Origin Story
Have you wondered where to find guidance and direction beyond just being handed a to-do list?
Have you ever felt rudderless, needing inspiration and meaningful goals to achieve?
Have you felt betrayed or screwed over at work, to forces you couldn’t control or didn’t understand?
Do you feel different from those you work with, struggling to fit in or navigate the challenges that seem to be easy for those around you?
In short, do you need a mentor?
These are real questions, faced at some time by just about everybody at different points in their careers.
Me? My answer is yes, yes, yes, and yes, with a timeline going from my early 20s to my 40s.
My first job, in retail management.
My second job, in tech.
And after that, my jobs in education.
I went through roughly the first twenty or so years of my career(s) without a mentor and only occasional good leadership to guide me. I admit that I was naïve. If someone was trying to help me, I didn’t know it. But I did know that most people were thinking about themselves, not me.
I’m thinking about you, and I’ll tell you why.
In my 40s, I had just lost my job as a marketing professor. To take this job, I uprooted my family and moved 250 miles away. And that was a few years after uprooting them to go to grad school. My career was failing.
Somehow, I landed an interview at another university. The guy who interviewed me walked in and told me, within seconds of meeting me, that I had taken “a lot of bad advice.”
The truth was, I didn’t take bad advice… I didn’t take any advice because I don’t think I received any. And if I did, I probably wouldn’t have recognized it anyway.
Fast forward: I got the job. Here’s where it gets good.
The guy who hired me and another new colleague came to my office to lunch to talk about my work and my career. They worked with me and guided me and taught me how to lead my own career.
Keep in mind that pulling me out of the ditch wasn’t in their job descriptions.
But that’s exactly what they did. They gave me a mentoring intervention. They taught me how to do my job and to enjoy my work, and to believe in my ideas.
It worked.
These guys, who brought me in only as an emergency replacement teacher, who barely knew me… picked me up off the ground and showed me what I needed to do, what I was capable of achieving.
A mentoring intervention.
A Mentorvention.
They gave me the help that I needed. The help I didn’t know I needed, and didn’t know how to ask for.
That was the most important year of my career.
I am eternally grateful to them and now it’s time for me to pay it forward.
I want to help you take control of your career. To find the help that you need. To find a mentor.
This is why I offer Mentorvention to you.
