How to Find a Mentor

What would it mean for you to finally find the mentor who opened up the door to new possibilities that you've always dreamed about? What's good? It's Rob Cressy. And what I want to do is share the process and thinking behind one of the most valuable skills I have ever learned in my entire life. And you can too. And this is all about creating visionary mentorships. Strategically creating relationships with forward thinking leaders who inspire, empower, and guide you to anything that you would love to create in your life.

And the inspiration behind this is over the weekend I shared a Facebook post that said, How can I help? And one person responded back saying, You know what, Rob? Most people aren't going to answer this question because they don't want to be vulnerable. They don't want to put themselves out there, but I'm willing to do so. If I'm just listening to my intuition, what I would love is for you to be my mentor.

And boom! Once I heard that, I was filled with love and joy because I love when people go ahead and put themselves out there because there's a phrase. There's a silent majority and a vocal minority. When that vocal minority steps up, boom! You have the ability to create something. So for me, logically I'm like, All right, here's someone who wants me to mentor them. I'm going to create a newsletter and a podcast all around my process for thinking about mentorship and creating that in your life.

So there are a few framings that are absolutely foundational to this all around creating visionary mentorships. Number one, let's just get what a mentor is. A mentor is someone who's an expert, a trusted advisor, someone who can help you improve. I'm going to encourage you to hold very loosely the term mentor because mentor can be coach. It can mean a lot of things, but oftentimes we put what mentor means in the box. I encourage you to throw that in the trash because number two, mentors are everywhere. And number three, mentors can happen in person, online, in books, podcasts, courses and coaching programs.

So what I really want to do is help you open your lens for what a mentor is so that you can start creating more of them in your life. So how in the world do you create someone as your visionary mentor? And the best thing that I can do is reverse engineer my process for how I've done that in my life over the last decade and you can too.

So 13 years ago when I quit my corporate job and went all into being a full-time creator and entrepreneur, I'm sitting there $0, no clients, no revenue, no website, no nothing. And I decided, you know what? I'm going to audit the success habits of the most successful people in the world. The people that I aspire to be like and do things like, what are the things that they are doing every single day? And for me, this is before I had a growth mindset. Actually, it was the creation of it. It was right when I became self-aware.

And my first mentors, and they still are to this day, are books and podcasts. You have the ability to learn from any person you want in the world who has created anything. And when you realize this, it's why I'm such a voracious reader because I love to learn. It's why I love listening to podcasts and creating podcasts because they're your ability to learn the lessons from someone who has already done those things to help you accelerate the speed in which you want to create those things in your life.

And when you start with, wow, anyone who's written a book or anybody who has a podcast or maybe it's a newsletter, that's how they can be my mentor. And you now start to open up the possibilities of, oh, I'm going to start diving into their world. But that would be my first encouragement. You want someone to be your mentor or you want to be, let me say it again. You want someone to be your mentor. The first thing you do, listen to their podcast, read their books.

The second thing that happened for me is when I hired my first coach and I've done podcasts with my branding coach Gil. And it was a huge step in my journey because I'd never hired a coach before. Now I want to say this was like $2,000 and he was my brand coach, helping me build out the clarity of what I was building for my content marketing agency at the time. And he was the first person to give me permission to share my dreams with him and he would help support me in building that world.

And he was a mentor, but I hired him as a coach, but it's pretty much the same thing. He was an expert in brand building. He was a trusted advisor. He was someone who had an extensive background in this who could help me speed up the journey. So the number two thing you can do is hire your first coach. And this is something that was maybe an eight week engagement, but guess what? We have continued on with a lifelong relationship and side note. I'm actually going to get the opportunity to see Gil this weekend, which I'm super excited about.

Number three. So once you've done those things, the books and the podcast and you've hired your first coach, the next thing that happened to my journey is what I call the deep dive. And I think back to when I was introduced to Grant Cardone's world for the first time and someone gave me or recommended the book, The 10X Rule. And then I read that and where I was at that point in my entrepreneurial journey, I was like, wow, this is speaking exactly to me.

And it was the first time in my life that I binge read three books. It was 10X Rule, Be Obsessed or Be Average and Sell or Be Sold. I was like, boom, boom, boom. I was like, this is unbelievable. I want to live all in this guy's world because he was speaking to the prolific creator and the entrepreneur in me. Then he has a 10X Growth Con coming up or he did at the time in Miami. Now I was like, I'm going to this conference. I got to see more about what this is. So I put Grant as one of my mentors. I was learning from him in so many different ways. And I loved it because it created an energy inside of me.

And it just so happens that this opened up Pandora's box because when we got to 10X Growth Conference, the very first speaker who was there was some guy wearing jeans and T-shirt and a headband that I'd never heard of before named Jesse Itzler. And within five minutes, I was like, Holy smokes, Batman. Who is this guy? I'm all about this life. I'm all about that energy and that first mentor open up the door to other ones.

And this is something that happens all over the place, podcasts, books, conferences, because how do you find new books to create new mentors? Well, oftentimes in books, they will quote other books of, Hey, in this book. So the way that I've created such an extensive library of being well read is because of all of the book recommendations in the podcast and the other books that I've been consuming. So once I discovered Jesse's world, Jesse has his Build Your Life Resume program and I'm like, I'm in. I got to know more about the systems and the process and the things that make this guy tick.

And here's the next level of this game. And this is something that I've been an absolute expert in. And I want to give you this gift. So once you start deep diving into someone's world, so you listen to the podcast or you read a book or you go to the conference, then you sign up for the coaching program. And the key is when you want to take someone who is a virtual mentor and start building an actual relationship with them. How in the world do you do that? Well, you do things that no one else does when you are in their community. You be a go giver.

And when I'm in Jesse's community all the time, I'm standing out. I'm engaging. I'm helping and on one of the group coaching calls. And of course, I'm very vocal. I'm very present in everything that I do. Remember, silent majority, vocal minority, even when you're in somebody else's community, the majority of the people are going to sit in the background. Be that 20% who says, you know what? I'm going to be a leader within this community because of course, being the leader of a community, you love and want people who are going to stand out to you because now all of a sudden you're on their radar.

So I got on Jesse's radar and there's a variety of things that have happened in terms of how I've built a relationship with Jesse and over the course of the years at one point on the group coaching calls, Jesse has a concept called a Misogi. You do something every single year that is so hard, that is so memorable that it defines the year and it stays with you for all 365 days. One of the things that Jesse has always talked about is people want to launch a podcast as their Misogi and on a live call, he's like, Hey Rob, would you ever want to do a training for our community on how to launch a podcast?

And literally a million percent as quickly as you can. I was like, of course, I would love to do that. I'm here to give and to help everybody else. So boom, I go and of course podcast coaching is something that is a service of mine, but you know what? I'm in service of his community and the people who are part of this tribe. So I go and create a three week masterclass on how to easily launch a podcast that I give to Jesse and his community that lives in his community and shout out to everyone in the BYLR community who has launched a podcast from that because I still get messages to this day.

So in the process of this, I am definitely more well known by Jesse because of being a go giver in his community. So this is something that I'm sharing out of experience for myself. It is a very strategic thing that I've done over and over and over again because a lot of people want someone to be in there, be a mentor of theirs, but they don't actually do the steps. They don't do the action. They don't do the things to live in that person's world. And I encourage you to be like the person who reached out to me and said, Rob, I want you to be my mentor because what do you think I said? I was like, all right, let's go.

So here's the next levels of all of this. The next way about this is in person events. And we said that with the Grant Cardone 10X Growth Conference, but this is the next level of something. If you want someone to be your mentor, cool. You want to be living in their world more. So go to the events they're speaking at and if you're part of their community, boom, see if there's meetups.

And one of the ways that I created that this year, and I even talked about this on a previous podcast, is this year I went through Billy Gene Is Marketing's a 16 week AI marketing agency program. Very beginning of it, they said, Hey, who wants to be a leader to help other people in this community be accountable to get into the end of the road? And of course I raised my hand. Why? Only good things can come when a mentor of yours says who wants to be a leader because then once a week, I got to jump on a call with 15 other people that was led by Billy Gene to this team all around, Hey guys, what can we do to make this better for everybody else in the group?

So that inevitably when I went to an entrepreneurship event when Billy Gene was speaking, I slid into his, I slid into his DMs and said, Hey Billy, I'm at this event too. If you have a few minutes, let's catch up, would love to jam. He's like, boom, I would love it Rob, meet me next to the stairs. So this is something that took me multiple months to build that relationship. But guess what? This is something where he was my AI and marketing mentor and then live event, boom, now deepening the relationship.

Because the last part of all of this is when you want someone to be your mentor, what you can actually do is to hire them to be your mentor. When you go from the virtual and the social and the books and the podcasts and even the community coaching all the way to I want you to be my coach. And we're going to use the term coach very loosely because a coach does multiple things. They wear multiple hats. They're not just coaching you. They're an expert advisor. They're trusted. They're there to support and to guide you and to help you speed up the process on things and there's something that it deepens the relationship when you want to live in that world and you want to go deeper.

I can tell you from my own experience hiring so many different coaches. I absolutely love it and 100 times out of a hundred it is far exceeded the expectations because there's a reason why you want someone to be your mentor or your coach or your advisor to help you along on your journey because you want to live in that energy. You want to live in that vibe. You want that support. You want more of that in your life and I showed you step by step by step how I've done this in my life and you can too.

And I can tell you this is a process that is never ending. And I think it's one of the biggest challenges a lot of people face that it's hard to teach an old dog new trick syndrome. As you get older you may think I don't need the support. I know it all. I would encourage you to say it is the complete opposite. The older I get the more I want to be around other amazing people and here's another thing, age no limit. People can be older than me, they can be younger than me. I want to be around others who can help me create new possibilities in my life and I'm open to who that could be, how it could be, age, location, anything. Everything is on the table.

So this is the blueprint for you to creating visionary mentorships in your life. It is up to you to keep taking action. Then you get to decide how deep do you want to go, how quickly do you want to build that relationship. How much do you want to transform and live in that world?

For me, if you would like for me to be your mentor, here is the process. Number one, I create tons of content. Start with my newsletter, my podcast, my videos. Number two, I have programs from building your brand and launching your podcast to personal growth and development and mindset and being a better person. Then once you go through that you can say, hey, if I want to explore what a deeper relationship looks like with you Rob, all you guys do is jump on a powerful coaching call with me. It is the number one thing that you can get access to mentors a lot easier than you think if you just say, hey, can I jump on a call with you and explore what looking, what explore what diving deeper into your world looks like.

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