How to Find a Mentor | Jack Canfield

If you want to achieve a really big goal in your life, one of the best ways to ensure you succeed is to find yourself a mentor. Now, this is something I constantly tell my students. When you're able to get advice and support from someone who has already achieved the same goal you're hoping to achieve, you can avoid some of the common pitfalls and reach your goal much more quickly and easily and efficiently. But how do you find a mentor? After all, you're probably thinking successful people are usually really very busy, right? So you might think they're too busy to help someone they don't know like you. Well, I'll let you in on a little secret. Most of the successful people I know are much more generous with their time and expertise than you might expect. It's pretty much a given that they've received help from a mentor on their personal journey, which means they're often happy to pay it forward to someone else. So today, I'd like to talk to you about how to find and approach a mentor who can help you achieve your goals. I've had many people mentor me over the years, some for just an hour or two and some for an ongoing period of time, like for several years in a row. But let me tell you a story about one of the most unusual experiences that may inspire you to do something similar. About 30 years ago, I was beginning the transition from only doing trainings for educators into developing programs for corporations and the general public. And it was a man named Lou Tice, who was the head of the Pacific Institute. There was teaching principles very similar to what I was doing, except that he was making about $8 million a year and I was making a couple hundred thousand. So I sent him a letter and I told him, if you ever come to Los Angeles, where I was living at the time and working at the time, I'll be glad to chauffeur you around from the airport to your hotel, to your speaking engagements and back again for the privilege of asking you some questions about how you are running your business. Meaning that you would mentor me for a few hours as I drove you around. Would you be willing to do that now? Because it was such a unique offer. He liked my boldness in suggesting it, and he agreed. And a couple of months later, he was coming to la, and I picked him up at the airport, and I took him to his hotel and to his talk later that night. And I asked him a lot of questions in the two hours we had together. And he was extremely forthcoming, and he shared all kinds of useful advice with me. Well, I did my best to put that into practice. Everything he taught me in those few hours that we had together, I started doing. But here's the best part of the story. About a year later, we were bidding on a contract to provide a motivational training program for a welfare to work program that was being created by the Los Angeles County Office of Education. Now, there were six contractors that submitted proposals to the county office, which, after extensive review, they boiled it down to two companies, mine and Luticen's Pacific Institute. After we both went in and had final interviews with the county, we were awarded the contract that was worth $750,000. And I remember the following week I received a very nice letter from Lou Tice, who said, congratulations on getting the contract. You are a very good student. Now, I'm not sure that's the best way to repay your mentor, but we actually had no idea who the other competitors for the contract were until the whole process was over. But my point is this. There are people out there who can mentor you. If you ask, will they all say yes to you? Of course not. But if you apply the law of probabilities, which states that the more people you ask, the more likely you are to get a yes, you'll find somebody. And make sure you use some common sense when you're asking. You know, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Elon Musk and Steven Spielberg and Barack Obama are probably not likely to respond to you with a yes. You want to ask people that are just a few rungs above you on the ladder, maybe someone several levels above you in your company, someone who's ahead of you, but not so far out of reach. And as you move up in your career and your success, you can keep reaching up higher and higher for other mentors. Let me give you two more examples of people who have successfully used this principle for asking for mentorship. When Farah Gray, a young African American living in the projects in Chicago, was 8 years old, he started what he called his first business club by going to successful businessmen in the surrounding community around that ghetto and asking them if they would mentor a group of young kids in the ghetto and teach them business skills. And these men agreed. And by the time Fry was 14, he had sold his first business, one that made and distributed a syrup based on his grandmother's recipe to local grocery stores. And he sold it for a million dollars. And by the way, his book, Nine Steps to Becoming Rich from the Inside out, is a great read. So I suggest you read it. I'm remembering Another story of a man in Canada who owned a trucking company, who decided to call a man in Texas who had an amazingly successful trucking company which was operating at the level that he one day wanted to operate it at as well. And because they were not in competition with each other, one in Texas, one in Canada, he asked the man if he could have 20 minutes of his time once a month and just to ask him a few questions. Now the man in Texas agreed, and after a few months of calls, he said, why don't you just come down to Texas and work with me for a few days, Follow me around, see how I operate, ask me any questions you want. So the man in Canada did, and he applied everything he learned and he went on to become a super successful trucking company in Canada. Now, I'm convinced there is someone out there who can help you if you ask enough people in the right way. So let's take a look at some ideas about how to go about finding and securing a mentor. First of all, do some research to figure out exactly what kind of mentor you need. For example, if you're a yoga teacher who wants to grow your business to six figures, what you want to do is find a yoga teacher who already has a six figure business. Or maybe you want to become a successful New York Times best selling author. Well, I'd encourage you to create a list of authors who've written New York Times bestsellers in the same genre as the book that you want to write or who live in the same part of the world as you do. They might be willing to give you some advice. Or maybe you're a corporate office worker who dreams of becoming a work at home mom who's able to make good money while raising her children. Well, what you want to do is find a woman who's made that switch from corporate to home business owner and is successfully balancing her business with her duties as a parent. And then respectfully reach out and ask her if she would spend maybe 30 minutes telling you how she did it. You know, a person who's already accomplished the goal that you want to achieve will obviously be in a much better position to give you relevant and effective advice than someone whose success lies in a totally different area of business. Now, that doesn't mean you can't learn valuable business principles and success strategies from people in a different kind of business, but it's much more valuable and probably easier to implement if they're already doing or have already done what you want to do. Now, once you've identified the kind of mentor you want and you've created a list of people who fit the description, you do some further research on them and learn everything you can about them before you reach out to contact them. If they've written any articles, find them and read them. If they have a blog, read their blog posts and sign up for their online newsletter. And if they've written any books, buy them or borrow them from your local library and read them. If they offer any programs or workshops, I encourage you to sign up for them and be sure to follow them on social media and comment on their posts and their tweets. Firstly, a lot of successful people offer a huge amount of advice and insight online for free. And secondly, by following them on social media and reading their articles and posting intelligent comments and questions about their work, you can also get on their radar as a fan of their work. And then once you've followed them for a while and you're familiar with their personal story and their success strategies, then I encourage you to reach out and get in touch with them. You can email them or personal message them or even phone them if their contact information is available. Or you can send an email to their team. But then very politely and respectfully let them know that you admire their work. And we're hoping to be able to ask them a few questions on how to achieve your goals better and faster. And be very specific and let them know exactly what your goals are so they can easily understand what kind of advice you want from them. And also be sure to show them that you're already familiar with their articles, their books and their programs and so on. You know, many successful people love talking to people who know and respect and admire their work. Now, you also may want to ask them if they offer any private consulting opportunities to see if there's a way for you to work with them on a professional basis. Or they might offer a group coaching program where you can learn from them in the company of other similarly motivated individuals. And lots of people have created courses and coaching groups and mastermind groups so they can more effectively share their information with as many people as possible. You know, I had so many aspiring authors asking me for mentoring and advice that I created an online program called the Bestseller Blueprint. And my business partner, Patti Aubrey, had so many women asking her how to become more successful that she created her permission granted program. And that's also why we created our online coaching programs and mastermind groups. Now, when you're reaching out to people, you're going to find that many of them may be so busy in their lives that they aren't able to offer any mentoring at this time. And for that reason, when you're contacting them, make sure to ask them if they can recommend anyone who might be able to help you if they're unable to. And often people are happy to suggest a friend or a colleague or a course, or give you tips on where else you might continue your search for the information you want. And after you contact them, I encourage you to be patient. If you haven't heard back from them in a week or so, follow up with them and see if they've received your message. Now, if they still don't respond, I encourage you to cross them off your list and move on. You might have to approach a few people before you find the right person to mentor you, but I promise you the effort is worth it. Remember the law of Probabilities, which says the more people you ask, the more likely one of them will say yes. And when they do, that person can point you in the right direction, review your progress along the way, and give you tips on what to do next in order to accelerate your progress toward your goals. And they can also point out potential obstacles and things to avoid in the road ahead and give you tips on how to handle them. And they can also tell you which resources and strategies have worked really well for them and which ones didn't. And all of these things will make it a whole lot easier for you to achieve your goals and create the life you want now. If you found this video helpful, please make sure to like it, share it with a friend who might need it, and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this one and for additional success strategies and resources. Be sure to visit jackcampfield.com and also check out the links in the description below and let me know what you think in the comments. And thanks again for watching.