Empower not Overpower

I listened to one of my favorite podcasts the other day, The High Performance Podcast; the episode featured Irish professional golfer, Paul McGinley.

In the podcast, Paul shared a story about a time he sought the advice of former football manager and player, Sir Alex Ferguson. When Paul sat down with Ferguson, Paul asked him a number of questions.

Rather than answer Paul’s questions directly, Ferguson replied, “What do you think?”

Paul responded, “Well, I’m asking you.”

Ferguson pushed back and replied, “No, no. You have an instinct. What does your instinct tell you?”

Paul said what he thought, and afterwards, Ferguson responded, “That’s fabulous; that’s absolutely what you should do. Can I maybe add that you do this as well?”

That conversation resonated with me. I have noticed one of my mentors, who has guided me for the last decade, has started to shift his approach in how he mentors me. When he met me as a teenager, I was inexperienced and needed a lot of guidance. But, as I have traveled the world, read widely, continued my education, engaged in higher level conversations, and learned how to ask better questions, I have evolved from the young girl I once was to someone who can start to think critically for myself. Having said that, when I turned 25 or 26, I started to realize how much I have relied on my mentor to answer questions that I had not taken the time to try and answer on my own. He didn’t have to say this, but I think he knew this too, and so he started to change the way he responded to me when I approached him.

In the 10 years he has mentored me, he has rarely, if ever, given an answer to one of my questions without challenging me in some way. Sometimes he knows that I am trying to ask a different question and has me rethink or rephrase my original question. Other times, he asks me questions to help guide me to the answer. Occasionally he will dismiss my question altogether by sending an emoji, which is particularly infuriating to me. In the last two years, I have received more emoji responses than the guidance I was used to getting when I was younger. Nevertheless, I now understand what he was trying to do.

Last month I was finalizing a Female Leadership Conference proposal I had been working on for over three months. I had asked for his input on a few things, and he had given it to me. In one of our last meetings, I had asked him to look at everything I had done up until that point. He told me no. I was upset, because I wanted to show him my hard work and also see if he had any suggestions. He could see my disappointment and told me the Conference was my vision, not his. On a surface level, I understood what he meant. He could see his response didn’t fully get through to me and he added that I, “need to be my own person.”

It wasn’t until this podcast that everything he has said and done had clicked for me. He never explicitly told me what he was doing all this time as he mentored me, and rightfully so.

I now understand that all this time my mentor has been empowering me. In the last few years, he has showed me that I am more than capable of standing on my own two feet. He has taught me to trust my instincts which has allowed me to find and value my voice.

I think it takes courage for someone to mentor another in the way my mentor has done for me or what Ferguson had done for McGinley. For some people, the ‘mentee’ might walk away and find the answers they are seeking elsewhere. I’ve certainly considered it. This isn’t to say that one person has all the answers because they don’t. I think that people like me would miss out on profound learning opportunities if they only sought the quick answers. I have tried to be a mentor to some of those people and it is painfully obvious when they are not patient enough to think for themselves.

In a time where we have access to so much information at the tip of our fingers, it would be easy to not have the patience for such a conversation or relationship. It takes a certain skill set to be an effective mentor. I think mentorship has little to do with how much a person knows and more about creating the right environment for an individual to thrive on their own. To me, that is the measure of a successful mentorship.

I knew how effective my mentors had been to me when at 28, I smiled at how much I had accomplished on my own in the last 3 years of my life. Ten years ago, I started riding a bicycle with training wheels and my mentors holding tightly onto the wheels, but now I have advanced to riding on my own with no training wheels.

The men and women I see as mentors in my life are invaluable to me. I don't think the goal is to outgrow my mentors, but rather to come to a place that I feel confident enough in my own ability that making decisions without their input will not stifle me.

When I was in the secondary education program at the university where I completed my undergraduate degree, one saying has been engrained in my mind. While there are different teaching styles, this is the one that resonates the most with me and how I understand effective mentorships: "You are not the sage on the stage, rather you are the guide on the side."