Is mentorship your biggest overlooked opportunity?
In part one of our two-part series on the importance of mentorship, we discussed how too many entrepreneurs and business owners dismiss the value of finding a great mentor, as well as techniques for identifying the perfect mentor for your goals and how you can study the habits, intentions, and processes that helped them achieve their goals.
For our second part, we’ll be focusing on how you can attract mentors into your world while also learning how to harness the power of their success in order to “draft” or use your mentor’s professional momentum to create your own.
As is the case with many of the techniques I use and share with the business owners I work with, getting the most out of your mentorships centers on creating clarity around your vision, setting goals, and developing a process that holds you accountable to achieving your goals.
So let’s talk about two crucial steps in making the most of your mentor relationships: attracting and drafting.
How to attract mentors into your life
A big part of having a mentor relationship that is deeper than just studying a person’s work and approach to life — one where this person will take an active role in your success — is based on your own character and how you conduct yourself.
In essence, you should strive to be the type of person your mentor would want to spend time with. Honestly, it’s not drastically different from any other friendship or relationship you might have. You have to keep in mind that these are busy, successful, and how you present yourself really, really matters.
So, how do you make yourself appealing to a potential mentor? By demonstrating how your values align with theirs and how you’ve embraced their body of work and applied it to your life. It’s not inaccurate to say that you should try to flatter or impress them by showing an expert understanding of their work, and by demonstrating how influential it has been on you.
This is the ultimate testament to your mentor. If you can show them in a meaningful way how their work has changed your life, not only emotionally, but in a quantifiable way, then you’re the ultimate example of how their work can create an impact in the world, and that will certainly mean something to them.
Seriously, there’s no bigger compliment to a mentor than to hear how their life’s work has helped someone excel in their career, mend relationships at home, or provide an inspirational path that helps someone overcome their biggest obstacles or create their biggest success in life.
This requires intention and preparation and the ability to articulate this person’s impact on your life in a way that is compelling. After all, when you’re asking for direct mentorship, you’re asking for something a little deeper. Why should they want to do this? What’s in it for them? This is your opportunity to shine. Don’t squander it.
And once you’re able to attract that mentor into your life? Well, this is where you can ask them real, pressing questions about their process, their take on your trajectory, and all the things that can help you achieve your personal, professional, and financial goals. But there’s also something else valuable you have the opportunity to do once you’ve attracted a mentor into your life, and that’s what I call “drafting.”
How to use drafting to achieve your goals
The final step in your process of finding a mentor, studying a mentor, and attracting a mentor, is learning how to draft behind your mentor. What do I mean by drafting? Let me explain.
Drafting is the action in which you fall behind them in order to create more success for yourself and your business, but doing so by actually making less of an effort. How is this possible? Well, it’s because you’re duplicating their strategy, knowledge, and influence. This action is meant to save energy, time, and resources, but is generating great results for you. This is drafting.
Let’s dig even deeper into drafting by using something I love to talk about, which is race cars.
When a race car is traveling at a substantial speed, there’s a significant amount of drag created by the airflow around the car. There is also a partial vacuum at the rear of the car. This air spills from where it is essentially attached to the car, and it flows over the car’s body, especially its top and sides, causing turbulence. The vacuum increases the drag on the vehicle, slowing it down quite a bit.
But if another car comes close to the back of the first car — like inches away from its bumper — the airflow from the first car will then flow around the second car as well, reducing the turbulence and drag on the second car. Then both cars can travel faster.
The same happens when a third or fourth or fifth car repeats the same process with the car immediately in front of them, and all of the cars can travel faster and more efficiently.
Remember that the first car is the one that has to split the air so that all the cars can benefit, but they get some benefits, too, namely in moving at a higher speed while burning less fuel.
Do you see what I’m getting at yet? This is the exact process you should be using when aligning with your mentor.
By making your path their path, getting as close as possible to them professionally, duplicating their actions, multiplying and expanding their efforts, then the result is that you’ll both end up benefiting. You’ll both reach your goals exponentially faster because your combined efforts will speed up your individual successes.
Use this process your team should follow in the business in order to reach their personal, professional, and financial goals. Show them how to draft behind you and behind the business, so that individual success creates collective success and vice-versa.
Finding mentors, becoming a mentor, creating mentors
True success is eventually being a mentor to others. And to do that, you have to first perfect the art of finding, studying, attracting, and drafting behind mentors that align with your goals.
You need to learn first, then once you’ve perfected your time as a mentee, you now have the responsibility to teach others. Identifying mentees is just as important as identifying the right mentors. Remember that they surely assessed the potential value in you before agreeing to become your mentor, and you should do the same when deciding who to align yourself with and nurture.
It is my sincere belief that the most important thing that any one of us could become in our life is a mentor. It is a whole different level of achievement, accountability, and obligation, and it requires a great deal of integrity in the way you choose to conduct yourself. If people are seeking you out in order to learn from you, then see that for the opportunity it is.
Your employees need that influence in their lives, and it is your job to show them how you succeeded so you can give them the tools, resources, and knowledge for them to succeed. This is what great leadership is all about. It is a privilege and should be treated as such.
Finding great mentors is a process. Being a business leader is a responsibility. Your teams need to draft behind you. And you need to draft behind somebody else, just like I needed to draft behind my mentors, and just like I tucked in behind Grant in order to learn and grow.
Now we’re all in alignment — Grant, Natalie, and I, the Cardone Ventures team, our clients — we’re all racing down the track feeding off our collective speed in order to create a massive impact that we could never create on our own. This impact comes from mentorship, and it’s helping us all achieve our personal, professional, and financial goals.
Doesn’t it make you wonder what you could achieve with the right mentors?
If you’re interested in learning even more proven business techniques from me and the Cardone Ventures team, then you should join us at one of our upcoming events. You learn beside business owners just like yourself who are striving to 10X their companies and their lives. The seats don’t stay empty for long, so register NOW to secure your spot!
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