February 8, 2019 • 32 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):
He 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 months 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? 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 give
for audio purposes? Because I wish I had more of
(00:49):
a life mentor. My advice would just be to like,
only reach out to the people who like really get
you excited. And who do you think you could learn
from someone who's doing something that you're just did in
So I met my first mentor I had gone to
a radio conference. We just met and she scared me
(01:11):
a lot. 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 this is weird,
but could you be a mentor? Her response was like
she was overjoyed, Like I was just waiting for you
to ask me. This whole weekend video would be like
(01:31):
I would look at your mentor. I 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 back to Works
(01:57):
for Me, to show where we try out solutions to
our productivity problems to see if they will work for you.
I'm Francesca Leity and I'm Becca 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 I
(02:20):
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
(02:40):
come to that was when I was in 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, I
(03:02):
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. So 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 of 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? Yea.
(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 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
(04:49):
and is a poet, finding them and keeping them. 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,
(05:13):
get promoted more rapidly, are more satisfied and 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
(05:33):
easy as following the four urs. Oh yeah, reading, writing, arithmetic,
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
(05:56):
what you want. After reflecting, step number two is re search.
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
(06:18):
reach out. At this point, you've narrowed down a list
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 are 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 a protege goes 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 sense.
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 uphemism for something you're not very good
at but you want to get better at. I'm Becca,
I'm a journalist, damn, and my editor tells me my
strengths are the I'm fast and I'm smart. I agree
with that. My growing areas I would like to be
(09:32):
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 especially hard to say nice things about yourself.
(09:54):
Or I find it hard, and I think many people
can relate to that. But after some reflection, I 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
(10:14):
happy 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, you'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 wanna be recorded
(10:37):
as saying someone 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
(10:58):
listen as a skill 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
(11:20):
story ideas. It was time 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
(11:43):
is someone who's like such a reach 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
(12:05):
experience writer and there is a blank photo that's supposed
to be filled in, and it just says in 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 She's a dead end. So it was
not just Susan Orlean. A lot of people in our
(12:26):
industry are not big users of LinkedIn, and it became
almost 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 tofor 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,
(12:48):
long Form is a podcast where each week the hosts
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
Becca Greenfield' reporter, writer, podcaster. I currently work at Bloomberg
(14:32):
and have worked at various other outlets since I 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. I
(14:55):
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 check 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, so I like amps
(15:39):
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 ride rule? I picked a song
that always lefts my spirits And also bonus is a
metaphor for my current tap. I Ain't no Mountain high
(16:07):
enough by Marvin Gay and Tammy Terrell. Okay, so the metaphor,
how is it is a mountain email. The email is
a tall mountain. That's right my stress climate. Well, 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
I didn't get to your mentor. That's great, thank you,
It's perfect. I thought about it now, so after reading
(16:54):
through my 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, Hey, okay,
it's guy scary. Onto the next one. I found it
(17:20):
surprisingly 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 Erin Hayman Niche Jodi, Hi, Rebecca,
my name is Becca. 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
(17:41):
crazy looking for some guidance and how to 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
(18:01):
was out of my hands. I had to 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,
(18:23):
waited more days passed. It felt like an eternity, 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.
(18:46):
I think if you're reaching out to people you admire,
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
(19:06):
some of them gave you real advice or thought through
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
(19:29):
to hear from people and very touched. Yeah, but it
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
(19:51):
you more of their time than you might expect. Dare
I say, ain't now mountain high enough you? Dare? I
had to keep waiting. The holidays came, they went, and
then on January two, I got an email from Manus Samarodi.
(20:12):
Manusha is an accomplished journalist. She used to 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
(20:32):
of her show, and she seemingly does not have a
problem coming up with good ideas. 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
(20:53):
tip of the morning, how to hold a microphone like
a pro something. This is gonna just gonna bug me,
but I really think you should talk like this and
then hand its musume. One minute in and I had
already learned something. Plus Manush 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,
(21:14):
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 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 and amazing are pretty
darn slim. Like what do the IRA glasses like? Your
ideas want to be bad? It's a team sport. Journalism. Yes,
(21:38):
there are people who just like put out amazing things
all 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
(22:00):
brainstorm with. 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
willed by the quality that she'll ask for more help.
One can dream. Then, as we were wrapping up, I
(22:23):
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 host multiple podcasts, I traveled giving
(22:46):
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 just pick up right where we
were because it was I hate this word speaking of
(23:08):
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 to another meeting in the next
month or two felt selfish. She's busy, and I agree
(23:31):
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 being direct about it, and
then she just had this way of like making it
(23:53):
a compliment to you that she wasn't gonna probably see
you for her six months to a year. 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 it as right. Sorry, Well you didn't
give yourself the chance to be rejective because you didn't. Actually, yeah,
I was a little meta about it. I was like,
(24:14):
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 that 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 a lot of time, and then you
didn't push it further because it's just like that email situation.
(24:37):
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 this song right now so I can
ask you another question, like put on you just be like,
I'm just gonna put on my earbuds for like thirty
(24:57):
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 step
four reflect again. 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
(25:19):
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,
(25:43):
was your mentoring experiment 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
that I've been fantasizing about. I was thinking of having
someone I could meet up with regularly to talk about
(26:06):
career stuff. But 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
(26:26):
it was kind of a way of helping you help yourself.
Like she 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
(26:48):
as you might like, she could keep kind of feeding
you 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
(27:11):
having 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 experience is very much like
you should make her mate. Yeah, I'll make her a
Spotify playlist. See. I think you're right. I should not
(27:31):
give 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
(27:51):
me to 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
(28:13):
reached out to. 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, what people say, can
(28:34):
you meet for coffee? They think, oh gosh, no, Like
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
(28:55):
phone talk to me for fifteen minutes. Well, I think
it's more about this asking for this 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
(29:16):
important enough to email, these people like they might have
some kind of imposter syndrome too, just because they happened
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
(29:36):
be included in my email asks, do you have fifteen minutes?
I also here worried about responding to this email. If
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
(29:59):
this thing you out, can you tell me about it?
And they might be more receptive. So I learned that
MINUS 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
(30:19):
people to help me do that. And I guess that
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. Next week on
(30:45):
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 of Works for Me. If you
like the show, please head on over 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
like articles Rewrite It about our detailed experiments, plus very
cool illustrations done by Jordan's Spear at Bloomberg dot com
slash works for Me. Have any workplace problems that you
want to solve, we'd love to hear from you. Give
us a call at two on to six seven zero
(31:28):
one six and we might play your voicemail on the show,
or you can tweet at us I'm at urs Greenfield
and I'm at Francesca Today. The show was reported and
hosted by Me at Greenfield and Me Francesca Leady. This
episode was produced by tofur Forehs. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg
Head of Podcasts. See you next week him
He 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 months 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? 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 give
for audio purposes? Because I wish I had more of
(00:49):
a life mentor. My advice would just be to like,
only reach out to the people who like really get
you excited. And who do you think you could learn
from someone who's doing something that you're just did in
So I met my first mentor I had gone to
a radio conference. We just met and she scared me
(01:11):
a lot. 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 this is weird,
but could you be a mentor? Her response was like
she was overjoyed, Like I was just waiting for you
to ask me. This whole weekend video would be like
(01:31):
I would look at your mentor. I 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 back to Works
(01:57):
for Me, to show where we try out solutions to
our productivity problems to see if they will work for you.
I'm Francesca Leity and I'm Becca 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 I
(02:20):
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
(02:40):
come to that was when I was in 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, I
(03:02):
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. So 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 of 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? Yea.
(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 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
(04:49):
and is a poet, finding them and keeping them. 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,
(05:13):
get promoted more rapidly, are more satisfied and 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
(05:33):
easy as following the four urs. Oh yeah, reading, writing, arithmetic,
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
(05:56):
what you want. After reflecting, step number two is re search.
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
(06:18):
reach out. At this point, you've narrowed down a list
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 are 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 a protege goes 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 sense.
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 uphemism for something you're not very good
at but you want to get better at. I'm Becca,
I'm a journalist, damn, and my editor tells me my
strengths are the I'm fast and I'm smart. I agree
with that. My growing areas I would like to be
(09:32):
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 especially hard to say nice things about yourself.
(09:54):
Or I find it hard, and I think many people
can relate to that. But after some reflection, I 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
(10:14):
happy 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, you'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 wanna be recorded
(10:37):
as saying someone 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
(10:58):
listen as a skill 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
(11:20):
story ideas. It was time 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
(11:43):
is someone who's like such a reach 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
(12:05):
experience writer and there is a blank photo that's supposed
to be filled in, and it just says in 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 She's a dead end. So it was
not just Susan Orlean. A lot of people in our
(12:26):
industry are not big users of LinkedIn, and it became
almost 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 tofor 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,
(12:48):
long Form is a podcast where each week the hosts
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
Becca Greenfield' reporter, writer, podcaster. I currently work at Bloomberg
(14:32):
and have worked at various other outlets since I 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. I
(14:55):
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 check 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, so I like amps
(15:39):
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 ride rule? I picked a song
that always lefts my spirits And also bonus is a
metaphor for my current tap. I Ain't no Mountain high
(16:07):
enough by Marvin Gay and Tammy Terrell. Okay, so the metaphor,
how is it is a mountain email. The email is
a tall mountain. That's right my stress climate. Well, 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
I didn't get to your mentor. That's great, thank you,
It's perfect. I thought about it now, so after reading
(16:54):
through my 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, Hey, okay,
it's guy scary. Onto the next one. I found it
(17:20):
surprisingly 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 Erin Hayman Niche Jodi, Hi, Rebecca,
my name is Becca. 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
(17:41):
crazy looking for some guidance and how to 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
(18:01):
was out of my hands. I had to 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,
(18:23):
waited more days passed. It felt like an eternity, 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.
(18:46):
I think if you're reaching out to people you admire,
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
(19:06):
some of them gave you real advice or thought through
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
(19:29):
to hear from people and very touched. Yeah, but it
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
(19:51):
you more of their time than you might expect. Dare
I say, ain't now mountain high enough you? Dare? I
had to keep waiting. The holidays came, they went, and
then on January two, I got an email from Manus Samarodi.
(20:12):
Manusha is an accomplished journalist. She used to 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
(20:32):
of her show, and she seemingly does not have a
problem coming up with good ideas. 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
(20:53):
tip of the morning, how to hold a microphone like
a pro something. This is gonna just gonna bug me,
but I really think you should talk like this and
then hand its musume. One minute in and I had
already learned something. Plus Manush 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,
(21:14):
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 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 and amazing are pretty
darn slim. Like what do the IRA glasses like? Your
ideas want to be bad? It's a team sport. Journalism. Yes,
(21:38):
there are people who just like put out amazing things
all 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
(22:00):
brainstorm with. 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
willed by the quality that she'll ask for more help.
One can dream. Then, as we were wrapping up, I
(22:23):
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 host multiple podcasts, I traveled giving
(22:46):
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 just pick up right where we
were because it was I hate this word speaking of
(23:08):
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 to another meeting in the next
month or two felt selfish. She's busy, and I agree
(23:31):
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 being direct about it, and
then she just had this way of like making it
(23:53):
a compliment to you that she wasn't gonna probably see
you for her six months to a year. 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 it as right. Sorry, Well you didn't
give yourself the chance to be rejective because you didn't. Actually, yeah,
I was a little meta about it. I was like,
(24:14):
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 that 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 a lot of time, and then you
didn't push it further because it's just like that email situation.
(24:37):
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 this song right now so I can
ask you another question, like put on you just be like,
I'm just gonna put on my earbuds for like thirty
(24:57):
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 step
four reflect again. 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
(25:19):
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,
(25:43):
was your mentoring experiment 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
that I've been fantasizing about. I was thinking of having
someone I could meet up with regularly to talk about
(26:06):
career stuff. But 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
(26:26):
it was kind of a way of helping you help yourself.
Like she 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
(26:48):
as you might like, she could keep kind of feeding
you 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
(27:11):
having 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 experience is very much like
you should make her mate. Yeah, I'll make her a
Spotify playlist. See. I think you're right. I should not
(27:31):
give 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
(27:51):
me to 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
(28:13):
reached out to. 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, what people say, can
(28:34):
you meet for coffee? They think, oh gosh, no, Like
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
(28:55):
phone talk to me for fifteen minutes. Well, I think
it's more about this asking for this 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
(29:16):
important enough to email, these people like they might have
some kind of imposter syndrome too, just because they happened
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
(29:36):
be included in my email asks, do you have fifteen minutes?
I also here worried about responding to this email. If
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
(29:59):
this thing you out, can you tell me about it?
And they might be more receptive. So I learned that
MINUS 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
(30:19):
people to help me do that. And I guess that
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. Next week on
(30:45):
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 of Works for Me. If you
like the show, please head on over to Apple Podcasts
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(31:08):
can also find all of our episodes and more things
like articles Rewrite It about our detailed experiments, plus very
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one six and we might play your voicemail on the show,
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