What’s the best way to reach your goals? In my humble opinion; having a mentor.

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Have you ever had someone in your life that you’d consider to be a mentor? What does that actually mean, and what can having a mentor do for you?

As you’ll see in this article, a mentor fills many roles, but in essence they are a person with experience, who has been where you are, done what you’re trying to do, and is willing to give you the benefit of their experience. Sound a bit one-sided? Well, it’s not. The mentor-mentee relationship is win-win; being a mentor allows you, among other things, to grow your own knowledge, develop self-reflection and leader ship skills, and gives you the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing that you’re helping another human being be the best person they can be and make a valuable contribution to the world.

At this stage you might be asking yourself; “do I need a mentor?” Well my friend, in this article I’ve compiled a list of 7 things that having a mentor can do for you. My hope is that it provides some insight into that question. The rest is up to you.

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You get the right Training

A mentor isn’t just a teacher. When you’re getting started on any new venture you don’t know your arse from your elbow, and there is always a steep learning curve. It doesn’t matter if you’re making clay sculptures of people’s cats or starting an online business, you can be guaranteed there is a lot to learn before you see any results. This can be overwhelming to say the least.

A mentor can help you to identify the skills you need to focus on, and which skills you need to prioritse to form a foundation for the next, because they’ve already developed the skills they needed to reach a goal similar to yours.

This is going to save you time spent on research and the trial and error approach which inevitably produces a lot of error (unless you’re really lucky, and I’m talking about the ‘developed a rare disease that causes you to shit gold nuggets’ kind of lucky!).

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You benefit from their Experience and Expertise

You will mess up. Unfortunately, that’s a fact of life, nobody gets everything right every time. Of course, spending a lot of time on research will help you to make informed decisions and fewer mistakes, but a good mentor has been in the trenches, they have made mistakes and fallen on their arses. But the fact that they achieved success means that they got back up, they learned from those mistakes and applied their new knowledge.

You’ll be able to tap into their knowledge, and learning from them means that you don’t have to make those mistakes, they can teach you those same lessons (without the pain of falling on your own arse).

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You get Encouragement

That’s not to say that you won’t still make mistakes. You will. But when you do, instead of sinking into a black hole of self-pity and fear, you’ll have your own cheerleader, someone in your corner, someone to encourage you and support you.

They will also help to keep you grounded, figure out exactly what went wrong and how you can leverage that mistake to your advantage. Every mistake contains a lesson, a good mentor will encourage you to identify the lesson and act on that knowledge.

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You get an Accountability partner

When you initially set a goal, you’re usually very driven but after a while; perhaps a few set backs, you’re just feeling tired today, you’re having doubts about your path, whatever excuses your lazy mind conjurs up, you start to lose motivation.

Simply having a mentor; someone who knows what you’ve set out to achieve, automatically brings an element of accountability. They will hold you to your goals, remind you of your reasons, and most importantly, let you know if they think that you’re not trying hard enough.

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You get Honest Feedback

Often, especially when you’re starting to have some success, it’s easy to get blinded by that and start to think that you can’t do anything wrong. Asking friends and family for advice at this stage can be disastrous, unless they’ve been where you are, it will look to them either like you smashing it and you should keep on doing what you’re doing, or they’ll be worried for you and give advice based on their fear and concern for you’re well-being. Very sweet, but not necessarily the guidance that you need.

In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that some of your biggest flaws are the one’s you can’t see.

Your mentor can give you a much needed outside perspective, impartial and based on their own hard-won experience. If they think you’re making a bad decision, or that there might be a better approach to explore, they’ll tell it to you straight.

A lot of the time it’s easy to be blinded by emotions, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t follow or at least explore your instincts, but if your mentor can see that you’re reacting to emotion, or desperation, or just without thinking things through, they will tell you to stop, anaylse the situation, and basically pull your head out of your arse, giving you the clarity that you need to make an informed decision on how to move forward.

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You get access to their Network

As we’ve already discussed, your mentor will have been around the block a few times. That means they’ve forged and maintained a lot of relationships, they know people in the business, they have a network. You can tap into that network, you can meet other successful people who might help you out along the way.

Nobody knows everything (except Google and Universal Intelligence), and anyone who tells you they do is lying. So, maybe you have a question that your mentor doesn’t have an answer to, in that case they may know someone who does. Networking is such a powerful tool for moving forwards in all areas of life, connecting with like-minded people, helping others and allowing others to help you builds trust and confidence.

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You get Confidence

When you know that you are learning from all of your mistakes, when you know that you are overcoming challenges instead of giving in to defeat, and when you know that someone’s got your back; someone with knowledge and experience, someone you can trust to be honest with you and hold you accountable, this gives you a deep sense of confidence. You are growing, you are resilient, you are resourceful, and you believe in your abilities.

Just having a mentor and a network can motivate you to success because you know, for a fact, that other people have stood where you are and have gone on to have success. If they can do it, and they are willing to share their tactics with you, then you can do it too.

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How to find a mentor?

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Having a mentor is important, but it’s essential to find the right person, someone who you admire and respect and who can give you the advice that you need. They need to have faced similar challenges to the ones you’re facing.

Look for people who have achieved what you want to achieve, who’ve started the kind of company you want to start. When you have identified them, engage with them, bring value to them, show them that you admire them and trust them enough to take advice form them. People genuinely enjoy helping others and making an impact on their lives, chances are whoever you decide to reach out to will be flattered and only too happy to take you under their wing.

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For me personally, my goal was to create extra income streams, to improve my standard of living and eventually be financially independent. The transition to starting my own online business would not have been possible without mentorship, I would have been so overwhelmed, and given up well before I’d made any progress let alone profit.

I don’t know your goals. Maybe you’re like me and want to create side-income, replace your 9-5 job, start your own online business or maybe you want to boost the reach of your current business by leveraging the internet. Either way, I know a place where you can get access to really valuable training and literally an entire community of mentors. If you want to find out more about that platform, let me know and I’ll do what I can to help you out.