The dream begins, most of the time, with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you on to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called truth.
Dan Rather
Learning a new skill can be a daunting task.
Whether we’re trying to learn the skill quickly, want someone to help point us in the right direction to ensure we are being efficient, or are just feeling hopelessly stuck on our own, it often makes sense to find a mentor or hire a coach to help keep you on track.
Why do people meet with mentors and coaches?
There can be many reasons, and they vary as much as the individuals themselves, but some common ones include:
Encouragement and support – learning new skills or making major transitions in your life can be a difficult process, and sometimes we just need someone in our corner cheering us on when we struggle.
On the other hand, we’re also here to “hold your feet to the fire” and keep you on track.
It is easy to let “life” get in the way. To succumb to procrastination. To fall into the trap of staying within your comfort zone.
Obviously, this is a less-than-optimal approach to gaining new skills.
When you and your coach set goals together, or when you submit your goals to your mentor, they have a duty to help shine a light on where you’re faltering.
Not because we want to judge you or make you feel bad, but because those areas are probably your blind spots. So your mentor helps you to see them.
Creating a feedback loop is another important aspect of mentoring. Feedback helps you course-correct and shows your progress, and it is an essential part of learning any new skill.
Let’s take archery as an example: if I shoot an arrow at a target, the arrow sticks in the target (hopefully…) and shows me how well I did. If the shots move towards the center of the target over time, then my performance is improving.
What if you were shooting in the dark? You would have no idea where your shots were landing, and thus would have no idea if what you are doing is working or not.
Coaches can provide feedback from a third party perspective.
Let’s face it, sometimes our own feedback to ourselves can suffer from a bit of bias. Having a knowledgeable part with an outside perspective can give us a new look.
“You can’t read the label from inside the jar.”
-Proverb, Unknown Origins (please tell me if I’m wrong and I’ll update!)
Finally, your coach can help you with strategy and clarification by answering questions like:
- What steps are the most important?
- In what order?
- What are the most foundational concepts?
- What is the best way to go about learning them?
- What resources or tools are available to help me that I might be unaware of?
- How much do I really want to know about this subject?
- At what point does one experience “diminishing returns”, where continued practice is unlikely to produce results at the same rate. Is the skill worth pursuing beyond that point?
These questions can help you to align your actions with your real goals.
They can also help to clarify or correct individual techniques, too, like tips and tricks to improve your memory or how to read faster with higher comprehension.
A good mentor can offer you all of these powerful tools, and even more, to aid you on your journey.
How often should we meet?
In my experience, weekly meetings are best to get started. This is typically the case for at least three months.
I find that a week is the biggest concrete block of time that most people can truly work with at a detailed level.
Sure, you can make high-level plans beyond that point, but most people I know and work with (myself included) can’t truly give you detailed info on what they’ll be doing a week from now.
(If you’re one of the rare few who can, then congrats!)
Most of our lives naturally fit into this block, as well. We think about the “work week”, the “weekend”, our “weekly schedule”.
“Thank goodness it’s Friday and the week is over”.
And so forth.
So, weekly meetings are typically where I would suggest you should start when meeting with a coach or mentor – anyone you meet with one-on-one to discuss progress, goals, feedback, or strategy.
That time may increase for especially complex skills, imminent deadlines, or accelerated courses.
Irregular meetings or appointments with long gaps simply encourage the very behavior that led you to find a coach in the first place.
You’re allowed to procrastinate because you don’t have imminent deadlines by which you will report to your mentor for accountability.
Engagement decreases and communications become fewer and further between.
Your practice becomes lower quality as you move further and further away from clarity.
Bottom line: progress slows or stalls, the very same behaviors that have been holding you back up to this point are allowed to thrive, and you lose a substantial amount of the value that you could be getting from the relationship.
It also creates more work on your mentor, as staying up-to-speed with what you’re doing gets harder and harder.
This wastes time during meetings, as now they’re forced to spend time playing catch-up.
If we aren’t in regular communication and it’s been two or three weeks since we’ve spoken, I’m going to have a much harder time understanding your current situation and trajectory.
If I receive regular updates and we have regular meetings, we can spend our face-to-face time on more important issues that are going to move the needle.
Personally, I advise my clients to correspond with me on a daily or near-daily basis.
This is done asynchronously, so they can send me short updates via text or screenshots as is convenient for them without the need to worry about scheduling.
Results on their daily training (if applicable), projects or tasks completed, progress made towards goals, or other information can be communicated in a few brief lines of text.
It doesn’t have to be overly complicated or time-consuming to do so.
After you and your coach have established some rapport, this can be revisited.
I only meet some of my long-term clients once a month or so now, after working with them for a number of months.
Some of my newest clients I’ll meet more than once a week for the first few weeks.
Yet others vary a little – we will meet more often when their workload increases, and less often when they feel they have more control or when competency has been reached.
However, we still have set and clear expectations as to how often communication should occur.
When doesn’t it make sense to postpone or delay appointments?
There are quite a few reasons appointments get delayed. Sometimes it does just happen.
Life has a funny way of throwing us a curveball now and then.
However, I also see appointments moved or postponed for some reasons that, though they might sound good on the surface, really undermine the process when you dig deeper.
“I got busy with school/work/life in general” is one that comes up often.
Let me tell you now: this is the worst time to blow off your mentorship if you’re really, truly wanting to improve.
It sounds good on the surface. “I’m too busy to stop and have meetings!”
“Life happening” is why you haven’t made progress on your own. It’s probably a big part of why you sought out a mentor in the first place – to keep you on track and accountable.
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but when you’re busy is when you need to connect with your mentor the most. This is when you need support and accountability more than ever.
It’s easy to get things done when life is easy. When life gets tough, that’s when you need support.
It truly is part of your mentor’s responsibility to help you short-circuit this cycle by holding you accountable to your goals.
Another justification I see is when people are behind on their training.
Which I can understand – it’s tough to own up to that, and there’s a certain amount of fear that your coach will “judge” you for it.
However…that fear is exactly what makes accountability partners work.
You’re also simply reinforcing procrastination. Giving in to the urge to put things off is just a continuation of the same unproductive cycle.
When you blow off one meeting, what stops you from blowing off the next?
It’s OK. Your coach isn’t there to beat you up, judge you, or make you feel bad If you’re falling behind, it’s a good opportunity to reconnect with your goals, realign your actions, and reboot your mindset.
It can also be a good time to look backward – how far have you come? Look at the progress you have made and take a second to be proud of it. Celebrate.
Your mentor can help you with a “mental reset” so you can get back on track faster.
Sometimes, life really does just happen.
If you’re missing a lot of appointments, though, it might be time to take a look at your scheduling and productivity habits to figure out how you can make time.
Some mentors (myself included) can help you with that, too.
What should I expect to cover at a meeting?
Finally, some of you may be wondering what gets covered at a typical mentor meeting.
Obviously, everyone does this a bit differently. They can range from super complex to very simple.
As for myself, I try to err on the side of simplicity. Life gets complicated all by itself, no need to start off that way.
A fairly typical “template” agenda for my meetings looks like this:
- What went well? Celebrate the wins!
- What was challenging? Were there any specific struggles you’ve had over the last week?
- Where can we clarify? What is currently misunderstood?
- What is coming up? What roadblocks can we anticipate and avoid? What are some common stumbling blocks (either from the mentor’s experience or from the mentee’s history) and how can we circumvent them?
- Set goals or crucial results for the next session
- Encouragement, wrap up.
- SCHEDULE NEXT MEETING – get it on the calendar!
Some sessions have more than that, some have less, but that’s a fairly typical format for me (and for many others, based on what I have seen).
TL;DR
If you want to make progress faster in an area that has been a struggle for you, one way to do so is to get a mentor and have regular, scheduled meetings with them so they can aid you.
It is important that these meetings stay both regular and frequent, however, or you run the risk of perpetuating the same cycle of procrastination and stalled progress that led you to find a mentor in the first place.
How You Can Take Action:
- Determine a skill that you want to learn, but have been struggling with (if you would like a suggestion for a really great skill to learn, one that can help you learn any other skill much faster, check this out)
- Brainstorm a list of possible mentors or coaches (paid or unpaid) that can help you. This person has probably learned the same or a very similar skill to the one you’re working on and has the ability to teach others.
- Contact this person and discuss setting up weekly meetings and daily (or near-daily) asynchronous correspondence for accountability, support, and greatly accelerated progress.
(Seriously, this is probably easier than you’d think – many people really enjoy helping others to learn and would jump at the chance to teach a willing student, so take the chance and reach out!)
If you are interested in working with me in the realms of accelerated learning, productivity, tech use, or any of the other subjects I write about I would love to chat with you about doing so.
You can reach me here.
Get out there, find a mentor, and start making progress faster than you ever thought possible.
Do it today.
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