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Leave us a voicemail at two on two six month seven zero one six six and we might play it on the show.

Hey, it's Becca.

Recently I went to a podcasting conference and I had a question, do you have a mentor?

Mentor?

I've had a number of mentors that boss is probably the closest thing to my mentor, that I go to them for advice, like a couple of times a week.

Can I use them more for life purposes than I do for audio purposes?

Because I wish I had more of a life mentor.

My advice would just be to like, only reach out to the people who like really get you excited, and do you think you could learn from someone who's doing something that you're in just did in So, I met my first mentor.

I had gone to a radio conference.

We just met and she scared me a lot.

And she was also the first like women of color that I met in audio.

So I contacted her, say, Hi, I am I don't know, is it it's just weird, but could you give a mentor?

Her response was like she was overjoyed.

It was like I was just waiting for you to ask me this whole weekend that he would be like, I would look at your mentor.

I think she just felt flattered and I'm very lucky to have her as my mentor.

Just asking around it seems like everybody has a mentor, everyone except for me.

This week on Works for Me, I go mentor hunting.

Welcome back to Works for Me, to show where we try out solutions to our productivity problems to see if they will work for you.

I'm Francesca Leaf and I'm beca Greenfield.

This week, it's Becca's turn to take something that's going wrong at work and attempt to fix it with an experiment.

Becca, what is your issue of the week.

Basically, I've gone through my whole career without much guidance.

I have people I can talk to when big things come up, like job changes, but I don't have a dedicated person like a mentor I can go to when any other work related issues or anxieties come up.

Do you have someone like that in your life?

Do you have a mentor?

I don't I don't have anybody like that, and I totally understand the desire for one.

I think the closest I've ever come to that was when I was in graduate school and I had professors who helped me get into the industry and help me get jobs.

And I kept in touch with some of them for a little while after grad school, but those relationships have fallen off.

In fact, I saw somebody recently at an event who I at one time I would have considered her mentor, and I'm pretty sure she didn't remember who I was.

Yeah.

I feel like that's one problem, is that these relationships don't really stick where we feel like we're supposed to have them, but there's not really a designated forum.

I mean, there are workplaces that do give people mentors, and I've talked to some people and they say, usually those aren't the people who end up being your mentors.

It just seems like this elusive, magical thing we're supposed to have and I don't really know how to find it.

Yeah.

You hear a lot about about the value of mentor, like in the kind of productivity circles that we run in and the kind of productivity articles that we read.

Um, you know that stuff pops up all the time about the importance of a mentor and how there are mentors and there are sponsors, a sponsors like a mentor like plus somebody who who's not who won't just give you advice, but they'll advocate for you at work.

So you hear constantly about the value of a mentor, you don't necessarily hear about like how to get one.

Yeah, and that's that's what I want to do.

So your problem then, really is that you don't have a mentor and you want one.

What is your plan to find one?

Yeah, So we don't get a training manual for this.

So I went out and found someone who's very good at finding mentors.

I have two core traditional mentors that I've had for over twenty years, and then as I've taken on different roles personally and professionally, I've added mentors.

So maybe I have like at any given time, maybe five to seven that I'm actively talking with and connecting with.

This is Ellen Nsher.

She's a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and she's the co author of a book called Power Mentoring.

She has spent decades researching mentors and is a pro at finding them and keeping them.

Ellen is what I would call a mentor enthusiast, and the reason she's so enthusiastic is because decades of research has found the benefit of having one.

There's a whole body of research that we've been doing for thirty years that shows definitively that people who have mentors actually make more money, get promoted more rapidly, are more satisfied and happier with their jobs.

Life and work is hard enough, and you don't always have to do everything the hard way.

You can learn from other people's experiences.

I asked Ellen how I could find a mentor, and she said, it's as easy as following the four urs.

Oh yeah, reading, writing, arithmetic, different different ours.

What are the four ours?

So the first R is to reflect.

Surprisingly, the whole how to find a mentor starts with yourself.

So you need to take a moment and think about who you are and what you want.

After reflecting, step number two is research.

Once you figured out what you want out of a mentor, Ellen says, research the go to people in your industry and find the people that they mentor.

She suggests an all out internet deep dive, find as much information on potential mentors as possible.

Then the third are is to reach out.

At this point, you've narrowed down a list of people who you want as mentors.

Now you have to email them or call them and ask if they will talk to you or meet with you.

And the last R is to reflect again.

This happens after you've already met up with them, and it's important for making the relationships stick past the initial meeting.

Reflect again and ask yourself what is it I can do from my mentor and how can I show appreciation?

Because I think a lot of times the reason that mentoring relationships don't get off the ground or have an early fail is because the protege go in has a meeting, sucks up some time, the mentor makes a bunch of recommendations, and then the protege gets busy doesn't follow up.

So to summarize, the four ours, not reading, writing, arithmetic are reflect, research, reach out, and reflect again.

So reflect is in there twice feels a little bit like a cheap, But now I mean I feel like that is there's nothing in there that is so surprising, But I actually think it's nice to have a roadmap, like just that there's somebody out there who spent the time to think about what the plan is for going out and finding a mentor, because, like we said, you don't.

It's just not something we're taught.

We're taught about the value of a mentor, but not how to get one.

So it's nice that she's giving you steps.

Yeah, I was.

It's encouraging that there are steps one can take instead of just waiting around to be a perfect person.

So I'm assuming that doing the four hours is going to be your experiment this week.

That's correct.

I'm going to do the four ours and see if I can land me a mentor.

How will you know if you succeeded at fighting a mentor?

One of them are challenging aspects about a mentor relationship is making it stick past that first meeting.

But Ellen assured me that within a month I should be able to meet up with at least one mentor potential and if it goes well, set up another meeting with them.

Okay, So if you can get a meeting and then get a follow up meeting, that's your definition of six sens that's right.

Okay, So I need to reflect this is step one of mentoring, I need to reflect on who I am, what I offer to someone else, my growing edges.

So here I was reflecting in my apart mint.

I enlisted my boyfriend Danny, so I wasn't just talking to myself about myself all alone.

Ellen said a good way to figure out what you want and a mentor is to identify your strengths and what she calls a growing edge, which is a euphemism for something you're not very good at but you want to get better at.

I'm becca, I'm a journalist.

Damn it.

My editor tells me my strengths are I'm fast and I'm smart.

I agree with that.

My growing areas I would like to be be better at, like thinking of bigger story ideas and be better at coming up with, you know, ideas for things I want to pursue.

I feel like I really I get in my head about that.

I found this part challenging.

It sounds like it's hard to talk about yourself, and it's especially hard to say nice things about yourself.

Or I find it hard, and I think many people can relate to that.

But after some reflection, I had just sided I wanted a mentor who could push me on my story ideas.

Ellen also said that during this step, you're supposed to think of something that you can offer your mentor so that the relationship isn't completely parasitic.

I'm happy to read things or give opinion on things.

I'm also really good at writing emails, so if they need like an email editor, I feel like you can attest to that.

Yeah, they're pretty good.

I mean, yes, I I am also someone who thinks they are a good email comes out No, I just don't want to be recorded as saying someone who like constantly need to help with their emails because constantly struggle your emails.

I am always helping my sad, sad poor boyfriend craft emails.

So what do you think is so great about your emails?

That's what I want to know.

I mean, your emails are your emails are great.

But I'm just wondering why you list this as a skill, because I think people come to me and asked me to edit their emails often, and I enjoy it, and I think I do a good job, and I think that's a skill that I can offer a potential mentor.

Okay, after my reflecting period, I had arrived at step two research.

I had identified what I wanted in a mentor somebody to push me on my story ideas.

It was time to find the right person to help me with this growing edge.

Ellen suggested thinking of some superstars in my field and using LinkedIn to find people related to them.

I sat down with Toefort, our producer, and we researched together.

Well, so one idea that I think I'm gonna do is Susan Arlene, which is someone who's like such a reach I wouldn't even think to reach out to her, but like, she's cool and she has a podcast, cry Babies.

I don't even know if Susan relians on LinkedIn, so she is on LinkedIn that she clearly does not use this website.

I mean it is not filled out at all.

It says experience writer and there is a blank photo that's supposed to be filled in, and it just says the last forty years she's been doing that and that's the whole thing.

She's been very consistent.

It doesn't even say what publications she's a dead end.

So it was not just Susan Orlean.

A lot of people in our industry are not big users of LinkedIn and it became almost immediately clear that that was not going to be a fruitful path for me.

So I decided to do my own version of internet research, and Tofer suggested that we look for people who have been interviewed on the long Form podcast for inspiration.

Are you familiar with that show?

I am.

I'm a subscriber actually, for those who don't know, long Form is a podcast where each week the hosts interview writers, editors, and journalists about their careers.

So I went through the roster of guests over the years to try to find some potential candidates.

After twenty minutes, Tob and I had a solid list of ten people.

It was a nice representation of people who do the different things that I do from my job.

It was writers, reporters, podcasters.

I felt good about it, and once I had my names, it was time for the third are reach out, which is where things got scary.

We'll see how that went for me.

After the right I had arrived at step three, which is reach out.

This, I think is the most intimidating step.

You have to email complete strangers, tell them how much you like them, and then asked them for their time.

It took me a while to build up to this step.

About a week after I did my research, I finally got the courage to contact my potential future mentors.

I sat down with my list of ten names and their contact information, which was readily available online, and I started writing an email to the first potential mentor on my list, Susan or Lean.

Hi, Susan, my name is Becka Greenfield.

I'm reporter, writer, podcaster.

I currently work at Bloomberg and have worked at various other outlets since I started working eight years ago.

I guess I say work a lot um.

It took me at least four drafts to write what I considered a decent email, and as we know, you have very high email standards, so that must have been an amazing email by the time you were done with it.

Yes, I was using my special skill.

I wanted to personalize it to Susan, but I also didn't want to sound too neat.

It's a very delicate balance.

And then I had to do the hardest part, which was sending.

Ellen said a lot of people get stressed about this step, understandably, so she has a trick for getting over it.

I really recommend that people come up with some kind of courage ritual.

So it might be a poem, it might be a song, it might be a quote.

So a lot of people run into this trouble, like reaching out to strangers as a problem, But it never occurred to me to like have a little thing that you always fall back on that makes you feel braver.

Yeah, she sings a song.

She sings the song, so I like amps you up.

So yeah, she she sings a song, and she suggests that you just do something to make yourself feel confident in the moment.

What did you decide to do for your courage rid rule, I picked a song that always lifts my spirits.

And also bonus is a metaphor for my current tap.

I Ain't no mountain high enough by Marvin Gay and Tammy Terrell.

Okay, so the metaphor, how is it a mountain email?

The email is a tall mountain.

That's right, my stress climates.

There's lots of metaphors.

The email itself, this moment is a mountain that it's not too high for me to climb over.

I can do it, you can do it.

Also finding a mentor, it's the scary amount and the song goes to keep me from getting to you.

So that's the mentor.

The mentors on the other side of the mountain.

The emails not too tall for you to climb over and didn't get to your mentor.

That's great, thank you perfect.

I thought about it now, So after reading through my email one last time just in case, I was ready to send it, I'm pretty nervous to send it.

But first email, here we go pressing send.

He Okay, it's gotta scary.

Onto the next one.

I found it surprisingly exhausting to write and send that email.

It took a lot of emotional energy, and then I had to do it in nine more times.

Hi Eran Hayman Niche.

Hi, Rebecca.

My name is Becca green My name is Becca Greenfield.

I'm a reporter.

I'm on the race class and gender in the right place team here and I admire I feel crazy.

I'm looking for some guidance on how to go as a writer, reporter and idea generator.

So respectable, Marvin Gay, you inspire me submit.

Sending the emails was so exhausting that I only ended up emailing eight out of the ten people on my list.

I just stopped.

Then it was out of my hands.

I had to wait for responses, and then right there, right then, I got one and it was a rejection, a really nice rejection, but a rejection.

So I waited even longer.

I refreshed my inbox, waited more days, pasted.

It felt like an eternity, and then finally people responded, and they were more rejections.

People were very nice and sent me some incredibly thoughtful emails.

Some of them had specific advice in them for me, but they were for legitimate reasons, too busy to meet up.

I think if you're reaching out to people you admire, there is a very real possibility that they're going to be too busy putting time and energy into their own careers to meet up with you.

I think that's true.

But I think that you might be underestimating how big a deal is that people responded at all.

Like I think that they could have just ignored your email altogether.

After all, you were a stranger, and it sounds like some of them gave you real advice or thought through what you had written to them.

So clearly the fact that you put a lot of thought into your email resulted in them putting some thought in their responses, And I think that's it's kind of a win, like you're on their radar.

Now, all I'm hearing is that I sent a really good email.

Yes correct, I know, iratulations on your amazing email.

Thank you.

I was genuinely delighted to hear from people and very touched.

Yeah, but it didn't help me get closer to my goal.

It didn't get you exactly what you wanted.

But I think it's a nice lesson the next time you're scared of something like that, because I think the assumption is these people are going to be like, what the heck is this?

Totally ignore it, And actually you can get a lot more out of people than you realize.

People will give you more of their time than you might expect.

Dare.

I say, ain't no mountain high enough you, dare.

So I had to keep waiting.

The holidays came, they went, and then on January two, I got an email from Manus Samaradi.

Manusha is an accomplished journalist.

She used to host a popular radio show called Note to Self.

Last year she left to start her own podcast company called Stable Genius Productions, where, among other things, she hosts their flagship show zig Zag.

She was the perfect person to help me with my growing edge.

She had to put out hundreds of episodes of her show, and she seemingly does not have a problem coming up with good ideas.

I responded immediately and set up a meeting with her a week later.

Hi.

Hello.

We met up in her coworking space on a chilly morning for coffee.

I sat down, put my recorder between us, and right then and there she gave me my first tip of the morning, how to hold a microphone like a pro something.

This is gonna just gonna bug me, but I really think you should talk like this.

And then he hand it to you.

One minute in and I had already learned something.

Plus Minush had put me at ease.

She made me feel okay asking her some of my other career questions.

After talking for a few more minutes, I brought up my growing edge, and I asked her how I can get better at coming up with story ideas.

You can't do this in a vacuum.

Ideas are iterative, right, Like, it's not the chances of you coming up with something that's fully formed and totally baked an amazing are pretty darn slim, Like what is the IRA glasses?

Like your ideas want to be bad.

It's a team sport journalism.

Yes, there are people who just like put out amazing things all on their own, but I don't think it's like being an artist to paint something and has a vision in their mind.

I think I have ideas of where I want to go, but there never they're never what we end up doing.

The news made me realize that I was maybe putting too much pressure on my own ideas, and that I should seek out other people to brainstorm with.

We spent an hour talking about stuff like this and remembering what Ellen said.

I tried not to just suck up her time, and I answered some of her questions.

Sadly, she did not request my email writing services.

Maybe you consider another email and she'll just be so wowed by the quality that she'll ask for more help.

One can dream.

Then, as we were wrapping up, I had yet another challenge.

Ellen said after the first meeting, if things went well, I should try to get on my mentors calendar again in the next month or so to try and make the relationships stick.

I asked manus when she thought it would be reasonable for us to meet up again.

Look, I have two kids, I run my own business.

I host multiple podcasts, I traveled, giving a lot of talks.

Time is not is the one thing right now in my life I do not have, but I do believe in Like, like, this session was extremely productive and fruitful and wonderful, and if I don't see you for another six months to a year, I really feel like we'll just pick up right where we were because it was I hate this word speaking of words authentic, but like we didn't both, do you know what I mean?

We just got to it, And like I have a lot of time for people who I feel like I can meet them right where we need to be without the lead up to get there.

Minusia had already given me so much of her time to ask her to commit to another meeting in the next month or two felt selfish.

She's busy, and I agree with her.

We got a lot out of our session.

I couldn't bring myself to ask for more, so I left without scheduling another meeting.

I love how skillfully she kind of rejected you in a way, like when you asked her about meeting up.

It sounds like you gently broached meeting up again without being direct about it, and then she just had this way of like making it a compliment to you that she wasn't gonna probably see you for six months to a year.

I she's like, that's high quality mental material right there.

Yeah, I didn't even think of it as a rejection.

That's the first time I'm thinking of it as right.

Sorry, Well you didn't give yourself the chance to be rejected because you didn't.

Actually, yeah, I was a little meta about it.

I was like, I'm supposed to do this thing, what do you think?

But she's obviously probably wisely protective of her time.

Yes, I told yes, that's the correct answer, and no, say no to mean.

But that's she made me feel like she did the right thing.

But you probably got scared.

You probably got you got scared away by her saying she didn't have a lot of time, and then you didn't push it further because it's just like that email situation.

You just assumed that as someone who doesn't have a lot of time, she wasn't going to give you this.

You know, she wasn't gonna give you this specific thing.

But maybe what you could have used is a courage with rule.

Oh my goodness, yes, just excuse me, I need to play a song right now, So I can ask you another question put on you just be like, I'm just gonna put on my earbuds for like thirty seconds next time.

But just because we hadn't set up another meeting right there didn't mean I had completely failed at making the relationship stick.

It was time for a step four reflect again.

Ellen said, I should reflect on what I can do for my mentor after the meeting to keep the relationship going.

MENU should ask me to send her an episode of this show that we're working on right now.

So I sent her an email thanking her for a time, with a link to our podcast.

And that was the end of my mentoring journey.

So, Becca, was your mentoring experiment a success?

Technically, no, I failed.

Yeah, I knew that.

I knew the answer because you didn't get a follow up meeting.

That's right.

I didn't set up another meeting with Manus, which was the goal.

And I don't think I got the kind of mentor relationship I had been fantasizing about.

I was thinking of having someone I could meet up with regularly to talk about career stuff.

But I don't know that I will ever have an explicit, ongoing relationship like that.

And maybe I just need to come to terms with that.

I don't think you should give up so easily on having that kind of relationship.

I think maybe that the like intensive in person I r L meetups might be hard, But some of the advice she gave you, it sounds like it was kind of a way of helping you help yourself.

Like she was saying, reach out to the people around you, collaborate more with the people that you work with, and so she was almost like teaching you how to fish instead of giving you a fish like she You know, if you had even an email relationship with her um or just a really occasional relationship that wasn't as regular as you might like, she could keep kind of feeding you that stuff that would help you be better in your day to day life.

So it's interesting that you brought up this email relationship because I called Ellen back up after my experiment and I asked her how I could have done things a little better, and that was one of her suggestions.

She was like, you should keep trying to build this relationship with the news.

You can email her things and not like here's a question I'm having about my life, and we're like, oh, this is something we talked about.

It reminded me of you.

Like, remember, I'm a person I'm very like post date.

It is a lot the mentor finding experiences very much like you should make her.

Yeah, I'll make heir of Spotify playlist.

So yeah, I think you're right.

I should not give up on my goal.

So in the end, do you feel like Ellen's for ours we're helpful?

I do.

I'm the kind of person who likes to have an actionable plan to follow in small increments to reach a larger goal, and it forced me to go on this path of finding a mentor.

I think it also forced me to reach out to people I assumed were inaccessible and unattainable.

And everybody I emailed, people who I am scared of and an of and who do awesome work.

They were happy to hear from me, and I think they wanted to help, or they pretended to want to help even if they couldn't.

I don't think before ours consider how busy people are, especially the women that I reached out to, a lot of them are also working parents, and they I know they execute at high levels at their jobs, so it's reasonable to me that they don't have time to meet up with a complete stranger.

Did you bring that up with Ellen when you called her back, Like, did she have any advice about people being really busy?

She did?

She was like, yes, when people say can you meet for coffee, they think, oh gosh, no, Like I don't have time for that.

She said, to phrase my asks in smaller increments and say, do you have fifteen minutes to get on the phone to talk about X Y Z thing?

Which I I don't know if I could do that, but it does.

Why not?

I don't know, it's just someone really gonna get on the phone talk to me for fifteen minutes.

Well, I think it's more about this asking for the specific thing, because I can totally see people being overwhelmed by hearing somebody who sounds like they really look up to them saying I would like you to help me with my whole life, because you know, just like you had fears about being important enough to email, these people like they might have some kind of imposter syndrome too, just because they happen to be really accomplished.

They might think, who am I to help this person figure out their whole career, and they might feel like it's easier to take on something smaller.

It's that's a very good point.

They might have needed a courage ritual to respond to your email, as to be included in my email asks, do you have fifteen minutes?

I was here worried about responding to this email.

If you're scared to respond, here's the ritual.

Um.

Yeah.

I actually was listening to a podcast recently where somebody said she asked other writers to walk her through their stories, which again is a very specific ask.

I could have done that and said, you know, journalist X, I loved this thing you out.

Can you tell me about it?

And they might be more receptive.

So I learned that manus is not going to solve or help me solve all of my career anxieties and problems, and that's not really any one person's job.

But I did learn some useful tools and tips for learning how to find more people to help me do that.

And I guess that just involves sending more emails.

Oh my god, you're so good at emails.

I just find more ways to send more emails.

It's actually perfect for you.

M Next week on works for me, Francesca and I go to couples therapy.

I'm gonna ask you about some things that have been challenges between the two of you, and I'm going to let either of you start.

I can start.

Thanks for listening to another episode Works for Me.

If you like the show, please head on over at to Apple Podcasts or ever you listen to, rate, review, and subscribe.

You can also find all of our episodes and more things like articles Rewrite It about our detailed experiments, plus very cool illustrations done by Jordan's Spear at Bloomberg dot com Slash Works for Me.

Have any workplace problems that you want to solve, we'd love to hear from you.

Give us a call at two on to six seven zero one six and we might play your voicemail on the show, or you can tweet at us I'm at ours Greenfield and I'm at Francesca Today.

This show was reported and hosted by Me at the Greenfield and Me Francesca Leavy.

This episode was produced by tofur Forehs Francesca leav Is, Bloomberg pet of podcasts.

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