How to Find a Mentor

Foreign. Welcome to today's episode. Today we're going to be talking about mentors. What is a mentor, why you want to find a mentor, and also if you should pay for a mentor and really what a mentor is and what it'll do for you. So what is a mentor? First off, it's somebody who's either further along in life than you, or they could also be someone who's younger than you, but they have a specific skill set or something that they're further along. In a business that you want to get good at, a mentor is someone who is just further along than you are. There's somebody who will shorten your learning curve and make it easier for you to be successful at whatever it is it could be. For instance, I've had mentors for years. My very first mentor, When I was 19 years old, I paid $500 a month to have a mentor that taught me how to get good at becoming, number one, treating myself like I was running a business got me better at my business and took me from making $17,000 a year to within a year and a half of coaching with him to making $177,000 per year. So that person has not only made me money in that aspect, but, man, they've made me money, millions of dollars over the past 10 years, 11 years, 12 years, since I originally started coaching with him. So mentors are extremely, extremely beneficial. And they don't have to be just for business. They don't have to be just for money. It could be that you could find someone who has a really good relationship, a really good marriage, and you and your wife or you and your husband start hanging out with them more. And they could be mentors as far as a relationship goes. So mentors can be for everything. I have mentors that teach me guitar. I have mentors that teach me vocal lessons for singing. I have mentors that teach me a recording program that's on my computer. I have mentors. I have a mentor for physical, for working out, for dieting, for all of those things. And then I have mentors that are further along than me in business. I have mentors that are further along than me in just psychology. And they just keep me, you know, they're happier, they're healthier, they're more on point than I am, and I want to be around those people. So a mentor is just somebody who is further along than you are. Now, why would you want to have a mentor? There's a ton of different reasons. Number one, these people are going to be in your top five, there's someone that you might not hang out with as much, but, you know, the five people that you hang out with the most is going to be. If you hang out with five alcoholics, you're probably going to be the sixth. If you hang out with five millionaires, you're probably going to be the sixth as well. So it's extremely important to think of the people that you hang out with the most. So the first thing that mentors will do is they will make you up your game. When you hang out with somebody who is. I have a couple people that I don't spend a ton of time with but a few times a year that are worth over a billion dollars. When you hang out with somebody who's in that realm of just mental capacity and business capacity, it makes you up your game. It makes you become better. Whenever you're around those people, when you see the stuff they do or the stuff they have, it also makes you go, man, maybe I'm. Maybe I'm dreaming a little bit small. If this shows you human potential. And so it completely makes you up your game by having them. So, like I said, upping your game is one of them also. Another thing that you have to think about is it puts you in the right frame of mind, right? They're the type of person who you might hang out with every single week, or you might hang out with them every couple months, but they put you in the right frame of mind by you might be able to listen to them talk about something that they think completely different than you, or you might have something that could seem as a negative, and they might be able to find an opportunity for it to actually be positive for you. So there's someone who can take your mindset and really make you think in a different way. And that's always a good thing, is to have someone challenge you and to make you think in a different way. Another thing that's really good about having a mentor is being around them, is it makes you take action. Being around them, whether they tell you to take action and you want to be held accountable because you don't want to be the person that tells them the story, a mentor, a story about something, and they say, hey, here's what I think you should do, and you don't do it. And the next time you talk to them, they ask you about it and you don't have it done, it makes you take action because it is an extra level of accountability, but of someone who's gonna be holding you accountable to your goals, what you want and what you say you want to do as well. They help you make the right decisions because you can ask them. They could have been through what you've already been through. And so you could say, hey, here's what I'm dealing with, what should I do? And that mentor will be able to say, hey, here's what I would do, or here's what I did do when I was in your situation. And they help you make the right decisions. One of the biggest reasons why you want to have a mentor is they help you save time and energy. And in reality, they also make you more money in the long run. Like I told you before, I went from making 17,000 to 177,000 by having this mentor that's 10 times my income. So not only should they save me time and energy, they should make me more money. And I'll talk about that a little bit later. But saving time and energy is this. Instead of going out and failing and making mistakes and going through life or business or finances with trial and error, you get to talk to these people who have already been through what you've been through. They might be 10, 15, 20 years down the road further than you are, and by having one conversation with them could save you two or three years. That's a huge deal of why you want to go out and find mentors. Also, what happens is they help you, they help push you, but also maintain your motivation. This is one thing, when you're around somebody who's super successful, you get motivated to be as successful as them. Like I told you, if I hang out with someone who's a billionaire, I'm going to be much more motivated when I come back on Monday after hanging out from them on the weekend and see all of the stuff that they have or all of the fun that they have, or the trips that they take or the life that they have. It motivates me to start doing more work than I already do. Another thing that you have to think about as well is, is a mentor also opens you up to their circle of friends. This is big. This is really big to think about. When you become friends with or you have a mentor who's successful, guess who they hang out with? Other extremely successful people. So there's a chance that when they start liking you, they start hanging out with you more, that they think, hey, you know, we're going to go out and we're going to go get some dinner, you should come with us. It opens you up to more people who, who are successful as well. Also, another thing that's really good about mentors is their secrets, right? If someone's a millionaire or a billionaire, they have secrets in business, they have secrets in life, they have secrets in happiness and finances and all of these things. If they like you, they will open you up to their secrets, which will make you go further along as well. All in all, what a mentor really does is it makes you learn faster. It shortens your learning learning curve. Now you might be asking, that sounds really great. How do I find a mentor? Well, there's a couple different ways. Number one, you could try to find a free mentor, which is what most people do, because most people are cheap. And even though they say they care about their success, they don't really care about their success as much as they think they do. So they go super cheap. You know, they'll spend 500 bucks a month on a brand new car and phone bills and all of these things, but they won't spend 500 bucks a month to talk to a millionaire. Right? It doesn't make any sense. But let me say this. There's free. You could get free if you wanted to. And there's pros and cons to free and paid. But the way you find someone who's further along than you are, if you want to find someone who's free or someone who might, who's free right now, who might turn into a paid mentor is you have to get yourself out there. That's the first step to finding a mentor. You have to do networking. I personally hate going to networking events, but I force myself to go to them because I know there's people out there that, that are way more advanced than I am, that are really good at what they do. And I could try to build a relationship with them. So how do you find them? You can go to meetup.com you could search your area, you could go on Google, you could go on Facebook. There's a bunch of different ways. But in order to find somebody, you have to put yourself out there. You have to have to put yourself out there. You could also pay for a mentor as well. And so there's pros and cons to both. The pros of a free mentor, free, obviously, right. The pros of a paid mentor is that that person feels accountable for your success. And this is what most people don't think about when someone's a free mentor, quote unquote, free mentor to be kind of just like a semi friend or acquaintance. They don't feel liable for your success. They don't feel like you have to succeed or it's their fault. When you have a paid mentor and they have the extra level of accountability, of making sure in their head, if you are paying them, if they're a good mentor, they better freaking make sure you get some results. And that's how you have to think about it. They need to make sure you get results. And in their head, if they're a good person, they're going to work harder and they're going to give you more time, they're going to answer your text messages, they're going to answer your emails, they're going to talk to you more often. And that's the benefit of a paid mentor. What's the cons of a paid mentor? Exactly? Like I said, they're not going to hold your hand and hold you accountable. What's the cons of a paid mentor? The fact that you have to pay money, that's basically it of it. So the pros and cons, a free mentor is free, but they're not going to be on top of you and making sure you get things done in that extra level accountability that most people really need. The pros and cons of a paid mentor is that this paid mentor is going to make sure you are successful. They feel liable for your accountability. So if you're not succeeding at the level that you should be, if you're not making money at the level you should be, they're going to put more time into you. One thing that my first mentor and I paid 500 bucks a month for them, told me is that by coaching with me, I should make you more money. And so you have to think about it that way. If you're paying 500 bucks or 600 or 700 bucks a month, you should be making that money back. And now here's the thing, you, you won't make that money back right away. In six months down the road, you should be making that money in a year, you should be making that money two years down the road. The shifting that they're going to do inside of your mind, inside of your daily habits will make you that money back 100%. My first coach, when I was 19 years old, rocked my freaking world, changed my life, changed my daily habits, changed everything. Which 11 years down the road, now, 12 years down the road, now my life, I'm a completely different person than I would be. So it's not going to pay off right away, but if they're a good mentor, it will completely pay off in the way that you live your life on a day to day basis. So that's what a mentor is. That's the benefits of having a mentor and that's how to find a mentor. So all in all, this is important. Put yourself out there. Be around people who are better, be around people who will hold you accountable and be around people who make you think bigger. And naturally, you will start to change stuff in your life.