February 11, 2019 • 31 mins
Ah the elusive mentor. We’re all supposed to have one to succeed in our careers, but how do you actually get one? This week, Becca goes on a journey to find a career guide.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey works for me. Listeners, A quick note before we
start the show, we would love to hear from you.
What work problems do you have? Have you tried any
of our productivity hacks to fix them? Leave us a
voicemail at two on two six month seven zero one
six six and we might play it on the show. Hey,
(00:26):
it's Becca. Recently I went to a podcasting conference and
I had a question, do you have a mentor? Mentor?
I've had a number of mentors that boss is probably
the closest thing to my mentor, that I go to
them for advice, like a couple of times a week.
Can I use them more for life purposes than I
do for audio purposes? Because I wish I had more
(00:49):
of a life mentor. My advice would just be to like,
only reach out to the people who like really get
you excited, and do you think you could learn from
someone who's doing something that you're in just did in So,
I met my first mentor. I had gone to a
radio conference. We just met and she scared me a lot.
(01:11):
And she was also the first like women of color
that I met in audio. So I contacted her, say, Hi,
I am I don't know, is it it's just weird,
but could you give a mentor? Her response was like
she was overjoyed. It was like I was just waiting
for you to ask me this whole weekend that he
would be like, I would look at your mentor. I
(01:32):
think she just felt flattered and I'm very lucky to
have her as my mentor. Just asking around it seems
like everybody has a mentor, everyone except for me. This
week on Works for Me, I go mentor hunting. Welcome
(01:57):
back to Works for Me, to show where we try
out solutions to our productivity problems to see if they
will work for you. I'm Francesca Leaf and I'm beca Greenfield.
This week, it's Becca's turn to take something that's going
wrong at work and attempt to fix it with an experiment. Becca,
what is your issue of the week. Basically, I've gone
through my whole career without much guidance. I have people
(02:20):
I can talk to when big things come up, like
job changes, but I don't have a dedicated person like
a mentor I can go to when any other work
related issues or anxieties come up. Do you have someone
like that in your life? Do you have a mentor?
I don't I don't have anybody like that, and I
totally understand the desire for one. I think the closest
I've ever come to that was when I was in
(02:41):
graduate school and I had professors who helped me get
into the industry and help me get jobs. And I
kept in touch with some of them for a little
while after grad school, but those relationships have fallen off.
In fact, I saw somebody recently at an event who
I at one time I would have considered her mentor,
and I'm pretty sure she didn't remember who I was. Yeah.
(03:01):
I feel like that's one problem, is that these relationships
don't really stick where we feel like we're supposed to
have them, but there's not really a designated forum. I mean,
there are workplaces that do give people mentors, and I've
talked to some people and they say, usually those aren't
the people who end up being your mentors. It just
seems like this elusive, magical thing we're supposed to have
(03:24):
and I don't really know how to find it. Yeah.
You hear a lot about about the value of mentor,
like in the kind of productivity circles that we run
in and the kind of productivity articles that we read. Um,
you know that stuff pops up all the time about
the importance of a mentor and how there are mentors
and there are sponsors, a sponsors like a mentor like
(03:45):
plus somebody who who's not who won't just give you advice,
but they'll advocate for you at work. So you hear
constantly about the value of a mentor, you don't necessarily
hear about like how to get one. Yeah, and that's
that's what I want to do. So your problem then,
really is that you don't have a mentor and you
want one. What is your plan to find one? Yeah,
(04:08):
So we don't get a training manual for this. So
I went out and found someone who's very good at
finding mentors. I have two core traditional mentors that I've
had for over twenty years, and then as I've taken
on different roles personally and professionally, I've added mentors. So
(04:29):
maybe I have like at any given time, maybe five
to seven that I'm actively talking with and connecting with.
This is Ellen Nsher. She's a professor at Loyola Marymount
University in Los Angeles, and she's the co author of
a book called Power Mentoring. She has spent decades researching
mentors and is a pro at finding them and keeping them.
(04:52):
Ellen is what I would call a mentor enthusiast, and
the reason she's so enthusiastic is because decades of research
has found the benefit of having one. There's a whole
body of research that we've been doing for thirty years
that shows definitively that people who have mentors actually make
more money, get promoted more rapidly, are more satisfied and
(05:18):
happier with their jobs. Life and work is hard enough,
and you don't always have to do everything the hard way.
You can learn from other people's experiences. I asked Ellen
how I could find a mentor, and she said, it's
as easy as following the four urs. Oh yeah, reading, writing, arithmetic,
(05:40):
different different ours. What are the four ours? So the
first R is to reflect. Surprisingly, the whole how to
find a mentor starts with yourself. So you need to
take a moment and think about who you are and
what you want. After reflecting, step number two is research.
(06:00):
Once you figured out what you want out of a mentor,
Ellen says, research the go to people in your industry
and find the people that they mentor. She suggests an
all out internet deep dive, find as much information on
potential mentors as possible. Then the third are is to
reach out. At this point, you've narrowed down a list
(06:21):
of people who you want as mentors. Now you have
to email them or call them and ask if they
will talk to you or meet with you. And the
last R is to reflect again. This happens after you've
already met up with them, and it's important for making
the relationships stick past the initial meeting. Reflect again and
(06:43):
ask yourself what is it I can do from my
mentor and how can I show appreciation? Because I think
a lot of times the reason that mentoring relationships don't
get off the ground or have an early fail is
because the protege go in has a meeting, sucks up
(07:03):
some time, the mentor makes a bunch of recommendations, and
then the protege gets busy doesn't follow up. So to summarize,
the four ours, not reading, writing, arithmetic are reflect, research,
reach out, and reflect again. So reflect is in there
twice feels a little bit like a cheap, But now
(07:23):
I mean I feel like that is there's nothing in
there that is so surprising, But I actually think it's
nice to have a roadmap, like just that there's somebody
out there who spent the time to think about what
the plan is for going out and finding a mentor, because,
like we said, you don't. It's just not something we're taught.
We're taught about the value of a mentor, but not
how to get one. So it's nice that she's giving
(07:44):
you steps. Yeah, I was. It's encouraging that there are
steps one can take instead of just waiting around to
be a perfect person. So I'm assuming that doing the
four hours is going to be your experiment this week.
(08:04):
That's correct. I'm going to do the four ours and
see if I can land me a mentor. How will
you know if you succeeded at fighting a mentor? One
of them are challenging aspects about a mentor relationship is
making it stick past that first meeting. But Ellen assured
me that within a month I should be able to
meet up with at least one mentor potential and if
(08:27):
it goes well, set up another meeting with them. Okay,
So if you can get a meeting and then get
a follow up meeting, that's your definition of six sens
that's right. Okay, So I need to reflect this is
(08:48):
step one of mentoring, I need to reflect on who
I am, what I offer to someone else, my growing edges.
So here I was reflecting in my apart mint. I
enlisted my boyfriend Danny, so I wasn't just talking to
myself about myself all alone. Ellen said a good way
to figure out what you want and a mentor is
(09:09):
to identify your strengths and what she calls a growing edge,
which is a euphemism for something you're not very good
at but you want to get better at. I'm becca,
I'm a journalist. Damn it. My editor tells me my
strengths are I'm fast and I'm smart. I agree with that.
(09:29):
My growing areas I would like to be be better at,
like thinking of bigger story ideas and be better at
coming up with, you know, ideas for things I want
to pursue. I feel like I really I get in
my head about that. I found this part challenging. It
sounds like it's hard to talk about yourself, and it's
(09:52):
especially hard to say nice things about yourself. Or I
find it hard, and I think many people can relate
to that. But after some reflection, I had just sided
I wanted a mentor who could push me on my
story ideas. Ellen also said that during this step, you're
supposed to think of something that you can offer your
mentor so that the relationship isn't completely parasitic. I'm happy
(10:15):
to read things or give opinion on things. I'm also
really good at writing emails, so if they need like
an email editor, I feel like you can attest to that. Yeah,
they're pretty good. I mean, yes, I I am also
someone who thinks they are a good email comes out No,
I just don't want to be recorded as saying someone
(10:37):
who like constantly need to help with their emails because
constantly struggle your emails. I am always helping my sad,
sad poor boyfriend craft emails. So what do you think
is so great about your emails? That's what I want
to know. I mean, your emails are your emails are great.
But I'm just wondering why you list this as a skill,
(11:00):
because I think people come to me and asked me
to edit their emails often, and I enjoy it, and
I think I do a good job, and I think
that's a skill that I can offer a potential mentor. Okay,
after my reflecting period, I had arrived at step two research.
I had identified what I wanted in a mentor somebody
to push me on my story ideas. It was time
(11:22):
to find the right person to help me with this
growing edge. Ellen suggested thinking of some superstars in my
field and using LinkedIn to find people related to them.
I sat down with Toefort, our producer, and we researched together. Well,
so one idea that I think I'm gonna do is
Susan Arlene, which is someone who's like such a reach
(11:46):
I wouldn't even think to reach out to her, but like,
she's cool and she has a podcast, cry Babies. I
don't even know if Susan relians on LinkedIn, so she
is on LinkedIn that she clearly does not use this website.
I mean it is not filled out at all. It
says experience writer and there is a blank photo that's
(12:10):
supposed to be filled in, and it just says the
last forty years she's been doing that and that's the
whole thing. She's been very consistent. It doesn't even say
what publications she's a dead end. So it was not
just Susan Orlean. A lot of people in our industry
are not big users of LinkedIn and it became almost
(12:31):
immediately clear that that was not going to be a
fruitful path for me. So I decided to do my
own version of internet research, and Tofer suggested that we
look for people who have been interviewed on the long
Form podcast for inspiration. Are you familiar with that show?
I am. I'm a subscriber actually, for those who don't know,
long Form is a podcast where each week the hosts
(12:51):
interview writers, editors, and journalists about their careers. So I
went through the roster of guests over the years to
try to find some potential candidates. After twenty minutes, Tob
and I had a solid list of ten people. It
was a nice representation of people who do the different
things that I do from my job. It was writers, reporters, podcasters.
(13:12):
I felt good about it, and once I had my names,
it was time for the third are reach out, which
is where things got scary. We'll see how that went
for me. After the right I had arrived at step three,
(13:50):
which is reach out. This, I think is the most
intimidating step. You have to email complete strangers, tell them
how much you like them, and then asked them for
their time. It took me a while to build up
to this step. About a week after I did my research,
I finally got the courage to contact my potential future mentors.
(14:11):
I sat down with my list of ten names and
their contact information, which was readily available online, and I
started writing an email to the first potential mentor on
my list, Susan or Lean. Hi, Susan, my name is
Becka Greenfield. I'm reporter, writer, podcaster. I currently work at
Bloomberg and have worked at various other outlets since I
(14:34):
started working eight years ago. I guess I say work
a lot um. It took me at least four drafts
to write what I considered a decent email, and as
we know, you have very high email standards, so that
must have been an amazing email by the time you
were done with it. Yes, I was using my special skill.
(14:55):
I wanted to personalize it to Susan, but I also
didn't want to sound too neat. It's a very delicate balance.
And then I had to do the hardest part, which
was sending. Ellen said a lot of people get stressed
about this step, understandably, so she has a trick for
getting over it. I really recommend that people come up
(15:16):
with some kind of courage ritual. So it might be
a poem, it might be a song, it might be
a quote. So a lot of people run into this trouble,
like reaching out to strangers as a problem, But it
never occurred to me to like have a little thing
that you always fall back on that makes you feel braver. Yeah,
she sings a song. She sings the song, so I
(15:38):
like amps you up. So yeah, she she sings a song,
and she suggests that you just do something to make
yourself feel confident in the moment. What did you decide
to do for your courage rid rule, I picked a
song that always lifts my spirits. And also bonus is
a metaphor for my current tap. I Ain't no mountain
(16:06):
high enough by Marvin Gay and Tammy Terrell. Okay, so
the metaphor, how is it a mountain email? The email
is a tall mountain. That's right, my stress climates. There's
lots of metaphors. The email itself, this moment is a
mountain that it's not too high for me to climb over.
I can do it, you can do it. Also finding
(16:28):
a mentor, it's the scary amount and the song goes
to keep me from getting to you. So that's the mentor.
The mentors on the other side of the mountain. The
emails not too tall for you to climb over and
didn't get to your mentor. That's great, thank you perfect.
I thought about it now, So after reading through my
(16:55):
email one last time just in case, I was ready
to send it, I'm pretty nervous to send it. But
first email, here we go pressing send. He Okay, it's
gotta scary. Onto the next one. I found it surprisingly
(17:20):
exhausting to write and send that email. It took a
lot of emotional energy, and then I had to do
it in nine more times. Hi Eran Hayman Niche. Hi, Rebecca.
My name is Becca green My name is Becca Greenfield.
I'm a reporter. I'm on the race class and gender
in the right place team here and I admire I
feel crazy. I'm looking for some guidance on how to
(17:43):
go as a writer, reporter and idea generator. So respectable,
Marvin Gay, you inspire me submit. Sending the emails was
so exhausting that I only ended up emailing eight out
of the ten people on my list. I just stopped.
Then it was out of my hands. I had to
(18:04):
wait for responses, and then right there, right then, I
got one and it was a rejection, a really nice rejection,
but a rejection. So I waited even longer. I refreshed
my inbox, waited more days, pasted. It felt like an eternity,
(18:28):
and then finally people responded, and they were more rejections.
People were very nice and sent me some incredibly thoughtful emails.
Some of them had specific advice in them for me,
but they were for legitimate reasons, too busy to meet up.
I think if you're reaching out to people you admire,
(18:48):
there is a very real possibility that they're going to
be too busy putting time and energy into their own
careers to meet up with you. I think that's true.
But I think that you might be underestimating how big
a deal is that people responded at all. Like I
think that they could have just ignored your email altogether.
After all, you were a stranger, and it sounds like
some of them gave you real advice or thought through
(19:10):
what you had written to them. So clearly the fact
that you put a lot of thought into your email
resulted in them putting some thought in their responses, And
I think that's it's kind of a win, like you're
on their radar. Now, all I'm hearing is that I
sent a really good email. Yes correct, I know, iratulations
on your amazing email. Thank you. I was genuinely delighted
to hear from people and very touched. Yeah, but it
(19:33):
didn't help me get closer to my goal. It didn't
get you exactly what you wanted. But I think it's
a nice lesson the next time you're scared of something
like that, because I think the assumption is these people
are going to be like, what the heck is this?
Totally ignore it, And actually you can get a lot
more out of people than you realize. People will give
you more of their time than you might expect. Dare.
(19:54):
I say, ain't no mountain high enough you, dare. So
I had to keep waiting. The holidays came, they went,
and then on January two, I got an email from
Manus Samaradi. Manusha is an accomplished journalist. She used to
(20:15):
host a popular radio show called Note to Self. Last
year she left to start her own podcast company called
Stable Genius Productions, where, among other things, she hosts their
flagship show zig Zag. She was the perfect person to
help me with my growing edge. She had to put
out hundreds of episodes of her show, and she seemingly
does not have a problem coming up with good ideas.
(20:37):
I responded immediately and set up a meeting with her
a week later. Hi. Hello. We met up in her
coworking space on a chilly morning for coffee. I sat down,
put my recorder between us, and right then and there
she gave me my first tip of the morning, how
to hold a microphone like a pro something. This is
(20:58):
gonna just gonna bug me, but I really think you
should talk like this. And then he hand it to you.
One minute in and I had already learned something. Plus
Minush had put me at ease. She made me feel
okay asking her some of my other career questions. After
talking for a few more minutes, I brought up my
growing edge, and I asked her how I can get
better at coming up with story ideas. You can't do
(21:20):
this in a vacuum. Ideas are iterative, right, Like, it's
not the chances of you coming up with something that's
fully formed and totally baked an amazing are pretty darn slim,
Like what is the IRA glasses? Like your ideas want
to be bad. It's a team sport journalism. Yes, there
are people who just like put out amazing things all
(21:41):
on their own, but I don't think it's like being
an artist to paint something and has a vision in
their mind. I think I have ideas of where I
want to go, but there never they're never what we
end up doing. The news made me realize that I
was maybe putting too much pressure on my own ideas,
and that I should seek out other people to brainstorm with.
(22:02):
We spent an hour talking about stuff like this and
remembering what Ellen said. I tried not to just suck
up her time, and I answered some of her questions. Sadly,
she did not request my email writing services. Maybe you
consider another email and she'll just be so wowed by
the quality that she'll ask for more help. One can dream. Then,
(22:22):
as we were wrapping up, I had yet another challenge.
Ellen said after the first meeting, if things went well,
I should try to get on my mentors calendar again
in the next month or so to try and make
the relationships stick. I asked manus when she thought it
would be reasonable for us to meet up again. Look,
I have two kids, I run my own business. I
(22:44):
host multiple podcasts, I traveled, giving a lot of talks.
Time is not is the one thing right now in
my life I do not have, but I do believe
in Like, like, this session was extremely productive and fruitful
and wonderful, and if I don't see you for another
six months to a year, I really feel like we'll
(23:04):
just pick up right where we were because it was
I hate this word speaking of words authentic, but like
we didn't both, do you know what I mean? We
just got to it, And like I have a lot
of time for people who I feel like I can
meet them right where we need to be without the
lead up to get there. Minusia had already given me
so much of her time to ask her to commit
(23:26):
to another meeting in the next month or two felt selfish.
She's busy, and I agree with her. We got a
lot out of our session. I couldn't bring myself to
ask for more, so I left without scheduling another meeting.
I love how skillfully she kind of rejected you in
a way, like when you asked her about meeting up.
It sounds like you gently broached meeting up again without
(23:48):
being direct about it, and then she just had this
way of like making it a compliment to you that
she wasn't gonna probably see you for six months to
a year. I she's like, that's high quality mental material
right there. Yeah, I didn't even think of it as
a rejection. That's the first time I'm thinking of it
as right. Sorry, Well you didn't give yourself the chance
(24:09):
to be rejected because you didn't. Actually, yeah, I was
a little meta about it. I was like, I'm supposed
to do this thing, what do you think? But she's
obviously probably wisely protective of her time. Yes, I told yes,
that's the correct answer, and no, say no to mean.
But that's she made me feel like she did the
right thing. But you probably got scared. You probably got
you got scared away by her saying she didn't have
(24:31):
a lot of time, and then you didn't push it
further because it's just like that email situation. You just
assumed that as someone who doesn't have a lot of time,
she wasn't going to give you this. You know, she
wasn't gonna give you this specific thing. But maybe what
you could have used is a courage with rule. Oh
my goodness, yes, just excuse me, I need to play
(24:51):
a song right now, So I can ask you another
question put on you just be like, I'm just gonna
put on my earbuds for like thirty seconds next time.
But just because we hadn't set up another meeting right
there didn't mean I had completely failed at making the
relationship stick. It was time for a step four reflect again.
(25:12):
Ellen said, I should reflect on what I can do
for my mentor after the meeting to keep the relationship going.
MENU should ask me to send her an episode of
this show that we're working on right now. So I
sent her an email thanking her for a time, with
a link to our podcast. And that was the end
of my mentoring journey. So, Becca, was your mentoring experiment
(25:45):
a success? Technically, no, I failed. Yeah, I knew that.
I knew the answer because you didn't get a follow
up meeting. That's right. I didn't set up another meeting
with Manus, which was the goal. And I don't think
I got the kind of mentor relationship I had been
fantasizing about. I was thinking of having someone I could
meet up with regularly to talk about career stuff. But
(26:07):
I don't know that I will ever have an explicit,
ongoing relationship like that. And maybe I just need to
come to terms with that. I don't think you should
give up so easily on having that kind of relationship.
I think maybe that the like intensive in person I
r L meetups might be hard, But some of the
advice she gave you, it sounds like it was kind
of a way of helping you help yourself. Like she
(26:30):
was saying, reach out to the people around you, collaborate
more with the people that you work with, and so
she was almost like teaching you how to fish instead
of giving you a fish like she You know, if
you had even an email relationship with her um or
just a really occasional relationship that wasn't as regular as
you might like, she could keep kind of feeding you
(26:50):
that stuff that would help you be better in your
day to day life. So it's interesting that you brought
up this email relationship because I called Ellen back up
after my experiment and I asked her how I could
have done things a little better, and that was one
of her suggestions. She was like, you should keep trying
to build this relationship with the news. You can email
her things and not like here's a question I'm having
(27:11):
about my life, and we're like, oh, this is something
we talked about. It reminded me of you. Like, remember,
I'm a person I'm very like post date. It is
a lot the mentor finding experiences very much like you
should make her. Yeah, I'll make heir of Spotify playlist.
So yeah, I think you're right. I should not give
(27:31):
up on my goal. So in the end, do you
feel like Ellen's for ours we're helpful? I do. I'm
the kind of person who likes to have an actionable
plan to follow in small increments to reach a larger goal,
and it forced me to go on this path of
finding a mentor. I think it also forced me to
(27:52):
reach out to people I assumed were inaccessible and unattainable.
And everybody I emailed, people who I am scared of
and an of and who do awesome work. They were
happy to hear from me, and I think they wanted
to help, or they pretended to want to help even
if they couldn't. I don't think before ours consider how
busy people are, especially the women that I reached out to,
(28:14):
a lot of them are also working parents, and they
I know they execute at high levels at their jobs,
so it's reasonable to me that they don't have time
to meet up with a complete stranger. Did you bring
that up with Ellen when you called her back, Like,
did she have any advice about people being really busy?
She did? She was like, yes, when people say can
you meet for coffee, they think, oh gosh, no, Like
(28:37):
I don't have time for that. She said, to phrase
my asks in smaller increments and say, do you have
fifteen minutes to get on the phone to talk about
X Y Z thing? Which I I don't know if
I could do that, but it does. Why not? I
don't know, it's just someone really gonna get on the
phone talk to me for fifteen minutes. Well, I think
(28:58):
it's more about this asking for the specific thing, because
I can totally see people being overwhelmed by hearing somebody
who sounds like they really look up to them saying
I would like you to help me with my whole life,
because you know, just like you had fears about being
important enough to email, these people like they might have
(29:19):
some kind of imposter syndrome too, just because they happen
to be really accomplished. They might think, who am I
to help this person figure out their whole career, and
they might feel like it's easier to take on something smaller.
It's that's a very good point. They might have needed
a courage ritual to respond to your email, as to
be included in my email asks, do you have fifteen minutes?
I was here worried about responding to this email. If
(29:41):
you're scared to respond, here's the ritual. Um. Yeah. I
actually was listening to a podcast recently where somebody said
she asked other writers to walk her through their stories,
which again is a very specific ask. I could have
done that and said, you know, journalist X, I loved
this thing you out. Can you tell me about it?
(30:01):
And they might be more receptive. So I learned that
manus is not going to solve or help me solve
all of my career anxieties and problems, and that's not
really any one person's job. But I did learn some
useful tools and tips for learning how to find more
people to help me do that. And I guess that
(30:23):
just involves sending more emails. Oh my god, you're so
good at emails. I just find more ways to send
more emails. It's actually perfect for you. M Next week
(30:45):
on works for me, Francesca and I go to couples therapy.
I'm gonna ask you about some things that have been
challenges between the two of you, and I'm going to
let either of you start. I can start. Thanks for
listening to another episode Works for Me. If you like
the show, please head on over at to Apple Podcasts
or ever you listen to, rate, review, and subscribe. You
(31:08):
can also find all of our episodes and more things
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Slash Works for Me. Have any workplace problems that you
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(31:28):
one six and we might play your voicemail on the show,
or you can tweet at us I'm at ours Greenfield
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hosted by Me at the Greenfield and Me Francesca Leavy.
This episode was produced by tofur Forehs Francesca leav Is,
Bloomberg pet of podcasts. Do You Next Week? Him
Hey works for me. Listeners, A quick note before we
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What work problems do you have? Have you tried any
of our productivity hacks to fix them? Leave us a
voicemail at two on two six month seven zero one
six six and we might play it on the show. Hey,
(00:26):
it's Becca. Recently I went to a podcasting conference and
I had a question, do you have a mentor? Mentor?
I've had a number of mentors that boss is probably
the closest thing to my mentor, that I go to
them for advice, like a couple of times a week.
Can I use them more for life purposes than I
do for audio purposes? Because I wish I had more
(00:49):
of a life mentor. My advice would just be to like,
only reach out to the people who like really get
you excited, and do you think you could learn from
someone who's doing something that you're in just did in So,
I met my first mentor. I had gone to a
radio conference. We just met and she scared me a lot.
(01:11):
And she was also the first like women of color
that I met in audio. So I contacted her, say, Hi,
I am I don't know, is it it's just weird,
but could you give a mentor? Her response was like
she was overjoyed. It was like I was just waiting
for you to ask me this whole weekend that he
would be like, I would look at your mentor. I
(01:32):
think she just felt flattered and I'm very lucky to
have her as my mentor. Just asking around it seems
like everybody has a mentor, everyone except for me. This
week on Works for Me, I go mentor hunting. Welcome
(01:57):
back to Works for Me, to show where we try
out solutions to our productivity problems to see if they
will work for you. I'm Francesca Leaf and I'm beca Greenfield.
This week, it's Becca's turn to take something that's going
wrong at work and attempt to fix it with an experiment. Becca,
what is your issue of the week. Basically, I've gone
through my whole career without much guidance. I have people
(02:20):
I can talk to when big things come up, like
job changes, but I don't have a dedicated person like
a mentor I can go to when any other work
related issues or anxieties come up. Do you have someone
like that in your life? Do you have a mentor?
I don't I don't have anybody like that, and I
totally understand the desire for one. I think the closest
I've ever come to that was when I was in
(02:41):
graduate school and I had professors who helped me get
into the industry and help me get jobs. And I
kept in touch with some of them for a little
while after grad school, but those relationships have fallen off.
In fact, I saw somebody recently at an event who
I at one time I would have considered her mentor,
and I'm pretty sure she didn't remember who I was. Yeah.
(03:01):
I feel like that's one problem, is that these relationships
don't really stick where we feel like we're supposed to
have them, but there's not really a designated forum. I mean,
there are workplaces that do give people mentors, and I've
talked to some people and they say, usually those aren't
the people who end up being your mentors. It just
seems like this elusive, magical thing we're supposed to have
(03:24):
and I don't really know how to find it. Yeah.
You hear a lot about about the value of mentor,
like in the kind of productivity circles that we run
in and the kind of productivity articles that we read. Um,
you know that stuff pops up all the time about
the importance of a mentor and how there are mentors
and there are sponsors, a sponsors like a mentor like
(03:45):
plus somebody who who's not who won't just give you advice,
but they'll advocate for you at work. So you hear
constantly about the value of a mentor, you don't necessarily
hear about like how to get one. Yeah, and that's
that's what I want to do. So your problem then,
really is that you don't have a mentor and you
want one. What is your plan to find one? Yeah,
(04:08):
So we don't get a training manual for this. So
I went out and found someone who's very good at
finding mentors. I have two core traditional mentors that I've
had for over twenty years, and then as I've taken
on different roles personally and professionally, I've added mentors. So
(04:29):
maybe I have like at any given time, maybe five
to seven that I'm actively talking with and connecting with.
This is Ellen Nsher. She's a professor at Loyola Marymount
University in Los Angeles, and she's the co author of
a book called Power Mentoring. She has spent decades researching
mentors and is a pro at finding them and keeping them.
(04:52):
Ellen is what I would call a mentor enthusiast, and
the reason she's so enthusiastic is because decades of research
has found the benefit of having one. There's a whole
body of research that we've been doing for thirty years
that shows definitively that people who have mentors actually make
more money, get promoted more rapidly, are more satisfied and
(05:18):
happier with their jobs. Life and work is hard enough,
and you don't always have to do everything the hard way.
You can learn from other people's experiences. I asked Ellen
how I could find a mentor, and she said, it's
as easy as following the four urs. Oh yeah, reading, writing, arithmetic,
(05:40):
different different ours. What are the four ours? So the
first R is to reflect. Surprisingly, the whole how to
find a mentor starts with yourself. So you need to
take a moment and think about who you are and
what you want. After reflecting, step number two is research.
(06:00):
Once you figured out what you want out of a mentor,
Ellen says, research the go to people in your industry
and find the people that they mentor. She suggests an
all out internet deep dive, find as much information on
potential mentors as possible. Then the third are is to
reach out. At this point, you've narrowed down a list
(06:21):
of people who you want as mentors. Now you have
to email them or call them and ask if they
will talk to you or meet with you. And the
last R is to reflect again. This happens after you've
already met up with them, and it's important for making
the relationships stick past the initial meeting. Reflect again and
(06:43):
ask yourself what is it I can do from my
mentor and how can I show appreciation? Because I think
a lot of times the reason that mentoring relationships don't
get off the ground or have an early fail is
because the protege go in has a meeting, sucks up
(07:03):
some time, the mentor makes a bunch of recommendations, and
then the protege gets busy doesn't follow up. So to summarize,
the four ours, not reading, writing, arithmetic are reflect, research,
reach out, and reflect again. So reflect is in there
twice feels a little bit like a cheap, But now
(07:23):
I mean I feel like that is there's nothing in
there that is so surprising, But I actually think it's
nice to have a roadmap, like just that there's somebody
out there who spent the time to think about what
the plan is for going out and finding a mentor, because,
like we said, you don't. It's just not something we're taught.
We're taught about the value of a mentor, but not
how to get one. So it's nice that she's giving
(07:44):
you steps. Yeah, I was. It's encouraging that there are
steps one can take instead of just waiting around to
be a perfect person. So I'm assuming that doing the
four hours is going to be your experiment this week.
(08:04):
That's correct. I'm going to do the four ours and
see if I can land me a mentor. How will
you know if you succeeded at fighting a mentor? One
of them are challenging aspects about a mentor relationship is
making it stick past that first meeting. But Ellen assured
me that within a month I should be able to
meet up with at least one mentor potential and if
(08:27):
it goes well, set up another meeting with them. Okay,
So if you can get a meeting and then get
a follow up meeting, that's your definition of six sens
that's right. Okay, So I need to reflect this is
(08:48):
step one of mentoring, I need to reflect on who
I am, what I offer to someone else, my growing edges.
So here I was reflecting in my apart mint. I
enlisted my boyfriend Danny, so I wasn't just talking to
myself about myself all alone. Ellen said a good way
to figure out what you want and a mentor is
(09:09):
to identify your strengths and what she calls a growing edge,
which is a euphemism for something you're not very good
at but you want to get better at. I'm becca,
I'm a journalist. Damn it. My editor tells me my
strengths are I'm fast and I'm smart. I agree with that.
(09:29):
My growing areas I would like to be be better at,
like thinking of bigger story ideas and be better at
coming up with, you know, ideas for things I want
to pursue. I feel like I really I get in
my head about that. I found this part challenging. It
sounds like it's hard to talk about yourself, and it's
(09:52):
especially hard to say nice things about yourself. Or I
find it hard, and I think many people can relate
to that. But after some reflection, I had just sided
I wanted a mentor who could push me on my
story ideas. Ellen also said that during this step, you're
supposed to think of something that you can offer your
mentor so that the relationship isn't completely parasitic. I'm happy
(10:15):
to read things or give opinion on things. I'm also
really good at writing emails, so if they need like
an email editor, I feel like you can attest to that. Yeah,
they're pretty good. I mean, yes, I I am also
someone who thinks they are a good email comes out No,
I just don't want to be recorded as saying someone
(10:37):
who like constantly need to help with their emails because
constantly struggle your emails. I am always helping my sad,
sad poor boyfriend craft emails. So what do you think
is so great about your emails? That's what I want
to know. I mean, your emails are your emails are great.
But I'm just wondering why you list this as a skill,
(11:00):
because I think people come to me and asked me
to edit their emails often, and I enjoy it, and
I think I do a good job, and I think
that's a skill that I can offer a potential mentor. Okay,
after my reflecting period, I had arrived at step two research.
I had identified what I wanted in a mentor somebody
to push me on my story ideas. It was time
(11:22):
to find the right person to help me with this
growing edge. Ellen suggested thinking of some superstars in my
field and using LinkedIn to find people related to them.
I sat down with Toefort, our producer, and we researched together. Well,
so one idea that I think I'm gonna do is
Susan Arlene, which is someone who's like such a reach
(11:46):
I wouldn't even think to reach out to her, but like,
she's cool and she has a podcast, cry Babies. I
don't even know if Susan relians on LinkedIn, so she
is on LinkedIn that she clearly does not use this website.
I mean it is not filled out at all. It
says experience writer and there is a blank photo that's
(12:10):
supposed to be filled in, and it just says the
last forty years she's been doing that and that's the
whole thing. She's been very consistent. It doesn't even say
what publications she's a dead end. So it was not
just Susan Orlean. A lot of people in our industry
are not big users of LinkedIn and it became almost
(12:31):
immediately clear that that was not going to be a
fruitful path for me. So I decided to do my
own version of internet research, and Tofer suggested that we
look for people who have been interviewed on the long
Form podcast for inspiration. Are you familiar with that show?
I am. I'm a subscriber actually, for those who don't know,
long Form is a podcast where each week the hosts
(12:51):
interview writers, editors, and journalists about their careers. So I
went through the roster of guests over the years to
try to find some potential candidates. After twenty minutes, Tob
and I had a solid list of ten people. It
was a nice representation of people who do the different
things that I do from my job. It was writers, reporters, podcasters.
(13:12):
I felt good about it, and once I had my names,
it was time for the third are reach out, which
is where things got scary. We'll see how that went
for me. After the right I had arrived at step three,
(13:50):
which is reach out. This, I think is the most
intimidating step. You have to email complete strangers, tell them
how much you like them, and then asked them for
their time. It took me a while to build up
to this step. About a week after I did my research,
I finally got the courage to contact my potential future mentors.
(14:11):
I sat down with my list of ten names and
their contact information, which was readily available online, and I
started writing an email to the first potential mentor on
my list, Susan or Lean. Hi, Susan, my name is
Becka Greenfield. I'm reporter, writer, podcaster. I currently work at
Bloomberg and have worked at various other outlets since I
(14:34):
started working eight years ago. I guess I say work
a lot um. It took me at least four drafts
to write what I considered a decent email, and as
we know, you have very high email standards, so that
must have been an amazing email by the time you
were done with it. Yes, I was using my special skill.
(14:55):
I wanted to personalize it to Susan, but I also
didn't want to sound too neat. It's a very delicate balance.
And then I had to do the hardest part, which
was sending. Ellen said a lot of people get stressed
about this step, understandably, so she has a trick for
getting over it. I really recommend that people come up
(15:16):
with some kind of courage ritual. So it might be
a poem, it might be a song, it might be
a quote. So a lot of people run into this trouble,
like reaching out to strangers as a problem, But it
never occurred to me to like have a little thing
that you always fall back on that makes you feel braver. Yeah,
she sings a song. She sings the song, so I
(15:38):
like amps you up. So yeah, she she sings a song,
and she suggests that you just do something to make
yourself feel confident in the moment. What did you decide
to do for your courage rid rule, I picked a
song that always lifts my spirits. And also bonus is
a metaphor for my current tap. I Ain't no mountain
(16:06):
high enough by Marvin Gay and Tammy Terrell. Okay, so
the metaphor, how is it a mountain email? The email
is a tall mountain. That's right, my stress climates. There's
lots of metaphors. The email itself, this moment is a
mountain that it's not too high for me to climb over.
I can do it, you can do it. Also finding
(16:28):
a mentor, it's the scary amount and the song goes
to keep me from getting to you. So that's the mentor.
The mentors on the other side of the mountain. The
emails not too tall for you to climb over and
didn't get to your mentor. That's great, thank you perfect.
I thought about it now, So after reading through my
(16:55):
email one last time just in case, I was ready
to send it, I'm pretty nervous to send it. But
first email, here we go pressing send. He Okay, it's
gotta scary. Onto the next one. I found it surprisingly
(17:20):
exhausting to write and send that email. It took a
lot of emotional energy, and then I had to do
it in nine more times. Hi Eran Hayman Niche. Hi, Rebecca.
My name is Becca green My name is Becca Greenfield.
I'm a reporter. I'm on the race class and gender
in the right place team here and I admire I
feel crazy. I'm looking for some guidance on how to
(17:43):
go as a writer, reporter and idea generator. So respectable,
Marvin Gay, you inspire me submit. Sending the emails was
so exhausting that I only ended up emailing eight out
of the ten people on my list. I just stopped.
Then it was out of my hands. I had to
(18:04):
wait for responses, and then right there, right then, I
got one and it was a rejection, a really nice rejection,
but a rejection. So I waited even longer. I refreshed
my inbox, waited more days, pasted. It felt like an eternity,
(18:28):
and then finally people responded, and they were more rejections.
People were very nice and sent me some incredibly thoughtful emails.
Some of them had specific advice in them for me,
but they were for legitimate reasons, too busy to meet up.
I think if you're reaching out to people you admire,
(18:48):
there is a very real possibility that they're going to
be too busy putting time and energy into their own
careers to meet up with you. I think that's true.
But I think that you might be underestimating how big
a deal is that people responded at all. Like I
think that they could have just ignored your email altogether.
After all, you were a stranger, and it sounds like
some of them gave you real advice or thought through
(19:10):
what you had written to them. So clearly the fact
that you put a lot of thought into your email
resulted in them putting some thought in their responses, And
I think that's it's kind of a win, like you're
on their radar. Now, all I'm hearing is that I
sent a really good email. Yes correct, I know, iratulations
on your amazing email. Thank you. I was genuinely delighted
to hear from people and very touched. Yeah, but it
(19:33):
didn't help me get closer to my goal. It didn't
get you exactly what you wanted. But I think it's
a nice lesson the next time you're scared of something
like that, because I think the assumption is these people
are going to be like, what the heck is this?
Totally ignore it, And actually you can get a lot
more out of people than you realize. People will give
you more of their time than you might expect. Dare.
(19:54):
I say, ain't no mountain high enough you, dare. So
I had to keep waiting. The holidays came, they went,
and then on January two, I got an email from
Manus Samaradi. Manusha is an accomplished journalist. She used to
(20:15):
host a popular radio show called Note to Self. Last
year she left to start her own podcast company called
Stable Genius Productions, where, among other things, she hosts their
flagship show zig Zag. She was the perfect person to
help me with my growing edge. She had to put
out hundreds of episodes of her show, and she seemingly
does not have a problem coming up with good ideas.
(20:37):
I responded immediately and set up a meeting with her
a week later. Hi. Hello. We met up in her
coworking space on a chilly morning for coffee. I sat down,
put my recorder between us, and right then and there
she gave me my first tip of the morning, how
to hold a microphone like a pro something. This is
(20:58):
gonna just gonna bug me, but I really think you
should talk like this. And then he hand it to you.
One minute in and I had already learned something. Plus
Minush had put me at ease. She made me feel
okay asking her some of my other career questions. After
talking for a few more minutes, I brought up my
growing edge, and I asked her how I can get
better at coming up with story ideas. You can't do
(21:20):
this in a vacuum. Ideas are iterative, right, Like, it's
not the chances of you coming up with something that's
fully formed and totally baked an amazing are pretty darn slim,
Like what is the IRA glasses? Like your ideas want
to be bad. It's a team sport journalism. Yes, there
are people who just like put out amazing things all
(21:41):
on their own, but I don't think it's like being
an artist to paint something and has a vision in
their mind. I think I have ideas of where I
want to go, but there never they're never what we
end up doing. The news made me realize that I
was maybe putting too much pressure on my own ideas,
and that I should seek out other people to brainstorm with.
(22:02):
We spent an hour talking about stuff like this and
remembering what Ellen said. I tried not to just suck
up her time, and I answered some of her questions. Sadly,
she did not request my email writing services. Maybe you
consider another email and she'll just be so wowed by
the quality that she'll ask for more help. One can dream. Then,
(22:22):
as we were wrapping up, I had yet another challenge.
Ellen said after the first meeting, if things went well,
I should try to get on my mentors calendar again
in the next month or so to try and make
the relationships stick. I asked manus when she thought it
would be reasonable for us to meet up again. Look,
I have two kids, I run my own business. I
(22:44):
host multiple podcasts, I traveled, giving a lot of talks.
Time is not is the one thing right now in
my life I do not have, but I do believe
in Like, like, this session was extremely productive and fruitful
and wonderful, and if I don't see you for another
six months to a year, I really feel like we'll
(23:04):
just pick up right where we were because it was
I hate this word speaking of words authentic, but like
we didn't both, do you know what I mean? We
just got to it, And like I have a lot
of time for people who I feel like I can
meet them right where we need to be without the
lead up to get there. Minusia had already given me
so much of her time to ask her to commit
(23:26):
to another meeting in the next month or two felt selfish.
She's busy, and I agree with her. We got a
lot out of our session. I couldn't bring myself to
ask for more, so I left without scheduling another meeting.
I love how skillfully she kind of rejected you in
a way, like when you asked her about meeting up.
It sounds like you gently broached meeting up again without
(23:48):
being direct about it, and then she just had this
way of like making it a compliment to you that
she wasn't gonna probably see you for six months to
a year. I she's like, that's high quality mental material
right there. Yeah, I didn't even think of it as
a rejection. That's the first time I'm thinking of it
as right. Sorry, Well you didn't give yourself the chance
(24:09):
to be rejected because you didn't. Actually, yeah, I was
a little meta about it. I was like, I'm supposed
to do this thing, what do you think? But she's
obviously probably wisely protective of her time. Yes, I told yes,
that's the correct answer, and no, say no to mean.
But that's she made me feel like she did the
right thing. But you probably got scared. You probably got
you got scared away by her saying she didn't have
(24:31):
a lot of time, and then you didn't push it
further because it's just like that email situation. You just
assumed that as someone who doesn't have a lot of time,
she wasn't going to give you this. You know, she
wasn't gonna give you this specific thing. But maybe what
you could have used is a courage with rule. Oh
my goodness, yes, just excuse me, I need to play
(24:51):
a song right now, So I can ask you another
question put on you just be like, I'm just gonna
put on my earbuds for like thirty seconds next time.
But just because we hadn't set up another meeting right
there didn't mean I had completely failed at making the
relationship stick. It was time for a step four reflect again.
(25:12):
Ellen said, I should reflect on what I can do
for my mentor after the meeting to keep the relationship going.
MENU should ask me to send her an episode of
this show that we're working on right now. So I
sent her an email thanking her for a time, with
a link to our podcast. And that was the end
of my mentoring journey. So, Becca, was your mentoring experiment
(25:45):
a success? Technically, no, I failed. Yeah, I knew that.
I knew the answer because you didn't get a follow
up meeting. That's right. I didn't set up another meeting
with Manus, which was the goal. And I don't think
I got the kind of mentor relationship I had been
fantasizing about. I was thinking of having someone I could
meet up with regularly to talk about career stuff. But
(26:07):
I don't know that I will ever have an explicit,
ongoing relationship like that. And maybe I just need to
come to terms with that. I don't think you should
give up so easily on having that kind of relationship.
I think maybe that the like intensive in person I
r L meetups might be hard, But some of the
advice she gave you, it sounds like it was kind
of a way of helping you help yourself. Like she
(26:30):
was saying, reach out to the people around you, collaborate
more with the people that you work with, and so
she was almost like teaching you how to fish instead
of giving you a fish like she You know, if
you had even an email relationship with her um or
just a really occasional relationship that wasn't as regular as
you might like, she could keep kind of feeding you
(26:50):
that stuff that would help you be better in your
day to day life. So it's interesting that you brought
up this email relationship because I called Ellen back up
after my experiment and I asked her how I could
have done things a little better, and that was one
of her suggestions. She was like, you should keep trying
to build this relationship with the news. You can email
her things and not like here's a question I'm having
(27:11):
about my life, and we're like, oh, this is something
we talked about. It reminded me of you. Like, remember,
I'm a person I'm very like post date. It is
a lot the mentor finding experiences very much like you
should make her. Yeah, I'll make heir of Spotify playlist.
So yeah, I think you're right. I should not give
(27:31):
up on my goal. So in the end, do you
feel like Ellen's for ours we're helpful? I do. I'm
the kind of person who likes to have an actionable
plan to follow in small increments to reach a larger goal,
and it forced me to go on this path of
finding a mentor. I think it also forced me to
(27:52):
reach out to people I assumed were inaccessible and unattainable.
And everybody I emailed, people who I am scared of
and an of and who do awesome work. They were
happy to hear from me, and I think they wanted
to help, or they pretended to want to help even
if they couldn't. I don't think before ours consider how
busy people are, especially the women that I reached out to,
(28:14):
a lot of them are also working parents, and they
I know they execute at high levels at their jobs,
so it's reasonable to me that they don't have time
to meet up with a complete stranger. Did you bring
that up with Ellen when you called her back, Like,
did she have any advice about people being really busy?
She did? She was like, yes, when people say can
you meet for coffee, they think, oh gosh, no, Like
(28:37):
I don't have time for that. She said, to phrase
my asks in smaller increments and say, do you have
fifteen minutes to get on the phone to talk about
X Y Z thing? Which I I don't know if
I could do that, but it does. Why not? I
don't know, it's just someone really gonna get on the
phone talk to me for fifteen minutes. Well, I think
(28:58):
it's more about this asking for the specific thing, because
I can totally see people being overwhelmed by hearing somebody
who sounds like they really look up to them saying
I would like you to help me with my whole life,
because you know, just like you had fears about being
important enough to email, these people like they might have
(29:19):
some kind of imposter syndrome too, just because they happen
to be really accomplished. They might think, who am I
to help this person figure out their whole career, and
they might feel like it's easier to take on something smaller.
It's that's a very good point. They might have needed
a courage ritual to respond to your email, as to
be included in my email asks, do you have fifteen minutes?
I was here worried about responding to this email. If
(29:41):
you're scared to respond, here's the ritual. Um. Yeah. I
actually was listening to a podcast recently where somebody said
she asked other writers to walk her through their stories,
which again is a very specific ask. I could have
done that and said, you know, journalist X, I loved
this thing you out. Can you tell me about it?
(30:01):
And they might be more receptive. So I learned that
manus is not going to solve or help me solve
all of my career anxieties and problems, and that's not
really any one person's job. But I did learn some
useful tools and tips for learning how to find more
people to help me do that. And I guess that
(30:23):
just involves sending more emails. Oh my god, you're so
good at emails. I just find more ways to send
more emails. It's actually perfect for you. M Next week
(30:45):
on works for me, Francesca and I go to couples therapy.
I'm gonna ask you about some things that have been
challenges between the two of you, and I'm going to
let either of you start. I can start. Thanks for
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