#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personalitytransformation
Choosing a Mentor
Today, we’ll talk about how to choose a mentor. A mentor is a broad concept: a mentor for life, business, advisors. Let’s go through all the parameters in detail. A mentor is someone who helps you grow in all areas of your life. Let’s define some terms: I often use the word “advisor” and I myself play that role.
An advisor is someone who is interested in the business reaching its goals. A mentor is someone who is interested in you reaching a specific goal or following a certain path. A mentor spends time not only on your professional activities but also on your health, inner state, personal growth, spiritual development, hobbies, endeavors, relationships with others, family at home, friends, colleagues. They fundamentally focus on your life in a broad range, which is why you can have multiple mentors.
When someone genuinely wants to develop and expand themselves, it’s great if they move in multiple directions and paths, working comprehensively: working on themselves, reading books, using books for development, interacting and learning about growth from friends and acquaintances, learning from colleagues, business partners, clients, their family; when they have additional people who help them grow. When someone works on multiple areas, they can have multiple mentors. You might spend a whole year, two, or three with just one mentor, one person. They hold a certain foundation, which might only relate to your professional activities, working on your body, might be a psychotherapist working on your psychophysical state. This current area is the most important for you right now, you chose it as your main focus. How to find this person, who to interact with? Now, in the era of access to any information, meeting different people, everyone recommends someone, without diving into you personally. That is, they recommend just because they went, they had some experience (not necessarily positive, could be negative), but it’s important for them to recommend so that another person says: “Great, thanks, I liked it too!” And they fix this person for themselves.
Carefulness in Recommendations
If you interact with some people who also play the role of a mentor for you, someone comes to you, and you want to recommend them to another person, first pay attention to whether this person really needs a recommendation. Did you understand how the person feels, what they really need, what their goals are? In business, many, when a new trend or system appears, start recommending it to each other. But not everyone fits a certain specifically complex system. I often say that if you start implementing additional automation in a certain business, start developing it a lot, introduce a large financial reporting system, or seriously engage in marketing and sales, you can just collapse it and lose it.
Many businesses do not need to scale up, grow: they should be in a state of some blockage and temporary stop. Their owner should come to the point where they want to make these changes themselves.
So, when you offer something to a person – you need to hear whether they really need it or not. When you recommend them a psychotherapist, go to a person who sees dark worlds, take a certain substance, engage in specific workouts, take a business development course – are you sure the person really needs it? It won’t disrupt their state, won’t lead to them losing a lot? And the most important thing: when you recommend someone to a person, it’s like you know what the other person lacks, and you can compare it. Especially it’s common in the world of metaphysical, esoteric, spiritual: one person went to some practice, attended certain meditations, and recommends it to another person, not understanding that maybe the other person is so deeply into spiritual life that your recommendation means nothing to them. It’s the same as if you recommend a super professional businessman to attend a class on choosing their niche with fifth graders.
But the thing is, human psychology is such that we need to fix ourselves in this state: if I went to some practice, I want to elevate myself before another person and recommend doing this action because I did it, and now you should do it because you are a bit lower and haven’t been to such an event. This is a big illusion. When you return to yourself and think about where to find a mentor, first you need to be very careful with any recommendations from other people. There is such an area here where there are two sides. On the one hand, you need to be cautious, selective, listen carefully and separate whether it’s mine at the moment. You can find out that it’s definitely not yours by two criteria: either you are much stronger than the other person in this area, or your inner state, intuition tells you that it’s not right, you need to wait. On the other hand, there might be a situation where you block the possibility of some new event: you say you don’t want to engage in this, but in reality, you need to go there. How to find this, see? If you feel some dislike, disagreement with this recommendation, or a state of absolute, total agreement, take it into mindful observation. It means allowing yourself to see it as good, and allowing it to be bad – treating it neutrally. If you really want to go there – slightly reduce the significance, if you don’t want to go at all – slightly increase the importance of the event. Write it down, fix it, observe, and ask yourself: why don’t I really want to take the opportunity of such strong mentorship? The thing is, mentors in modern times (and it was like that in the 20th century) are not people who are your only teachers in life.
Self-Development
A thousand, two thousand years ago, there was a time when a teacher, a mentor could be with a person their entire life.
Now is the time when we first need to find harmony, a connection with ourselves without an outside person. I always say that a person can do this only by themselves, because only they truly feel and hear themselves.
This doesn’t mean that they are feeling or hearing themselves at the moment, but only they can do it. At the same time, it’s good to have different people you can turn to specifically, based on certain recommendations or sometimes for deep questions. And it’s important not to miss them. These people come because you’re ready for it, because life at this moment has brought you together with this person. You can notice it or not. This doesn’t mean you should trust every recommendation, but it means you should try to see for yourself where this person really is.
Nowadays, people often look for mentors based on achievements. “I need a business mentor who has made a billion dollars,” “I need a person in spiritual practices who has meditated for 10,000 hours,” “I need someone for my body and health who is in some incredible state” – all this can be a total illusion. It doesn’t mean that a person who made a billion dollars will lead you to a billion dollars; a person who has spent 10,000 hours in spiritual development can absolutely degrade you in terms of spiritual development: spiritual development isn’t measured in hours.
Even if business has a measurable indicator like money, it’s only one of the indicators. When you need to scale up, you are the one making this growth first, and another person can bring you to this point not just because they know how to make a billion dollars (rather, they had this experience), they must first see you with a huge set of different circumstances, with the system you live and exist in, and create a personal trajectory for you. But it definitely doesn’t base only on money. That’s why it’s personal: it’s based on your personality.
Finding a Mentor
Our mentors in life aren’t necessarily presented through books, titles. At certain moments, a mentor in life can be a tree, the sky, a child, a wife or husband, a parent, yourself. There are always people. It’s important not to miss, to see and find this person. When we are in a deep transitional time, in the time of Christmas, New Year, in the time of changing various paradigms of thinking, some states, insights, strategies, new goals, plans, new dreams, illusions, disappointments, stress, fear, insecurity, or joy, happiness, new opportunities – it’s worth looking: what can I do now to open my eyes and find a person who can become my mentor in the near future? This is the gift I recommend giving to everyone at this moment.