and be mentored from.
This is where the mentoring happens. This is also where you will be required to put in the most time an effort.
Consume everything that your mentor has written, created or recorded. If they have an online course, buy it. If they have 200 YouTube videos sharing information, watch them all. Be a sponge of information.
When reading, don’t just read to finish, read to learn. This may require you to read a book several times. We have done this too. We have read some books more than 15 times over the years to either re-learn a topic or to get a different perspective on the challenges we are facing.
To take this one step further, categorize your mentors content. Break the content up into smaller categories and save it into folders on your computer or phone. This will make it easier to find later when you are trying to solve a problem or face a challenge but can’t quite remember what to do. You just go back to your folder and re-watch or re-read the info you need.
Think of this as giving your mentor a phone call and asking for their advice. They have written these books and made these videos to help you learn from their mistakes. You don’t need a personal relationship with your chosen mentor, you just need the knowledge they provide.
Just remember the more you study those that have the info and knowledge you want, the more you will begin to think and act like them.
Bonus
Now at this point you may feel like this is not mentorship or this won’t work. Read on…
Here is the BONUS TIP.
Every mentor we now have that we can call for advice in business, finances, relationships, etc, all came from doing this process we just laid out. Once we put in the time and effort to learn on our own, people started to notice. We did not go looking for mentors, they just showed up as a result of our actions.
What we have found is that mentors want to help people that our willing to put in the effort to help themselves. If they are going to take time from their lives to help guide you, they want to know that you are not going to be a waste of time.
To sum things up, there are thousands of people out there waiting to mentor you. Start by choosing an area of life to be mentored, find the experts in that space, then choose one and study everything they have.
If you put in the work you will get the mentorship that you are looking for.
Cheers!
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