Powerful Mentors and an Epidemic of Anxiety

Do you have supportive mentors in your life?

Welcome back! 

This time of year is always an interesting and fun one. 

Students are back in school, football season has begun, the weather is changing, and we have settled into a different cadence after the summer.

But even if you crave routine and predictability, that doesn’t mean that you should stay complacent and not seek change.

One way to avoid settling too much is to find great mentors in all areas of life. 

We’ve got more on mentorship in the workplace below, but mentors don’t end at work. You can have mentors for family life, spirituality, health, or any other area of life you want to improve.

Growth is not an individual process - mentors can give us the support we need!

In today’s newsletter:

• Mentorship for career growth

• Um, do we have a phone problem?

• Hot jobs
  

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CAREER TIPS

Find Mentors Early to Grow Your Career

There are few things that are as important to your personal development as finding good, supportive mentors in your career. It's important not only because you can gain knowledge and skills from a mentor, but also because they can help provide personal support and facilitate success in many areas. 

I connect the importance of a mentor to Newton's 1st Law of Motion:

"An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force."

A good mentor can act as that "outside force" to help you progress through your career, improve your current performance, and help you navigate complexities in personal relations, office politics, and negotiations.

Internal vs. External Mentors

From your company's perspective, it is beneficial to have both internal and external mentors. They can advise and help you in different ways.

An internal mentor:

• can help you work through problems with internal business processes.

• is able to connect you with specific people and resources available in your company.

• is sometimes biased in advising you because of company responsibilities.

An external mentor:

• can look at your entire career and advise you on various paths to take.

• acts as an unbiased advocate for you.

• will often connect you with people in different companies and industries to broaden your perspective.

What Does a Good Mentor Do?

One definition of a mentor is a "wise and trusted counselor or teacher; an influential senior sponsor or supporter. Thus, a mentor ought to be trusted, influential, and supportive. It's therefore important to find not just a mentor but a good mentor who can help you through various challenges that you need help with. A good mentor should be able to:

• provide you with new ideas.

• challenge you to be better than you are.

• be vested in your career growth and success.

• hold you accountable for things you say you want to accomplish.

If you find a mentor who is not doing these or related things, it is totally okay to stop the mentoring relationship and search for a new mentor who can meet your needs. It's your career, and a mentor is supposed to be an advisor. If their help isn't helpful, there is no reason to continue working with them.

Find Mentors Early

You should seek successful mentors so that you can draw upon their success in your own career. There is no point in reinventing the wheel. While everyone is different, it's helpful to learn from someone who has "been there, done that."

The earlier you find good mentors the better. Some companies provide a mentorship program for new employees, but I would also suggest you find mentors outside of official programs. These relationships often feel more natural and less forced. 

In all cases, remember also that a mentoring relationship is just like any other relationship—it goes two ways. You need to come prepared and willing to invest in conversation and learning so that you do not waste your mentor's time. If you take personal responsibility for the success of your time together, you'll be much happier.

By the way, struggling to know what questions to ask a mentor? This resource is a great place to start!

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📚 BOOK RECOMMENDATION

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt

I was stunned after reading this book, but it also makes so much sense. This book is for all of us.

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s.

He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most importantly, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.