The Morning Formation (TMF) Podcast
In life, we all face battles—some are visible, and others are fought within.
The Morning Formation (TMF) Podcast dives into the journeys of those who have not only survived adversity but transformed it into strength, success, and purpose. Hosted by KP Phillips, a combat military veteran, Bronze Star recipient, law enforcement veteran, BJJ Practitioner, and proven leader with years of experience, this podcast explores stories of resilience, mentorship, survivability, and transformation.
From the frontlines of Mosul during Operation Iraqi Freedom to the heart of Southern California, KP knows what it means to adapt and thrive beyond struggle. Whether it’s about bouncing back from personal loss, rebuilding careers after setbacks, or finding new missions in life, TMF Podcast takes you beyond the struggle and into the heart of real-life triumphs.
Tune in, & discover how you, too, can turn obstacles into opportunities, survive the toughest of battles, and emerge a hero of your own story.
The Morning Formation (TMF) Podcast
How Mentorship Enhances Life's Transitions and Opportunities with Dr. Deborah Heiser
Discover the transformative power of mentorship with insights from Dr. Deborah Heiser, founder and CEO of the Mentor Project. Join us as we uncover how mentorship can significantly enhance personal growth and happiness, especially during midlife, by addressing emotional development and civic engagement. Deborah, an applied developmental psychologist, sheds light on the barriers to embracing mentorship, such as imposter syndrome and societal pressures, while highlighting the profound impact mentors have in encouraging a culture of giving back.
Hear compelling stories that illustrate how mentorship can break cycles of limitation, particularly for those from challenging backgrounds, such as military members and individuals from less privileged families. By sharing personal experiences, including how a college professor changed an academic path, we emphasize the qualities that make mentorship effective—support, honesty, and trust. We explore the parallels between mentorship and friendship, urging listeners to pursue diverse mentoring relationships for a richer perspective on life.
This episode offers practical advice on finding the right mentor-mentee fit, stressing the importance of setting goals and understanding the distinction between mentorship and coaching. Deborah shares insights from her book, "The Mentorship Edge," providing guidance for those seeking to become or find effective mentors. Explore how mentorship plays a crucial role in transitional life phases, like moving from military to civilian life, opening up new possibilities and helping individuals discover unrealized goals. Stay engaged and informed as we highlight the significant impact mentorship can have across all stages of life.
Dr. Deborah Heisen's Website: http://www.mentorproject.org/
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Warriors fall in. It's time for formation Folks. Today I'm joined with the founder and CEO and author of the Mentor Project. Deborah Hesser is joining me on today's podcast, and today we're going to talk about something that I really feel like we should underline more than once, maybe twice, maybe three times and it's mentorship maybe twice, maybe three times. In its mentorship, debra has actually been a TEDx speaker, a consultant author and, again, she was the founder of the Mentor Project, where they really suggest folks out there should take a look at. It's a really outstanding opportunity for folks to really get inside the conversation with other professionals out there. That might be where you want to go at some point at time in your life. And, debra, thank you for joining me on the Morning Formation podcast today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
Speaker 1:The honor is all mine. I mean, I was looking at some of your experiences, your education, your history overall when we matched up and I was extremely impressed and I can tell you that I really feel like mentorship is a lost art in today's society, especially with our younger generation, and I truly blame myself, I blame, uh, my generation, for not doing a better job at trying to light the torch, uh, so that they, the uh next group coming up behind us, can actually see the path to do better than what I had done and what we had done. But before we get into that, Debra, I just want to give you an opportunity to tell folks out there that are listening a little bit about you.
Speaker 2:Sure, thank you. I am an applied developmental psychologist. That's a little bit different than what most people think of as a psychologist, a clinical psychologist. A clinical psychologist is looking at pathology and I look at everything that we can expect in our lifespan and that's usually good stuff, you know. Like if you look at development, that's walking and talking and part of that in the middle is mentoring, and I'll get to that in just a second. But for the most part, I'm a researcher, I write, I write for Psychology Today and I look at what we have to look forward to in the second half of life.
Speaker 2:So most of us look at our lives as a physical trajectory where we look at walking and talking and doing all of the things that make us really strong and amazing physically in our early 20s and up to 30. And then we all think of life as having a slow, steady decline in the second half of life, or even more than the second half of life. And I look at the emotional trajectory that we have, which starts the same time at birth and it only goes up. It goes up our entire lives. This is why when you're you know 10, you don't throw yourself on the floor and have a tantrum. We're learning how to deal with things throughout our lives, and in the military especially. You really do learn how to cope with things. You have to it's necessary and so there's a great emotional formation that happens with us as we get older. By the time we're at the end of our lives. If you think of us as a tree that develops over time, we've got all that fruit that's finally ready to come off and be given as knowledge to others.
Speaker 2:So our lifespan trajectory is what I look at. I look at the midlife and how we can look at our emotions in our midlife, and that's really the point where we hit the turning point, where we start to get happier than we ever were and that only increases. So that's a little bit about myself. That's where mentoring comes into place. Mentoring is that midlife thing that happens to us. We're built to want to give back. If we don't do it, we're like Ebenezer Scrooge. You can have everything on paper, you can be a millionaire and have a mansion servants taking care of all your needs, but you will probably be unhappy. It's not until you give back that you start to feel joy, and that's a little bit about what I do and where I come from.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's a lot of folks out there around midlife? You say that's around 40 years old. Do you think?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's folks out there? Because I've noticed this over the years Some folks have more of a thirst or a hunger to do that and I've ran into some folks out there that have more of like a 15 minute. They'll just talk about it but they really won't do anything type of mentality. But what are your thoughts on that overall? What would drive someone more to want to give back versus? This is kind of a five minute like sounds cool conversation but in reality I'm not going to do anything.
Speaker 2:I have some thoughts about this. There were a few things. One is you know, when I'm in my 50s, when I was young, we had civic engagement that we got involved in, where you had to go outside yourself and give back. Like there, I was at the tail end of when they had candy stripers and people who would go in and volunteer in the hospitals and go and volunteer to do other things in the communities. That sort of fell by the wayside and people are less service-minded so we don't know how to engage in that. It's harder to know if you haven't been doing it for a long time. So the emphasis had been for decades listen, go your own route in a sort of a silo. Don't help others, help yourself, get ahead. You need to see how you know we can interact with others and feel comfortable about it. You're not. You're not. If someone else succeeds next to you, it doesn't mean you're a failure. And getting that mentality back into the our own spaces and how we think about helping others and mentoring.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, sort of what you're talking about. There is kind of imposter syndrome. There's folks out there that feel like they're not a success or they're not good enough to mentor or to offer any any kind of mentoring to anybody else. Like, who am I to tell anyone? Uh, you know what is the blueprint, uh, on a professional career or life in general, but have you seen any type of character trait or is there anything specifically character wise that a good mentor would make?
Speaker 2:I'm going to tell you, every single person is a mentor, and they don't know it, so it's everybody's character. It's just when it kicks in, even like Ebenezer Scrooge became a mentor and they don't know it. So it's everybody's character. It's just when it kicks in, even like Ebenezer Scrooge became a mentor.
Speaker 2:He ended up doing it after a long time of not having it kick in. But I'm going to give you some examples because we're all doing it and we never know. I interviewed 45 people before starting the mentor project to see what mentors look like. I interviewed somebody like a four-star general to a grandma. Every tradition that you ever have that you go to a holiday meal and you eat the same food every time for that holiday. It smells like the holiday because of the cooking and whatever else is there. That is mentorship. When I go to make Thanksgiving dinner, I am making it off of a card that my grandmother hand wrote the recipe for everything. If I leave anything out, it doesn't feel like the holiday. That is being passed down generation to generation. My kids are going to get that card. That will get passed down. Religion is passed down for centuries. That's mentorship. It doesn't get reinvented all the time. It's these sort of things that we take for granted in our lives that we think are just happening for no reason. But it's really mentorship.
Speaker 2:I just want to say one other thing that when we talk about imposter syndrome, so many people feel like, if they haven't been exposed to something or that they aren't an expert in it that somehow they are unworthy. I've had so many people that say to me well, I'm not a doctor, a lawyer, I can't mentor. Well, of course you can. You've been doing things all along that people are following, and that can be values. People don't think of values as being mentoring, but yes, that is, it's values, it's our morals, it's our traditions, and one of the biggest things that I've noticed and it's in the book is talking about the military and mentorship there. It's a natural part of it.
Speaker 2:You cannot get through the military without mentorship, and mentorship is hierarchical in many ways that we think about it. So in regular times, you have somebody above you, you want to raise in the ranks or whatever. It's very hierarchical. As soon as some trouble hits, there's a crisis, those walls come down and now there's a lateral mentoring. You are looking to your left and you're looking to your right for other experts and other disciplines that might even be other areas of the military or wherever you can find it to solve the problem that's in the crisis. Once that crisis is solved, those walls go back up and you're doing hierarchical mentoring again.
Speaker 2:The military is one of the few places that engages in multiple facets of mentoring that most people don't talk about. Nobody talks about lateral mentoring. I write about that, I talk about that extensively, and the military is one of the few that does that seamlessly, and so I love I know that people who come out of the military are born mentors. They are ready, they're ripe to mentor. They may seem too young. No, you're not. You're a lateral mentor to somebody else. If somebody says, hey, give me the expertise that you have in what you do, you're going to give it, you're going to help somebody. You're not even going to think about it. That's mentoring. And so that person now holds that info.
Speaker 1:And so what are your thoughts or what is your message to folks out there that think that they're not good enough to mentor because they've messed up? They've screwed up, they made a mistake, whether it was, you know, in the military. They got a UCMJ, which is a uniform code of military justice, punishment. What is your message to those folks out there?
Speaker 2:Go find somebody who hasn't messed up. That's my first thing to say. Find anyone out there in the world who hasn't messed up. You know everyone has messed up. That's my first thing to say. Find anyone out there in the world who hasn't messed up. You know everyone has messed up and that's just part of the journey. You pick yourself up and you go. Of course, you can mentor. You can mentor people and how you got through messing up. You can mentor people and how to avoid messing up. There's a lot that you can do, but truly go out and find any one person. Come back to me and tell me, and I'll give you a load of money If you can find somebody who's never messed up. There's no one who hasn't, so that is not something that keeps anybody from mentoring.
Speaker 1:You know, that's the number one thing that I think I've learned in my professional career is it's not necessarily all about making the right decisions at the right times and being a perfect human being, because that just doesn't happen. It's more about picking yourself back up, brushing yourself back off and getting back on it and going forward and keep moving, keep progressing, keep fighting and not giving up. And you're right, there are a lot of people out there who will count themselves out, but they need to make sure that they find that motivation to keep on going. And for folks out there that you know, I really feel like a lot of folks that join the military either come from mid-income housing or less. They're poor, they come from broken homes, less than ideal situations.
Speaker 1:A lot of folks that joined the military. For folks out there that may not have been mentored growing up and they're trying to figure it out for themselves, have you ever had anyone or experienced anything before where you had someone that was trying to break a cycle, whether it was domestic abuse or it was just poor mentoring? Maybe mom and dad weren't really in the picture? What is your message to folks out there that are in the military? They have a difficult time seeing themselves succeed, and they really want to break that cycle anyone can break that cycle.
Speaker 2:I will tell you that a mentor is the best way to break that cycle. I broke it. My parents didn't go to college, um, and when I got my PhD, my mom said to me is a PhD the same as an EMT? And you know, that's just that no one knew, like it wasn't something that was talked about in my family. Um, so does that mean you can't go do things? No, is it a pipe dream to think that you can, you know, do something that you want to do? No, but get a mentor.
Speaker 2:Because that person, when I was in college, for example, it was a college professor who said to me you know what? You're not doing great in anything right now. And it was because I just it wasn't, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And she said either drop out of school or do your best and get through it. And I was like, okay, I'll do my best, you know, but it took somebody to tell me that and to lay it on the line, and I don't tell this story to people, but honestly, I'm not alone in that. I'm sure that people have been somewhere where they're like kind of muddling along in something and it's because they don't have a path that's clear ahead of them. I didn't know what I'd ever want to do with stuff because there was nobody ahead of me in my family that did stuff like that, so I had to look outside of my family for mentorship. And that college professor, peggy DeCook, really turned things around for me, because I looked at my future trajectory as something I didn't even know existed before that moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was kind of a personal question I come from.
Speaker 1:My father was pretty much the only one that was around when I was growing up for the most part, and everyone outside of that was kind of in and out of my life. My siblings aren't doing too well, and so now I talk to my niece and the one thing I keep telling her is you need to break that cycle, find a mentor, put yourself in position to win Like, unfortunately, you weren't given the template on success. You don't know what a good personal relationship looks like. You're never challenged to do better. But inherently she has something inside of her that makes her want to do better, and that's my consistent advice to her is to find a mentor to help her break that cycle, and I'm one of her mentors, but she needs to find someone that is somewhere where she wants to be eventually. I guess and that was sort of a personal question on my end and it kind of leads me to this next question of folks need to really understand what is good mentoring and what isn't good mentoring.
Speaker 2:So I'm going to give you the five things that make a mentor, and anybody can be a good mentor. It's like saying what's a good friend? Is a good friend somebody who talks behind your back? No, is a good friend somebody who listens? Yes, if we think of friend, we can say what a good friend is or isn't. Without a doubt, it's in our minds.
Speaker 2:So think of mentorship as this there has to be somebody who's generative. That's the mentor. Starting with that right, the person has to want to give away a bit of their knowledge to someone else and expect that that person wants to receive that knowledge. So if I talk about generativity, people think that's being generous sometimes, but it's not. Generosity is you go to the ice cream store, somebody gives you an extra scoop of ice cream and you say thank you, you eat it and it's gone. Generativity is you're giving a little bit of your knowledge to somebody that lives on in them forever. It's a value, it's a, it's some kind of a skill, it's a talent, it's whatever it is that you have an in and giving them and it lives in them. So, in terms of being a good mentor, you have to want to come from that point. You're not expecting to get anything from anybody else. You're not getting paid, you're not getting an award, you're not getting a certificate or reward for this. You are doing it because you want to be generative. The mentee, in that case, to be a good mentee, has to be somebody who says I want it, I want this information that somebody is giving to me. Otherwise, it's like somebody is giving you a gift and you're like no, no, no, thanks, I've got enough gifts. That makes the person feel terrible. That tried to give it to you, right, and you know you're not expanding that. It's falling right on you and ending. The next thing you need is intrinsic motivation, and what that means is that you're motivated to do it without, like I mentioned before, an award or reward or anything like that. So again, it's not pay, it's nothing like that.
Speaker 2:I ask my students when I teach how many of you would work in a soup kitchen for free giving out food and beverages to people who are hungry and thirsty? And they all raise their hand. I say how many of you would go to Starbucks instead and go donate your time to give food and beverages to people who are thirsty and hungry? And they all say no, I wouldn't. That's crazy. That's intrinsic versus extrinsic. They have both very different feelings. So if you go to your job and you're getting paid you're not going to do that for free you feel like a sucker. But if you go and you donate and give something to somebody else, from your heart, from you know, intrinsically, you feel great about yourself.
Speaker 2:So the next thing is that you need to have a meaningful connection self. So the next thing is that you need to have a meaningful connection. If I don't think very highly of you, I'm looking at you as somebody who's just going to give me information. This is what most people say. They say go find a mentor that's a nameless, faceless individual. That is not a meaningful connection. If you're just looking to go get something from somebody, you have to like the person. You have to actually care about them and not just the mentor caring about the mentee going forward, because mentors always feel that. But a mentee has to feel like they are doing something with their knowledge or information that the mentor wants them to do. They have to think of that mentor and what the goal is for that mentor and what they're are they carrying that goal forward?
Speaker 2:Another thing is trust. How many times do you not trust somebody that is not a mentor? Then how often do you not trust a mentee? Are they going to steal your idea? You know? Are they going to?
Speaker 2:You know, if you're in some kind of a tech industry, you have to trust each other and this is why people think of hierarchical mentoring as having problems with it. Because if you don't trust being able to say to your boss or someone above you that you don't know how to do something, expressing a vulnerability, you think they're going to say I'm never going to promote them if they don't know how to do this, that trust is a barrier to mentorship. And in that case is where I say go to lateral mentoring somebody who's not your boss and get it that way. And then, finally, there has to be a goal. If somebody is just shooting a breeze with somebody, that's not mentoring. There has to be a goal with it and that goal can change. You can be mentored by somebody for decades, but and that goal will change with time.
Speaker 2:But that's what makes a good mentor and a good mentee. And I put them together the way I did, because if you separate it, people will say I'll do a few of these things and you might not have a matchup with the mentor and the mentee and you could be the best mentor out there, but if you have a crummy mentee or a mentee who's not engaged, it's not going to work. And the other thing that I like to say about being a good mentor or mentee is it's not always going to work, just like friends. Have you ever gone and met somebody and you're like not my person. They could be a fine person, they're just not somebody that you. You don't get their humor or there's just something that they that isn't interesting about them.
Speaker 2:That's the same thing that happens with mentorship and we put so much pressure on it and think it's a failure if it doesn't work out. No, it's like meeting somebody and you're like if I see him, I'll say hi. That's the same with mentorship. You should not be putting pressure on it and you shouldn't be thinking you should not be putting pressure on it and you shouldn't be thinking you should just have one mentor. You should have a million mentors. You should have as many as you can have.
Speaker 1:So sorry that was a long answer for that question, but very, very developed answer no, and I certainly agree with with a lot of what you said. Mentoring is a two way street. I mean it's you have to be and I've told people this before in order for me to mentor, you have to be a good mentee, um, it's not just a one-way street where I'm just feeding you and you're just taking it. Um, it's really a conversation. You do have to have a personality match to some extent. Um. Do you have any idea why it seems like most of the time, family members um, are not good mentors? Like, why is it that a lot of times, if something comes out of a family member's mouth and another person that's outside of the family says the same thing, it sounds better?
Speaker 2:Oh, please. I mean, I'm a parent, you know my, that's how it is. That's why I don't include parents as mentors, because you know you're expected to be doing that with your kids. You're really not expected. That's an expectation, right. But I do include grandparents and aunts and uncles and those sorts. There has to be a degree of separation, because when you are trying to get through the basics of life, you know a child or a parent that gets blurry and fuzzy what's mentorship and what's parenting, and so that can be removed if you go one degree away. So I will never say, hey, can there be mentorship within that family? You know immediate family parents and siblings, yes, but there's a whole lot of other stuff going on, good and bad, and families. That makes it so that mentorship is a little tricky and diluted and muddy in that respect.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no doubt about that. And in order for folks out there to seek mentorship, especially in their young professional careers, what's the best way to get them to either realize the importance of it or to simply come to the table to seek it?
Speaker 2:The first thing I suggest to people is go do something outside of yourself for somebody else, because then you can understand the position of the mentor. So if you are donating your time to you know, volunteer at a soup kitchen, midnight run maybe, and do it regularly like not once you're not going to get it from that, but go do something for somebody else and and don't do it when anybody knows you're doing it. Just go do it and then you're going to understand why a mentor wants to help you, because it feels unbelievably good to help somebody. So if somebody's young, I try to get them to see how important and good it feels to go help somebody out in some way, whatever that is, whatever that civic engagement is, to get involved in that. That's where I've seen the disconnect happen. You know is not being civically engaged, so people don't understand why a mentor would ever want to give their time. So if you are young, first start with your friends that you already trust them and like them and ask them. You know how would you solve this? How do you do this?
Speaker 2:Most of our most explosive impact that came from all of our big tech. You know explosive things that have happened were two friends. So I'm going to tell you an example of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Neither of them did anything alone. They did it with each other and they were friends. They didn't seek originally advice from somebody above them. They sought it laterally from each other and then they moved up. So if you're seeking a mentor, go to the person you feel most comfortable with and that's likely somebody who's lateral to you and then you can use those ideas to find the person above you that you say. That's somebody I'd like to reach out to, and it's easy enough. It doesn't have to be somebody you know. People respond to emails. They respond to social media requests. They are people in your schools, they're people in the workplace that aren't in your division or your department. They can be anybody anywhere. The world is a nice small place in that way that you can reach out to people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really, really, really great advice. Um, and for folks out there that are mentors and have a tendency to get frustrated mainly because, uh, their advice is not, I guess what it is is, I've tried to mentor folks before and I'm trying to think about how to phrase this question, but I've tried to mentor folks before and have become very frustrated, like overall, with trying to get this person to consider doing something else. And then instead they do. They only take certain parts of the advice they don't. They like to pick and choose what they like and what they don't like. And me as a mentor, like I've been very frustrated before with that, with that overall concept, trying to convince them and then later down the road finding out that, yeah, I probably should have done it that way. Instead, what do you, what do you suggest? How do we cope with that, like as mentors, to overcome that frustration?
Speaker 2:You know that's a tricky one. I think that there's a lot of levels to that. The first thing I would say is that yes, there's a goal that we're working on. Was that goal established first? Was there a goal or was it an open ended thing? I'm going to give you this information and hope you do what you need to do with it. Like if I'm going to go ask somebody for help, I'm going to say, hey, I'm looking to solve this problem. I may not know how to get there. Do you know any route that I can get there? And then there's a goal that's stated there. That's one thing that may not have been stated.
Speaker 2:Maybe it was and somebody is only taking a little bit. Are they making progress? Are they still moving in the right direction? If they are, then you're doing your job. You know we don't have control over how quickly people absorb our information that we're giving and utilize it. We have to just make sure you're still going in the right direction. Are we working towards that goal that we had?
Speaker 2:Number two is it might be a bad fit. Maybe that person isn't ready. Two is it might be a bad fit. Maybe that person isn't ready. Maybe you're the person that's going to be good for them in six months, a year or maybe never. That's hard for mentors to see Sometimes. That's why I tell mentors and mentees to have many mentors and mentees, because it feels like all your eggs are in one basket. If you have only one and you, I bet that everyone who's listening and that you can think of a lot of different people who've helped you along the way. Imagine if you only had one. Your eyes get open to so many things when you have multiple mentors and mentees so that if one person has taken a little bit longer, you can feel really good about, maybe somebody else is moving in. One person is taken a little bit longer you can feel really good about. Maybe somebody else is moving in a little quicker, at a little bit of a quicker pace with something it makes. It takes that pressure off that there should never be when you're mentoring.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that that totally makes sense. I mean, getting different perspectives from different people can only amplify your overall. I guess mental lateral movement into thinking bigger and thinking outside the box To be a good mentor, in your opinion. Do you think that you need to be a little bit confrontational?
Speaker 2:Some people are confrontational and some people are not. I think it has to be your personality style and that should be matching up with your mentee. So in certain situations look, if you're in the military and you're not confrontational people have to all get to the same place. You know, at a certain time point you're going to need to be that way and there are certain areas that really resonate with that. That could be sports, that could be all kinds of different areas, but you have to know what's going to work with you and your mentee. If you're confrontational with a friendship and a friend doesn't like that, it's not going to be a really close friendship. You have to match it up, just like you would with friendship. Friendship and mentorship are not the same thing, but I like to talk about them similarly because everyone knows how to go make a friend and what feels good in a friendship and what doesn't, and when you feel that feeling, that's the same feeling you get with a good mentorship relationship.
Speaker 1:No, that makes a lot of sense and I've actually described people like that before. Well, I think that's a great guy, I think that's a lot of sense, and I've I've actually described people like that before. Well, I think that's a great guy, I think that's a great gal, but at the end of the day, like, they're just something, yeah, that I don't personally really like all right and it's just. It's not that they're bad, it's just something that that I don't personally whatever, like my own value system or my own beliefs don't match up with that. And overall, you talked about good fit. Maybe, if you're mentoring or mentee or whatever, whichever side of the road you're on, how do you know? Like, how do you know if you are a good fit? Is there like a test you could take or a questionnaire you could take, or is it just something that you inherently feel when you're conversating with somebody, sort of like you know, you and I, or whenever I'm talking to a guest? I guess is that how it goes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's exactly like that. You don't give your friend a questionnaire and say, let's see how good our fit is, and we don't do that with mentorship. A lot of places try to do that. They try to quantify mentorship, and if somebody tried to quantify my friendships it would be a disaster. You know, I like who I like, because there's some kind of chemistry there. And that's the same with mentorship. So you could look at something and on paper, a relationship would look great. This is why, if you go through a dating app, do you look at the dating app and the first person that comes up you go oh, we were matched, we're a fit, and if it doesn't work out, it's a failure. No, that's not how life works. So there's no tests that you can take, there's no questionnaire, it fits. It's like putting on a shoe. If you wear a size eight and you put on a size six, it's going to feel uncomfortable. If you put on a size 12, it'll feel uncomfortable. You really need the right fit.
Speaker 1:Right, that totally makes sense. I wish life came with an instruction manual. It'd be so much easier, right for everybody just to read and follow the instructions. But it doesn't quite work that way. And there's one more thing I wanted to ask too, because I've kind of talked about this before with other people, but for folks out there who especially like parents and things like that, if they haven't gone to college, do you think that there are times where certain people need to be very careful about offering advice or mentoring to folks, because they might be giving the same blueprint to the next generation and the blueprint may not be a blueprint of higher achievement be a blueprint of higher achievement.
Speaker 2:No, I, I, some of our mentors don't have college degrees and they've done world changing things and so I don't look. This is me personally. I do not look at a degree as making a person a higher achieving person. I couldn't have done what I do without you have to have a PhD to do what I do. I had to go that far, whether I wanted to or not. If I wanted to do this, I had to do it. But there's a million things people do that don't require a college degree and you can be super successful and achieve great things. So I caution against that. Everyone can be a mentor, no-transcript, and a degree may not be the answer to it. So am I saying don't go get a degree? I'm saying get a goal. That's what I'm saying Get a goal.
Speaker 1:You know, and I made that, I made that mistake. You're talking to someone right now. I have two graduate degrees and an undergraduate degree and I don't use any of my degrees. I mean I don't want to say I don't use them. I'm sure it's helped me along the way, but like a ship in the night, I kind of got a. I got a degree in MBA, in project management, msa, in organizational leadership, and then my undergrad is in criminal justice. So it's one of those things where I just thought that getting degrees was like going to make me successful. And in reality I know a lot of folks out there that run businesses that don't have degrees, that didn't get higher education. You know, and that's and that's.
Speaker 1:I'm glad that you mentioned that, because I tell folks that all the time I'm like you're looking at someone right now who thought that that was the measurement of success and in reality it's not. So I really try to impress upon people to do exactly what you just said. Don't look at that as something. Look at a goal. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do someday? Where do you want to be in life? But, debra, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about the mentorship edge, which is, which is your book, who, who is it for and who? Who should be the folks out there that buying it and reading it?
Speaker 2:Thank you. You know the Mentorship Edge was written. It was something that I felt compelled to write because I've been seeing mentorship used in the wrong ways. People are trying to quantify it or make a checkbox for it and it's not working in a lot of places. So people are thinking mentorship is something that you can fail at or that it can only be done in certain situations. So the mentorship edge is for anybody and everybody. It really is showing how we're built to mentor and it's from a mentor perspective. In many ways, we are built to want to do this and I give examples of people who have mentored successfully and been in mentoring situations. I also show what it's not. It's not coaching.
Speaker 2:People who are coaches often say well, I'm a mentor to, you're paid, you're not sorry, that's how it is. There are certain things that it's not, but you can use mentorship in conjunction with all of these different things. So it's what it is, what it isn't. It's a lot of stories from you know people like who've had their lives saved from mentorship. And it talks about lateral mentoring, not just hierarchical mentoring. So if you want to have better connections with people in work and in personal life, this is for you. If you want to mentor, this is for you. If you want to have a mentor, this is for you. It comes from looking at the mentor project and how things worked.
Speaker 2:We were told I was told in the very beginning, when we only had 10 people who you know, a small core of us who just wanted to give back locally to schools that no one who's really successful will ever have the time or want to give back. We went from 10 to 60 to 80 to 100. We have a waiting list now and the top people in the world ask to become mentors because they want to give back. And so we've been able to understand that people who are really high level often feel the same disconnect from others. So an example is Bill Cheswick.
Speaker 2:He was a guy who said I'm leaving Bell Labs, he's a famous inventor and he was moving to a farm and retiring. And he said I can't go to a park and say, hey, kid, do you want to learn quantum mechanics? You know he he didn't. There was a disconnect. So this book is here to show how you can make the connections in both directions. How people doesn't matter how successful you are. You want to give back. You're driven to. So if you're feeling like I am, I'm not worthy of asking a question. This book shows why you are, because people want to feel useful, they want to feel relevant, they want to feel productive, they want to feel helpful. Um, the same way we all feel when we give back. So that's what the book is for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, when I, when I read your, your bio and your background and everything, I thought, wow, this is the perfect person for my podcast, cause I really want to focus on adapt, overcoming and seeing further than the end of your, your own neighborhood, and I really feel like mentoring is a lost art in today's society and I really, if you'd asked me, like you know, 20 years ago, where we would be as a society, I thought by now we would have mastered this whole mentoring thing and we would understand how to better serve each other by passing the torch onto the next generation and helping them make better decisions. And here we are still trying to figure it out.
Speaker 2:And with that I just wanted to ask you, in your opinion, why do we still struggle business-wise and even military-wise with before they exit? Because in any transition that we make, if you get married you know there's the whole. It can be anything you want married, but that you know there's this whole transition that happens, that makes it stressful, that makes it feel like there's some stress involved. Retirement is like that too, and when you're transitioning from the military to any civilian role, I really, truly believe that all of the opportunities that are available that somebody may not know they may not even know that the questions to ask or what is available, that should be made available to them. They should have as many mentors as possible, not just one, but people who are gonna open their eyes to every single possibility that's out there and how they can get to the goal that they may not even know that they have set for themselves yet. So that's really what I think is so important for the military, and it can be done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think sometimes people tend to be a little hardheaded about that stuff. I know, when I transitioned out of the military, I kind of palmed a lot of resources in the face and I was like I got this get out of my way. Like I, I know how to do a resume, I know, like I, I know how to do a resume, I know how to interview, I know how to do all these things and really I didn't know any. I didn't know Jack, I knew nothing. So looking back at myself back then, uh, I could have utilized those extra resources and those extra voices and those extra conversations. Um so, this is fantastic. I have so many more questions for you, but I understand that I shouldn't extend podcasts very long, but I'd love to have you back on the show again to talk more about mentoring and to dig deeper into this. But before I finish off today's show, is there anything that you wanted to mention or anything that I might have missed during our conversation today?
Speaker 2:No, the only thing I want to tell everybody is to look to your left and look to your right. You're likely looking at a mentor or a mentee, and you don't have to only be looking to get help for yourself. If you see somebody that you have an expertise that they may benefit from, you become their mentor. Your life will be much better if you have a really strong network around you. As you lift up others, you're lifting yourself up too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you have those good intentions to help out the pave the path for the next generation or for folks that you truly care about, or even just a group of folks, whether it's military folks, service members, military spouses I definitely highly would recommend to get in touch and contact Dr Deborah Heiser and check out the Mentorship Edge, which is her book. I know is it available on Amazon.
Speaker 1:Everywhere you want to buy a book, and in libraries Everything's available on Amazon now so want to buy a book, and in libraries, everything's available on Amazon now. So, yeah, I'll definitely make sure that I put the link down in the show notes for folks to click on if they want to order your book, and then also to any of your social media availabilities out there. So I really appreciate you for giving me the opportunity to pick your brain today. I know you have a huge, huge, vast background. I really appreciate you for giving me the opportunity to pick your brain today. I know you have a huge, huge, vast background and I was extremely impressed and I'm honored to have talked to you and have this conversation.
Speaker 2:I'm honored to be on this show, and, boy, I learned a lot from you today, and it's a privilege being here, thank you.
Speaker 1:And folks, that's it for today. I hope I can have Debra back on the show at some point in time. It's been a very insightful conversation, as always. Folks, I want you to stay tuned, stay focused and stay motivated. Warriors fall out.