Mentorship 101: Who It's For and Why It’s Essential for Growth - Part I
In Part 1 of our Essential Mentorship Guide, we dive into why mentorship is crucial as a lifetime skill, how to build a strong foundation for it and how to identify and become a great mentor and mentee (yes, both!).
Author Marcela Gómez, CEO of Culture Shift Team and multicultural marketing expert, happily shares her wisdom on why mentorship is a catalyst for growth and her experience as both a mentor and a mentee in her entrepreneurial journey. Photo by John DeMato.
“Marcela, what’s your plan for the next five years?”
“To grow,” I replied, without a second thought.
It was June of 1994 and I had just flown from Miami to my first full-time job interview in Nashville. Now, I was sitting in front of my future boss, realizing what I had said and not knowing if that was what he had meant.
Nevertheless, he liked my answer and I got hired on the spot. I have never forgotten that moment.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the entire theme of my life has been just that: to grow.
It drives me, it excites me. I feel like grabbing everyone, rounding them up and dancing while we all whoop and holler: “Let’s grow! Let’s grow! Let’s grow!” It bubbles up inside me until I want to burst with energy from it (through the inevitable growing pains, of course!).
My good friend and business partner Ann Gillespie always says to me: Marcela, you put yourself through intense experiences in order to grow and when you realize you are growing in some area, you do it really fast. You accelerate it.
You can say growth is my raison d’être. And it’s not just my growth I’m looking to fill the skies with. It’s everyone's.
And, hey, I get it. Growth isn’t exactly everyone’s tall glass of coke. It might not be refreshing or energizing for some (in fact, it isn’t for many). Growth isn’t easy. In order to grow, you have to get rid of things that hold you back (yes, even yourself!), you have to change your mindset and even your attitudes. Who wants to do that type of work, especially on the daily?
If that’s you, dear reader, I say this: we are not static beings.
Einstein says the whole universe is a constant flow of energy—and that includes every individual being. So why not use that power to grow spiritually and mentally, as whole beings? Imagine if we did that together.
ENTER: Mentorship.
I mean, even Einstein had a mentor or two. And we all know he mentored some of the leading brilliant minds that came after him. They couldn’t have achieved their true potential just by themselves—in fact, they didn't. They understood the power of energy and flow—especially when compounded with other people.
Mentorship is arguably the most fun way to accelerate growth, so let’s get into the whos and the whys of it in this first part of my two-part foundational Mentorship 101 series. (Part II is out now!)
Like all good inquisitive minds, let’s start with our WHYs. This usually takes us back in time—for us, it’s 100 years ago.
WHY: The Immortality of Mentorship When Driven by Equity & Empathy
The Las Vegas airport pulls interesting people together.
As I waited for my flight to Palm Springs there earlier this year, an older couple sat down and started to chat with me about my work. I explained how I reach out to minority markets for clinical trials and they were fascinated. The older lady excitedly took out a piece of paper and a pen and wrote down a book she thought I should read: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I had never heard of her.
Truth is, I forgot about the recommendation almost as soon as it had been given.
But a few weeks ago, six months after our serendipitous airport meeting, I remembered it. I listened to a podcast interview on minority markets, equity and decision-making and suddenly found myself listening to Henrietta Lacks’ granddaughter and great-granddaughter speaking. Aha! The book! Even better, I found it in my favorite medium: film.
After I finished watching it that night, I could not stop crying.
I kept thinking, no wonder there is so much mistrust! There exists so much pain from how people are treated—we can think of so many atrocities inflicted upon minority groups in our history alone. As marketers, as community outreach people, and as communicators, the intensity of what we need to know and how we need to listen to people before we make assumptions or create a campaign is profound.
This is why I continuously remind myself and my team to put ourselves in the “others” situation, and not assume that we know, understand, or can even process it all. In big part, this entails not automatically thinking that other people “should.”
Here is where marketing leads with empathy. It’s where all our roles do, personal or professional.
In general, people assume that everyone we talk to knows what we know or has had the experience we’ve had. This isn’t the right way of looking at things. In our firm, Culture Shift Team, we lead by the platinum rule: treat others as they want to be treated.
It’s not as easy as the golden rule—treat others the way you want to be treated—because you don’t know how the other person wants to be treated in the first place. In fact, you won’t ever know, unless you spend the time learning about the other person and are then able to adopt some of those challenges.
Basically, we will never be able to walk in someone else’s shoes because we have no idea what that person has gone through.
Cue: Equity.
For me, equity starts with exposure and awareness. Specifically, with the exposer.
As a consultant, when clients come to me to reach a target audience, I ask them, “How much do you know about this group of people that we are trying to target?” Most of the time, not much. And that’s okay. Even as someone who’s been in this line of work for 30 years, I am still learning.
To be clear, this isn’t just “knowing about '' a target group from a qualitative perspective—it’s about deeply understanding how they make decisions and how people think of themselves from a psychological point of view. And how can we assume things about others when we have no idea what’s going on in their lives?
This is the importance of knowing who people are from different aspects, not just from the quantitative demographic one. In order for us to communicate and engage with or motivate someone to make a decision that we would like for them to make, we need to know everything—as much as we possibly can—about how they make decisions.
This is the importance of knowing who people are. This is the foundation of mentorship.
WHO: You, me and everyone in between. (But especially you.)
Part I: You as a mentee.
There are two ways to become a mentee:
1. First of all, you learn from everyone. Everyone is teaching you something.
Listen to someone else’s story and something will resonate with you. It doesn’t have to be in a specific “aspect” of your life, like business or work, for this to work its magic. We circle back to the idea of the whole you: your whole life is in one body so that you can experience different things.
You become a mentee simply learning from others, even only being in their presence and listening.
2. Secondly, when you talk to others, you also listen to yourself.
During the process of being a mentor (we’ll get to that in a second), you double as a mentee to yourself. When you speak, the lesson comes back to you too. It’s that simple. It’s that natural.
Nowadays, everyone is looking for “the” mentor of their dreams or “the” prodigy to bring into the world. The “Golden Egg Mentor” is just a myth. Mentorship is as easy as talking to others and listening to them, throughout your life. It’s an easy-going life journey—it doesn’t have to be as hard as scouting someone for this or that.
Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty.
Part II: You as a mentor.
Let’s go back to Einstein and the idea that we are not static beings, but a flow of energy. In mentorship, there is a constant flow of energy from one person to the other—you are essentially helping that person expand their energy and grow.
Yes! That’s how I view mentorship: this natural progression of growth (both from mentor to mentee and vice versa).
I never believe that I know it all or have it all figured out, although that does cross my mind from time to time. After all, mentorship isn’t about making decisions for someone, it’s about asking the right questions so they can get to the decision that feels right for them.
You can dip into this attitude with ease by asking questions like: What can I do to help you grow? What do you need right now? You can ask yourself questions like: What can they read or listen to that will help them on their journey?
If you’re in a company setting with a team, think about what you can do to help each other grow creatively.
For example, this summer I started a weekly marketing team meeting to read articles on multicultural marketing. This does two things:
It reminds us that we can’t assume we know it all so we have to keep reading and learning (otherwise known as #StayingHumble), and
It helps us bond and grow as a team.
This not only helps us skyrocket our work with motivation and data-driven conclusions but also helps us understand our community outreach, so we can have more up-to-date info on how people are shifting, making decisions and what’s happening in their psyche in order to guide our clients more effectively and accurately.
Part III: The truth about WHO mentorship is for.
I don’t have just one mentor in my life.
I have many people I consider my mentors in different times and aspects of my life. Some people thrive on having just one, and that might work for them, but it’s not for me. I like to take the lifelong approach, where listening to Wayne Dyer engages my brain to prepare myself intellectually and spiritually for my life after 60, for example.
You can be a mentor to someone without even knowing it.
I’ve had messages come in from people I personally know and strangers alike who tell me they consider me to be a mentor. There’s a responsibility in what I am sharing, saying and putting “out there” into the world for others to see and learn from because I just don’t know who is watching, listening or absorbing my words.
The truth is, unbeknownst to you, you become a mentor and a mentee at the same time to everyone who is in your circle. This is how you’ll grow 10x faster—together.
That’s it for Part 1 of 2 on my Mentorship 101: Essential Guide series!
Next time I post, we’ll be following along to Part II, where I’ll answer three crucial questions: what exactly is mentorship, where does it actually happen and how do you build a strong foundation for growth with it? I might even sprinkle in some real-life case studies for you to learn from—and tie it all in to one crucial aspect of growth.
Keep your eyes peeled on Aug 30, 2022 to find out what the most important piece of the puzzle in mentorship is—and how you can grow it in all aspects of your life!
In the meantime, check out Culture Shift Team, my multicultural marketing and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) firm I co-founded, who creates healthy and data-driven company culture to attract the right audiences with empathy and compassion—and who use mentorship as a core building block for deep growth in relationships.
If you want to drive change within your company or org with a heart-and-head-centered people approach, chat with us here!