The Element (25 page)

The second role of a mentor is
encouragement.
Mentors lead us to believe that we can achieve something that seemed improbable or impossible to us before we met them. They don’t allow us to succumb to self-doubt for too long, or the notion that our dreams are too large for us. They stand by to remind us of the skills we already possess and what we can achieve if we continue to work hard.

When Jackie Robinson came to play major-league baseball in Brooklyn for the Dodgers, he experienced levels of abuse and hardship worthy of Greek tragedy from those who believed a black man shouldn’t be allowed to play in a white man’s league. Robinson bore up under most of this, but at one point, things got so bad that he could barely play the game. The taunts and threats rattled his concentration so badly that he faltered at the plate and in the field. After a particularly bad moment, Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger shortstop, called a time-out, walked over to Robinson, and offered him encouragement, telling him he was a great ballplayer destined for the Hall of Fame. Years later, during Robinson’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony, he spoke about that moment. “He saved my life and my career that day,” Robinson said from the podium at Cooperstown. “I had lost my confidence, and Pee Wee picked me up with his words of encouragement. He gave me hope when all hope was gone.”

The third role of a mentor is
facilitating.
Mentors can help lead us toward our Element by offering us advice and techniques, paving the way for us, and even allowing us to falter a bit while standing by to help us recover and learn from our mistakes. These mentors might even be our contemporaries, as was the case with Paul McCartney.

“I remember one weekend John and I took the bus across town to see someone who knew how to play B7 on the guitar,” Paul told me. “The three basic chords you needed to know were E, A, and B7. We didn’t know how to do B7 and this other kid did. So we got the bus to see him, learned the chord, and came back again. So then we could play it too. But basically, mates would show you how to do a particular riff. I remember one night watching a TV show called
Oh Boy!
Cliff Richard and the Shadows were on, playing ‘Move It.’ It had a great riff. I loved it but didn’t know how to play it. Then I worked it out and ran over to John’s house saying, ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got it.’ That was our only education experience—showing each other how to do things.

“To start with, we were just copying and imitating everyone. I was Little Richard and Elvis. John was Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. I was Phil from the Everly Brothers and John was Don. We just imitated other people and taught each other. This was a big point for us when we were planning the policies at LIPA—the fact that it’s important for students to rub up against people who have actually done or are doing the thing that the students are learning. They don’t really need to tell you much, just show you what they do.”

The fourth role of a mentor is
stretching.
Effective mentors push us past what we see as our limits. Much as they don’t allow us to succumb to self-doubt, they also prevent us from doing less with our lives than we can. A true mentor reminds us that our goal should never be to be “average” at our pursuits.

James Earl Jones is known as a superlative actor and one of the great “voices” in contemporary media. Yet most of us never would have heard that voice had it not been for a mentor. One can only imagine what Darth Vader might sound like if Donald Crouch hadn’t entered Jones’s life.

As a child, Jones suffered from crippling self-consciousness, largely because he stuttered and found it very difficult to speak in front of people. When he got to high school, he found himself in an English class taught by Crouch, a former college professor who had worked with Robert Frost. Crouch discovered that Jones wrote poetry, a fact that Jones kept to himself for fear of ridicule from the other boys in school. “He questioned me about why, if I loved words so much, couldn’t I say them out loud?” Jones says in the book
The Person Who Changed My Life: Prominent Americans Recall Their Mentors
.

“One day I showed him a poem I had written, and he responded to it by saying that it was too good to be my own work, that I must have copied it from someone. To prove that I hadn’t plagiarized it, he wanted me to recite the poem, by heart, in front of the entire class. I did as he asked, got through it without stuttering, and from then on I had to write more and speak more. This had a tremendous effect on me, and my confidence grew as I learned to express myself comfortably out loud.

“On the last day of school we had our final class outside on the lawn, and Professor Crouch presented me with a gift—a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Self-Reliance
. This was invaluable to me because it summed up what he had taught me—self-reliance. His influence on me was so basic that it extended to all areas of my life. He is the reason I became an actor.”

Mentors serve an invaluable role in helping people get to the Element. It might be overstating things to suggest that the only way to reach the Element is with the help of a mentor, but it is only a mild overstatement. We all encounter multiple roadblocks and constraints on the journey toward finding what we feel we were meant to do. Without a knowledgeable guide to aid us in identifying our passions, to encourage our interests, to smooth our paths, and to push us to make the most of our capacities, the journey is considerably harder.

Mentorship is of course a two-way street. As important as it is to have a mentor in your life, it is equally important to fulfill these roles for other people. It is even possible that you’ll find that your own real Element is as a mentor to other people.

Anthony Robbins is one of the world’s most successful personal coaches and mentors, often credited with laying the foundations for the personal coaching profession. This sector is growing exponentially around the world and has become a multimilliondollar industry. All of this speaks eloquently to the appetite for mentoring and coaching and to the profound roles these can fulfill in many of our lives. More and more people are discovering that being a mentor, for them, is being in the Element.

This happened for David Neils. His own mentor was Mr. Clawson, a neighbor who came up with multiple successful inventions. When Neils was a child, he would go to visit the neighbor while he worked. Instead of chasing the kid away, Clawson asked for Neils’s advice and criticism about his work. This interaction charged Neils with a sense of self-worth and an understanding that his opinions mattered. As an adult, Neils founded the International Telementor Program, an organization that facilitates mentoring by electronic means between professionals and students. Since 1995, the program has helped more than 15,000 students around the world receive professional guidance. David Neils literally made mentoring his life’s work.

I’m sure that several of the mentors mentioned here, including many of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters, became heroes to those they mentored. We all have personal heroes—a parent, a teacher, a coach, even a schoolmate or colleague—whose actions we idolize. In addition, we all have heroes we’ve never met who stir our imaginations with their deeds. We consider Lance Armstrong a hero for the way he overcame a life-threatening illness to dominate a physically grueling sport, and Nelson Mandela one for his critical role in ending apartheid in South Africa. In addition, we forever associate people with heroic acts—Rosa Parks’s triumphant stand against bigotry, Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon.

These people inspire us and lead us to marvel at the wonders of human potential. They open our eyes to new possibilities and fire our aspirations. They might even drive us to follow their examples in our lives, moving us to dedicate ourselves to public service, exploration, breaking barriers, or lessening injustice. In this way, these heroes perform a function similar to mentors.

Yet mentors do something more than heroes in our search for the Element. Heroes may be remote from us and inaccessible. They may live in another world. They may be dead. If we meet them, we may be too awestruck to engage properly with them. Heroes may not be good mentors to us. They may be competitive or refuse to have anything to do with us. Mentors are different. They take a unique and personal place in our lives. Mentors open doors for us and get involved directly in our journeys. They show us the next steps and encourage us to take them.

CHAPTER NINE

Is It Too Late?

SUSAN JEFFERS is the author of
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway®
and many other best-selling books. She didn’t begin her writing career until she was well into her forties. How she did it is a remarkable story.

As a child, Susan loved to read. The best time of the day for her was when she could curl up with a book in the quiet of her room. “I was always curious, and my father was a great one for explaining things. Sometimes he would go into so much detail my eyes would roll back. I remember hearing something on the radio once that I didn’t understand. The word was
circumcision.
True to form, he didn’t give me a short explanation! He was like a teacher. I think he missed his calling. He’d always wanted a boy, and I was treated to all the things he would have done with a son. I got to go to a lot of wrestling matches!”

Susan went off to college, where she met and soon married her first husband. She dropped out when she got pregnant with the first of her two children. After four years at home, she decided she had to go back to college. This decision created much anxiety: “The years at home had shattered my confidence, and I wasn’t sure I would succeed.” She eventually found her feet at college and even graduated summa cum laude. When she learned of this honor, she began phoning everyone she knew. “Finally I dropped the phone and began crying as I realized that the one person I was trying to reach was my father, who had died a few years earlier. He would have been so proud.”

With the encouragement of one of her teachers, Susan enrolled in graduate school and ultimately received her doctorate in psychology. Then, through an unexpected turn of events, she was asked to become the executive director of the Floating Hospital in New York City. She hesitated at first, as it was a very big job and she didn’t know if she could handle it. But finally, she agreed.

By then, she was having trouble in her marriage, and she filed for divorce. This was a difficult time for Susan. “Even having my doctorate in psychology didn’t help. While my job was rewarding beyond my wildest dreams, I was miserable. I soon got tired of feeling sorry for myself and knew I had to find a new way of ‘being’ in the world. And that is when my spiritual journey began.”

During the ten years she ran the Floating Hospital, Susan became what she calls a “workshop addict.” In her free time, she studied Eastern philosophies and attended all manner of personal growth and New Age workshops. “I discovered that it was fear that was creating my ‘victim mentality’ and negative attitude. It was stopping me from taking responsibility for my experience of life. It was also fear that was keeping me from being a truly loving person. Little by little, I learned how to push through fear and move myself from the weakest to the strongest part of who I am. Ultimately, I felt a sense of power that I had never felt before.”

Sitting at her desk one day, the thought came into her mind to go down to the New School for Social Research, a place she had never been. Since she was learning to trust her intuition, she decided to check it out. “I thought maybe they had a workshop I needed to take. When I arrived, I looked at the directory and noticed the Department of Human Resources, which sounded relevant to my interests. I made my way to their offices. There was no one in the reception area. Then I heard a woman in the office to the right say, ‘Can I help you?’ I walked in and blurted out, ‘I’m here to teach a course about fear.’ Where that came from, I hadn’t a clue! She looked at me in shock and said, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve been searching for someone to teach a course on fear and this is the last day to put it in the catalogue and I have to leave in fifteen minutes.’ Satisfied with my credentials she said, ‘Quickly write a course title and a seventy-five-word course description. Without any forethought, I titled the course ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’ and wrote the course description. She was pleased and placed my course information on her assistant’s desk with a note to include it in the catalogue. She thanked me profusely and quickly exited. Alone, I stood thinking to myself, ‘What just happened?’ I believe strongly in the Law of Attraction, but to me this was mind blowing.”

Susan was nervous as she faced the first session of the twelve-week course. The two hours went well, but she then was confronted with a new fear. “I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s all I know about this subject. So what am I going to teach next week? And the ten more sessions to follow?’ But every week I found I had more to say. And my confidence level grew. I realized I had learned so much over the years about pushing through fear. And my students were drinking it up. Ultimately, they were amazed at how shifting their thinking really changed their lives. Teaching this course convinced me that that the techniques that had transformed my life were the same techniques that could transform anyone regardless of age, sex, or background.”