Choosing a Mentor to Grow Your Business and Life

Aligning yourself with the right mentor is an essential tool to take your business to the next level. Finding and choosing your mentor deserves careful attention.

Although my past achievements may look quite different (for example, practicing law, building an elite performance consulting company, becoming a highly paid speaker, publishing a book with a national publisher), they share a commonality. In each of these endeavors, I've more quickly reached a higher level of success by aligning myself with a mentor who had experienced what I needed to know to move forward.

Based on both the research and my experience with mentors, here are the criteria I recommend using when choosing a mentor:

1. Find a Mentor Who Is Successfully Doing What You Want To Do

Select a mentor who is at least one step ahead of you. You need someone who has not only made the mistakes you are facing but is thinking bigger about the possibilities than you can with your current focus. A mentor that is ahead of you naturally has a bigger vision of what's possible.

For best results, pair up with someone who has successfully built the type of business you are building. This allows you to benefit from their shortcuts and avoid making the mistakes they made on their path to success.

When you choose a mentor who has walked the path you are taking in your own business, you can use the lessons they’ve already learned to leapfrog over the years of expensive mistakes and failures they've already experienced.

Mistakes are the tuition we pay in life and business. But there’s no requirement that they have to be your mistakes. Successful people learn from the mistakes of others!

2. Authenticity Matters

Life is too short to align yourself with those who put you in a value-conflict position. Find a mentor who walks their talk.

Trying to learn from someone who you don’t trust, don’t like or don’t experience as congruent with your core values bleeds energy. You will be working against yourself. You will end up frustrated and likely fall short of your goals.

Authenticity matters in business and in life.

Select your mentor not only on what they teach, but by the results they produce using what they teach.

Don’t be afraid to ask around to see if your prospective mentor produces results that you want to produce in your life in a way that you respect. Look at testimonials and results. Ask for a phone call to see if they resonate with you.

Of course, this whole process starts with you getting clear on what’s important to you. Without this essential yardstick by which to measure, you are increasing the possibility of working with someone who does not align with your core values.

I’ve made this mistake once…and walked away with money on the table. No regrets. No amount of money is worth compromising my values. Lesson learned. Do your homework upfront.

3. Invest in Yourself By Paying Your Mentor

To maximize your mentorship experience, I’m convinced you must pay for it. Bottom line: you need some skin in the game.

A lot of people get caught up on this one. In order to dismiss the investment as too high, they focus on all of the reasons they can’t afford the right mentor.

What they really are saying is that they have made a decision that they are not worth the investment. Make no mistake: when you pay a mentor to guide you, you are actually paying…yourself.

There is a lot of psychology behind making a substantial financial investment that causes you to stretch beyond your current situation. You create cognitive dissonance, when your mind begins to question your investment – and then seeks to justify it to make you feel better. This process triggers creative overdrive as you figure out how you can earn your investment back (with interest!). The result: quantum leaps toward new ideas and opportunities.

Another key aspect of investing is accountability. When you write out that check or make that credit card charge (ideally on a no-interest card), you commit to playing a bigger game. You have to answer to yourself and perhaps a partner for this expenditure. This increased accountability means you are more likely to take action on your ideas.

Beyond the psychology of investment, a paid mentor simply makes good business sense. You are proactively investing in yourself in order to avoid expensive mistakes and time-consuming errors that will drain your time, energy and money. With the right "been there, done that" mentor, your investment will come back to you exponentially.

In my early days in business, I was part of a free peer mastermind. This great group of women were serious about helping each other, but our results were limited. We simply lacked the know how to help each other take big steps forward and we did not have enough invested in our success. Eventually the group fell apart. Invest in yourself through your mentor.

4. Leverage, Leverage, Leverage.

There are many mentorship opportunities out there. Look for the one that can help you best leverage your strengths to create the type of business and lifestyle you desire (read: your investment creates much bigger results).

Look for a mentor who will freely share their resources and networks on your behalf.

Consider working with a team of coaches as a way to produce greater leverage. When I chose mentors to teach me the book publishing industry, I selected a pair of mentors who each published in my area of psychology and business success, but had very different styles and strengths. These coaches could have viewed each other as competition, but they had made a decision to collaborate and create more for themselves and their joint clients. One of my coaches was instrumental in helping me finish the manuscript in an expedited fashion, and the other taught me insider industry information on marketing and selling books.

As a success and performance coach, I regularly seek out others in my industry whose strengths compliment my own and work with them to provide a stronger product for our clients. We share business and life philosophies and each of us have created successful businesses that work for our lives, but we bring different experience and skill sets to the table.

For example, in one recent collaboration, my experience as a national speaker is complemented with my partner's teleseminar hosting experience. My expertise as a published author is rounded out with her copywriting skills. My work in mental toughness and optimal performance keeps our clients motivated, inspired and moving forward through any challenge while my partner shines with her ability to model authentic networking. Our clients get the full focus of two savvy business women on their success. That’s leverage. Creating an extremely powerful combination of coaching that is only available through our collaboration.

A key factor in your leveraging your mentorship relationship is aligning with a mentor who is still learning and doing, not just teaching. If your mentor is not continually learning and keeping up to date with the quickly changing business trends, they will not be able to help you leverage your time and money by providing the fastest and easiest ways to your desired outcomes.

In summary, when you’re looking for a mentor, I advise you seek out experience, authenticity, investment, and leverage. When you incorporate these elements as part of your core support structure, you will experience a quantum leap forward toward greater business success.