Sometimes we find ourselves at a crossroads, maybe we have to make a difficult choice or we have doubts on important decisions. It can happen in personal and professional life. This coaching exercise can help you. Basically you have to find your inner mentor and get “advice” from him or her.
First thing first: who is the “inner mentor”?
It is a guide, a teacher who helps and supports us when we need inspiration.
The origin of the word is to be attributed to the name of Mentor, character of the Odyssey, precisely, the one to whom Ulysses entrusted his son Telemachus before his departure from Ithaca. The character of Mentor also had a spiritual connotation because, under his guise, the divine presence of the goddess Athena was hidden.
It was with the opera Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse of Fènèlon that the name “mentor” has taken on the meaning we know today.
Actually, the figure of the mentor has always been present and in every area: Socrates, for example, was a mentor for his students as he did not limit himself to teaching, but stimulated them through his questions to elaborate new thought patterns and find new answers. Virgil, who allegorically represented reason, was also a mentor to Dante on his journey through Hell and Purgatory. Or, to go back to the present day, mentor (an extraordinary one!) is Yoda in the movie Star Wars.
The mentor is therefore the one who, thanks to his profound wisdom and knowledge, reminds us our fundamental values, knows how to say the right word and knows how to reconnect us with our deepest essence.
The mentor is an essential figure in our life. We should all have one (or more).
According to one of the most important coaches in the world, Anthony Robbins, choosing a model to be inspired by is one of the best ways to “achieve excellence”. According to him in fact, “you have to hire someone who has already done what you want to do as your model”. And I would like to add: someone who is already like you would like to be.
In fact, it is not just a matter of taking as a model those who have achieved the goal you want to achieve and replicate their behaviours, but also of trying to reason using his/her thought patterns.
Thus: get inspired!
Let those who know more than you teach you; let whoever is wiser make you wiser. Let those who are best in a particular area show you the way to improvement.
EXERCISE
- Choose one mentor or more than one if you prefer. You can identify one in the professional sphere and one in the personal sphere. The choice can be even more specific: for example, choose a mentor who inspires you with confidence if your lack of confidence is what you need to work on or one who is a model of integrity if you have to deal with a problematic situation from an ethical point of view and so on. It can be an existing person or a person from the past, someone you know directly or a fictional character.
- Remind yourself of the reasons why that person is a source of inspiration. What are the characteristics you would like to have? What are the values that make you appreciate him or her so much? Why do you feel so inspired by this person?
- Close your eyes and ask him/her the issues you are trying to solve. Imagine you are sitting in a peaceful place in front of your mentor and have all the time to discuss a particular issue. You can also carry on a real dialogue. What values does he or she tell you to focus on? What does he/she think is most important? What does he/she think is right to do? Basically, what would he or she do in that specific situation?
- Then write down everything you are told. Even a single word can be a door to a new way of thinking if you know how to internalize it and make it yours.
This coaching exercise might sound like a joke (thanks anyway… ) but instead it is quite the opposite: the role modeling, that is, the use of a positive model of reference is used by many people: sportsmen, actors, professionals in the business environment. You have probably had a role model yourself at some stage in your life: a parent, a friend or even an acquaintance.
I’ll tell you more: even when you read a book and let yourself be inspired by its words, in reality you are already somehow making use of the role modeling.
You might ask the following (and that is a very good point): “a real mentor or even a book can teach me something new. How can I tell myself something that I don’t know yet?”. Remember that if you can really immerse yourself in someone’s values and beliefs, you can also reason according to that person’s mental patterns. Here lies the strength of this exercise: you can enrich yourself by reasoning differently from how you usually do and not only seeing things from a different point of view, but seeing them from the point of view of those who, in that particular context, know more than you.
And that’s why we must also be careful about who we choose as an influencer. Before you follow someone, make sure they have these five characteristics.
♥
“When you choose a teacher, you choose what you want to become”
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