MENTORING - “OVERCOMERS ANONYMOUS MENTORING”©
“The most influential people in the world never started out that way! All had or have Mentors! Most Mentors are not well known. Many remain Anonymous.”
John R Fergusson
Personal Mentor, Coach and Business Consultant
Mentoring:
“Ignorance” is not a bad word! To “ignore the obvious” at your detriment is bad!
Knowledge leaves more people in a state of ignorance than ignorance itself will, as knowledge incurred by people carries the risk of itself becoming the enduring cause of why most stop learning. It is a natural human phenomenon! Fight or flight then becomes the natural response or reaction to events caused by either our limited knowledge or complete ignorance.
There is only one thing worse than not knowing and that is thinking you know! ‘Thinking you know’ has killed more businesses, revenue, income, and people’s dreams, than knowing nothing at all.
Consider the following:
1. Those who know they know little will wisely pay to learn much.2. The unknown costs of your ignorance may never be known – but – the overall costs of your knowledge and what you’ve spent on it re time, effort and money are already determining both your current and future revenue and profit for those of you in business – not to mention your personal development.
3. The price of “not knowing what you are doing” or “planning to do” usually consumes capital and retards growth.
4. Knowledge is a more frightening trap to be ensnared with than ignorance.
5. Learn why knowledge keeps most people ignorant in areas they have never dreamed of – especially specialist and expert knowledge.
6. Your ignorance is not the problem – it is your knowledge quotient i.e. lack of complete, or wrong knowledge.
7. People are imprisoned by their own knowledge, and many by the knowledge of others, far more than they ever will be by their own ignorance.
8. Knowledge of what you think are minor faults and habits, easily become the major prisons from which most will never be free.
9. People are self-imprisoned by their own knowledge confined minds, and not their ignorance – no one can be imprisoned by thoughts that aren’t there.
10. Learning by your mistakes costs heaps more than paying for help to do it right the first time.
When is it the “Wrong Time” for you to engage a Mentor, a Coach or a Consultant for yourself and your business? Why humans wait until a disaster happens, or until after the horse has bolted, is indicative of human nature! But that is precisely the wrong time as you must engage in help beforehand if you wish to avoid disaster or keep your horse (business) safe, contained and healthy.
Here is your check-list of engagement or not:
· When you think it costs too much and you believe you know most of what you think you will need for your business or your profession, or yourself.
· When you think you can’t afford a mentor because you can hardly afford to be in or buy a “Business” in the first place.
· “Gosh! It’s only a small business for goodness sakes – it can’t really be that hard!” – is your attitude and mindset.
· After you’ve realised that you really don’t know why or what you’re doing in business after-all – especially when you are not making enough money to pay yourself.
· After you’ve financially crashed or gone bankrupt.
· After you’ve lost or used all your capital (money).
· After you find out you’ve hired the wrong people.
· After you realise you are absolutely in the wrong location bound to a long lease.
· After you realise it is entirely in the wrong position in the wrong location but it seemed like a good idea at the time and it saved you rent money – but where are the people.
· After you begin to hate what you’ve bought or are doing.
· After you find out you’ve bought yourself “A Nightmare” instead of “The Dream”.
· After you banked on the government tax-cut and you still can’t afford your own haircut.
· When you start chewing off your fingernails instead of cutting them or getting a manicure.
· When you are running around in circles that are getting smaller and smaller so now the only toes you tread on are your own – ‘thank God’ say all the others who once knew you or worked for you not so long ago, who no longer wish to be part of your ‘successful’ failure and that’s not counting the ones you fired because of your own incompetence (not knowing what to do or what’s really going on).
· After you end up in Court over issues you never dreamed could appear or ensnare you.
Don’t give up and wait for the Undertaker!
Get up and call the Overcomers who’ve been there, done that, read the books, viewed the videos, seen the movies, watched the plays, sung through the musicals, did all the expo’s, organised the conventions, agonised thru the conferences, orchestrated the time-wasting seminars, wrote the boring articles, cooked the books to sell the businesses, ran in the charity marathons to punish themselves for having so much, did the CEO and Executive Sleep-Out-Rough-Night every year so they wouldn’t forget the homeless who got to sleep in a shelter once or twice a year, sent their funds off-shore for a holiday minus the tagalongs (taxman), did time in the Bahamas, in London, in the Cayman Islands, the Cook Islands, the Seychelles and other havens, not to mention where they are now – but they do take authorised visitors! And they got there by knowledge in part (not knowing enough) and not by ignorance! You can’t claim ignorance about what you know you don’t know!
Ignorance is not an excuse! It is a state of being! No one knows what they themselves don’t know! How could they? If they knew they would no longer be ignorant. But knowing something does not mean they know enough to remove the lack of knowing i.e. the deficit of knowledge. This is why mentoring is so very important – it helps take care of and fill the very deficits your in part knowledge leaves you with, helping you connect all the necessary dots in your whole being – not just one or two aspects of it.
There is never a “good time” or “right time” to be mentored; there is only a “wrong time” and that is seasonal and subjective, often discriminatory and related usually to an event or a series of events you have allowed or caused! Remember, you have been given a “lifetime”!
From the day you are born you are being mentored by someone or something near you, in front of you or around you. Hopefully it is first your parents and carers, who have your best interests at heart for your growth and development as a human being.
Mentoring involves the whole person.
It cannot be in fragments by singling out isolated or obscure need without creating great imbalances. Coaching deals with specific needs, or particular wants, systems, modes of practice or getting down certain purposes for achievement of goals. But that is not mentoring.
Mentoring is absorption, a transfer of adaptive energy and thought processes, of establishing the pathway toward the fullness of your own personal identity and destiny, your loves, your likes, your gifts, your faults, your talents, your insanities, your needs and wants, your passion and calling. It produces an amalgam of true coefficient interconnectivity through another (your mentor) and of others, causing active, expansive richness of one’s total being.
Mentoring is building a default character on foundations of wisdom, experience, true nature and embedded personal intrinsic wealth, with unique and many extraordinarily gifted attributes that often need to be dug out, developing them in your own time, within your own space, and by your own distinctive ways!
Great Reward
True mentoring is a beautiful life-giving thing and so rewarding. Yes, even for those who embrace it unknowingly, as many of us have done and still do! But the reward is greatest when one knowingly attaches one’s self to another who can be totally objective without prejudice, that has your best interest at heart for your life and your love of living and working – doing all that you love to do...... in your love of being all you are meant to be......!
Whether you are reaching for the glorious stars or searching for a particular grain of sand on shore within the eyelid of your teary starry eyes, waves of joy wash over you each time you discover and embrace the so distant and so near via your mentor! Eyes now shining in the reflection of the light you now see, with no tears wasted, as a mentor to others you at this moment also plan to be.
Think of your staff, your family, your clients, those customers who take up so much of your time when they tell you their stories they believe is part of their fare. You know they’ve no mentor to help them become, a person with value to capture your attention and make working life with them much more fun! Til all are enriched by the exchange taking place and they go away happy just for seeing your face, full of laughter and joy as together you screamed at the stories they bring you, claiming all to be true though that hardly seems fair!
How they love your profession and now book in their loved ones and send you their friends – Wow, your business is thriving and so they help carry your business these new business friends, and keep bringing others, all because you’re the mentor’s apprentice – a true “Overcomers Anonymous Mentor” staying professional, while becoming their mentoring friend.
Learning and knowing how to become mutually wealthy and influence others for each ones better life journeys end, is the only way to ensure prosperity and longevity, always meeting the demands of the future that all that hi-tech and all that life in general may throw at you daily with your family and friends, your employees, your colleagues, your new business friends and admiring associates! Mmm! Life’s not just ‘Good’ – it’s ‘Great’!
John R Fergusson
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Overcomers Anonymous Mentoring
For info or bookings: info@bacup.com.au
Office Ph: 04 1265 4621