The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Mentor Yourself’

How to Self-Mentor

Last week in the post Self-Mentoring – an Idea for the Twenty-First Century, we delved into the idea of mentoring yourself. We mentioned briefly how to become a self-mentor and how to use The Invisible Mentor blog to mentor yourself. But how do you really mentor yourself, and how can you use resources other than those found on this blog?

We mentioned that you have to know yourself, and you have to identify your mentoring needs. Knowing what your needs are allows you to fill those needs. So whenever you meet someone, view it as mentoring in a moment, we can learn from everyone, if we pay attention. Whenever you read, never do it in a vacuum, always think how you can use the information and how it relates to what you already know – interact with the information to bring it to life.

If you come across a new idea that sounds interesting that you do not understand, take 30 minutes or so to explore it a little more deeply. When we learn, we want to have a reason for learning, but we also want to balance that with building our general knowledge which is critical to creative problem solving.

Immerse yourself in different situations. Do something that you’ve always wanted to do, but didn’t have the courage to do before now. To self-mentor is not only about people, it’s also about situations, resources, ideas and concept. It’s about exploration, and being your true self. Spend some time on YouTube, SlideShare.net and Scribd.com researching topics and ideas that you are interested in. Pop over to Questia.com, AskNature.org and HowStuffWorks.com and explore some more.

It may not appear like you are mentoring yourself but you are. A mentor is someone who guides and advises you. What guidance and advice do you need? While you are exploring the resources mentioned in this post, you’ll learn new things and you’ll learn about potential mentors, who you could call and have a 15-minute conversation with.

Taking control of your professional development puts you in a position of power. You take control of your life, and journey on a path that’s right for you. Self-mentoring is not easy, neither are the best things in life. Take the time to understand your needs, and fill those needs. Build a solid formation on which you can build on. That’s self-mentoring in action.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Related articles

• Self-Mentoring – an Idea for the Twenty-First Century (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Create Your Board of Mentors – January is National Mentoring Month (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Mentoring in Moments at Socialize Toronto (theinvisiblementor.com)

Mentor Yourself – Interview With Invisible Mentor Dan Elash, Principal, Syntient

To get the most from The Invisible Mentor Interview, while you are reading it, answer the following questions:

1. Are their similarities between the Dan Elash and yourself?
2. In what ways can you use the information?
3. In what ways would you respond differently from Dan?
4. What are your five takeaways from the interview?
5. After reading the interview, what is one concrete action you can take?

Invisible Mentor: Dan Elash, Principal

Company Name: Syntient

Website: http://syntient.com/ 

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Dan Elash:  I started off life as a clinical psychologist. I have a PhD in Psychology from the University of Kansas, and it has served as my credentials, my platform for all the work I’ve done in my life since. After some time doing therapy in various clinical settings, I was drawn to the world of business and organizational effectiveness, and I worked there for about 35 years until now. I’m back doing a wide range of different things. I’ve lost my travel calluses that kept me going for all those years on the road, and I’m enjoying life a little closer to home.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Dan Elash: What I love is that no day is typical at this point in my life. I’m still responding to various client needs and challenges which put different problems in different contexts in front of me all the time. I also take some time to write and publish. I have a wife who loves life and manages to bring adventures to us quite often. I love the variety of my work-life.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Dan Elash:  Motivation has never been a problem for me. When I was young, I decided I wanted to find a career that allowed me to go to work every day and be myself. I found that in behavioural science in being a consultant dealing with people and organizations with people-to-people kinds of opportunities and issues. For me, I’ve always been fascinated by it. I’ve been curious about it, and I’ve found it a rewarding place for me to go to work and be myself.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Dan Elash:  The biggest thing I would do is seek more guidance and mentoring through close relationships with people who might have been looking to teach or guide me. When I was younger, I was very self-sufficient, and didn’t know what I didn’t know. Now as I look back over the dumb things that I said, bad choices I made, I wish I would have been wise enough to seek more mentoring.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Dan Elash: It wasn’t a discovery, but I came across a book called the The Power of Impossible Thinking: Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business by Jerry Wind. I was excited about his excellent articulation of the power of belief, and how our mindsets can create our realities. It’s something that resonates with me and I found his articulation to open my mind to other ideas.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Dan Elash:

1. The first threat would be staying in touch. Being an independent consultant, many of my clients are remote from me and so staying in touch is a challenge. I wind up doing a fair amount of networking using some of the social media options. I made a commitment to write nine to 10 articles over the course of a year, so I put those out in a newsletter to my clients.
2. The second is staying relevant. I try to do that by listening to the clients’ issues. What are they wrestling with? What are their struggles? Enquiring about what they are learning and excited about, what they have discovered and what innovations they are using or embracing. And it’s in that way I try to stay relevant and open to learning new tools and skills myself.
3. The third challenge to my business in staying successful is my need to embrace technology and weave it into the way I practice, whether its’ doing long-distance coaching over Skype, sharing ideas and product development, or going to meetings, even though that’s not cutting edge technology but it’s the ability to continue to look for ways to do what we do in an updated fashion.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Dan Elash: I think what’s fundamentally unique is my personal perspective. Lots of people consult, and lots of people come from the behavioural science field to do their consulting, but I have in addition to a PhD, I was trained as a community organizer, as part of my graduate training. I’ve consulted to businesses and not-for-profit organizations for a long time earning my spurs and developing my perspective. I’ve been invited to teach everywhere from universities to the US Naval War College to US boardrooms. All of those things have given me a perspective that is honed out of my experience, and I’m sure it’s not the experience of anybody else on the planet. And I guess that’s what makes me different in the world of giving advice and brainstorming with clients to help them find tools and solutions.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Dan Elash: When I was in graduate school, I had started a family, and I was working part-time to supplement my student income. I was going to school working on my PhD, and still in training as a community organizer, and in the middle of all of that taking my comprehensive, written examinations to qualify for my PhD. I failed one section and I had never failed anything academically. It led to a good deal of soul searching. I re-prioritized and recognized that getting through school, and getting the credential was the most pressing need I had to address and I had to scale back some of the other activities and focused on what was going to get me what I needed. So that’s my challenge and what I did about it. The lessons I learned was learning my own limit and I needed to be more disciplined in my focus, and also learn to say “No.”

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Dan Elash: My big break came from Dr. Bob Medina. He ran a consulting firm, Medina & Thompson out of Chicago. He took a chance on me and hired me as a consultant to work with Fortune 500 Companies. He put me in a complex and demanding environment that pushed me to grow both in my knowledge and sophistication. At the time I was young and not deeply experienced in working with businesses and he provided me with the opportunity to learn and develop.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Dan Elash:  I was divorced at one point in time. I had four boys and their mother went to study abroad – the youngest two went with her and the oldest two, who were in high school and university, stayed with me. I couldn’t parent as if I was onsite day-in-and-day-out. And for me, I had to redefine parenting. What did it mean? How could I do it from a quarter of a world away? How I dealt with the failure was to experiment in the nature of my relationship with the guys and try to be a loving mentor and ally, someone who had their best interests at heart. I had experience in some broader perspective than they did, but recognizing that I didn’t have the power to control. I could influence. I could persuade, but I couldn’t make anybody do anything.

In doing that, what really became clear to me is my idea that validating your child is the most important role of a parent being able to send him or her out into the world as a competent, confident and secure individual is a necessary part of doing a good job raising children.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Dan Elash:  I had to fire a man who was a direct report. He was middle aged and was into a rut and settled into a routine. He wasn’t doing his job, and coaching and supervision didn’t seem to make a difference. He liked the security of the job and the image of himself in the role, but he wasn’t willing to learn and grow, and really go out of his way to serve what were supposed to be his clients. I had to let him go. He felt victimized at first, and all the drama with it, but in the end, he wound up in a job that he could handle and he felt good about himself.

What it taught me was that being in a job where a person is in over their head, is a very destructive place to be, both emotionally and psychologically. It’s like you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. On the other hand, if you embrace your fears you have a chance to beat them or move away from them and protect yourself. If you spend your life avoiding dealing with painful realities you wind up stunting your growth, limiting yourself, at best, to mediocrity, and at worst, to a life of anxiety. While it was a hard thing to do, and never pleasurable, I took away a lesson that I have gone back to time-and-time again for my career.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Dan Elash:

1. Growing up blue collar taught me the reward of work, the value of responsibility, and dedication to a purpose. It was the times I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it’s a blue collar city and it has a work ethic and attitude about it that I took away.
2. When I was younger, I learned martial arts and it helped me to gain confidence in my body to balance out the confidence I had in my mind. It stretched me and again supported the idea that with hard work you can see progress.
3. Going to graduate school in clinical psychology with its focus on professionalism caused me to understand dedication, and commitment to those who look to you for value to do your best and be as excellent as you can be because other people are depending on your for the quality of your skill. I take myself and my work more seriously as a result. I have always appreciated the repetition and the focus that the faculty had on what it meant for us to become professionals.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Dan Elash:  Learning as an adult to become a writer. To be able to articulately express my thoughts in words has led to numerous opportunities for work, and has allowed me to influence and inspire countless people who I otherwise would not have met.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Dan Elash:  Mentors influenced my life by broadening my perspectives. They caused me to expand on my current point-of-view and to look on the world from a different perspective than I brought to the problem originally. They helped me to realize that the right answer is not always the best, and they helped me to think more complexly when dealing with problems, and to stretch my thinking to produce my best outcome.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Dan Elash: There were many mentors along the way and I’m always amazed after a lifetime of learning, there is still so much that I don’t know. If I had to boil it down, one message would be that you can learn from anyone, everyone if you are humble and willing to listen – people have things to teach you.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Dan Elash:  The past is gone and is unchangeable, but the future is not. We can create our lives by the choices we make going forward, particularly if we use today’s feelings to cause us to learn new information and skills. The future is before us to create by how we choose to react to the circumstances that come to us.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

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Other Invisible Mentor Interviews

• Interview With Invisible Mentor Jeanne-Marie Robillard, Senior Account Executive, National Speakers Bureau, Part Two (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Mentor Yourself: Interview With Invisible Mentor Jo Ann Langer, Senior Level Retail Executive (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Mentor Yourself: Interview With Pauline Crawford, Founder and Chief Executive at Corporate Heart Part II (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Interview With Invisible Mentor Stefan Meister, Director, intercultures, Part Two (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Mentor Yourself – Interview With Invisible Mentor Luba Rusyn (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Interview With Invisible Mentor Carol McManus, America’s LinkedIn Lady (theinvisiblementor.com)
• Interviews for Mentoring: Invisible Mentor, Maggie Berry, Women in Technology (theinvisiblementor.com)

Big Breaks + Mentoring + Hard Work = Success?

I am reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success and it got me thinking about interviews that I have conducted, so I decided to explore an idea. I have only read a third of the book so far, but when you ask most people about Outliers, they’ll mention 10,000 hours to become an expert at a craft. But from what I have read so far, hard work doesn’t equal success, you also need opportunities and talent.

I have taken five of The Invisible Mentor interviews that I have published on the blog, and extracted the responses to big breaks, mentor influence, and steps to success. As you read the responses, what ideas and thoughts come to mind? Are there ways you can create your own opportunities if you haven’t had your big break as yet?

Name: Patty DeDominic

Big Break: Thirty years ago, one of our neighbours in business brought us a request for proposal to do business with the local government and they said they were not going to bid on the small contract, and asked us we would like to bid on it, that was a big break for us. That got us started with government contracting and opened up a new world of a certain type of customer, which over the years I did many millions of dollars worth of business with the government – the city, county, state, national government.

Mentor Influence: y father being a very successful business person, and my mother being a wonderful homemaker, and active community volunteer. They mentored me, and taught me the value in volunteer work, always trying to line your head and your heart and making sure that your values are not compromised by making a living. I had other business mentors, from early bosses and friends who helped and advised me on buying real estate. When I married my husband 25 years ago, he was more experienced than I in different kinds of businesses so he helped to mentor me in regard to some of the systems he used when he worked for multinational corporations so I’ve been very fortunate to receive many coaching opportunities and mentors along the way.

Steps to Success: There were many: I had to study, I had mentors, I had to believe that I could do it, I had to experiment and practice, make mistakes and learn. So those are the steps – it’s conceive, believe, receive, and achieve. Being grateful is an important part of being successful. I think you must be grateful for the things you have that you have been given.

Name: Kamel Hothi

Big Break: I would say my biggest break was from my line manager going back three lines ago, a gentleman by the name of Arif Mushtaq. He was parachuted in from another company into Lloyds Bank. I encountered him when I was setting up the effort for the Ethnic Minority Network, and he was the one who sponsored the event. It was great to meet Arif. When we started discussing the event and he heard some of my views and ideas he really encouraged me to take a risk. He had faith, he saw something in me that I suppose other people didn’t see, so that encouraged me to take a risk from the position. Yes I could have lost my job. He gave me a blank sheet of paper and said he would support me, and to be honest, that empowerment was the best gift I have ever had. It increased my confidence and since then I have never looked back, so I’m really grateful to Arif.

Mentor’s Influence: I have had a number of mentors I would say, and some were good and some were bad. Most were not what you call formal mentors in the beginning, but certainly people who you admire who you see can add value in different ways. My mother was a huge mentor to me, she helped me to shape my personal life, helped me to focus on the core things to look at, how to overcome when things are not quite going right. And at work, Arif Mushraq was a huge mentor to me, he helped me, and he understood what other people thought were weaknesses, were strengths and he had a real influence on my career.

Steps to Success: For me, it was really understanding the psyche of what’s in it for me. That’s very cynical, selfish thinking, but that’s how people tend to live in the corporate world. It’s using that thinking and putting it into my strategy. When we were building the Asian strategy, it was very much what’s in it for them, what’s the business case, what would they achieve, would they pay attention? So once you can show them what the case looks like and get their juices flowing, then it’s mapping that out and how it can be realized. That’s what I would say is what I have done in my field.

Name: Runa Magnusdottir

Big Break: I’ve had so many! I’ve been so fortunate to have so many big breaks. There has always been a woman who stood behind me, who helped me. If I go back in time, when I was about 20 years old, the private secretary for the Minister of Culture and Education in Iceland who was a woman, gave me a huge break. She appointed me to help out with computerizing the ministry. That was a huge break. Another huge break was when my mother asked me to join her company which I later bought. And that was definitely a huge break in my life. And I can name so many that have come to me and it has always been women who gave it to me.

Mentor’s Influence: The idea behind mentors in Iceland is a fairly new thing so I had to think outside the box when it came to mentors. I would say overall in my life my biggest mentors were my parents. In my adulthood, and how they did it was feeding me with information, and talking openly about life and that the thing I think mentors in my mind has influenced me is to be open and to listen to other people’s views that has been my biggest learning point from mentors.

Steps to Success: The steps I took to succeed in my field were to do a lot of personal development, and find out what was important to me. I think it’s important for everyone to find their purpose.

Name: Nadja Piatka

Big Break: My first big break was getting the account for McDonald’s, and that was selling my low fat muffins to them. And I got to be good friends with the CEO and he grew to be a really great mentor to me. But it was starting as someone coming to them in a regional office with my idea, my low fat muffins, and finally getting to head office. It was a process, but it was through believing and having the best product out there and not thinking that what I was doing was impossible. Though later, the CEO of McDonald’s said that generally it’s a slam door policy and I had a better chance of winning the lottery.

Mentor’s Influence: I really believe in mentors, whether you are a mentor or mentoree. We grow and we really need to have other people’s experiences. I have always belonged to a group of women called the Equinox, and it’s just a cluster of women that we formed in Calgary. We are businesswomen who meet once a month, have dinner and share our challenges, our successes, anything that we can talk about freely and confidentially amongst ourselves. That was such a beneficial experience that when I moved to the United States, to western New York, I formed a group of women. We call ourselves the Equinox and continue to meet once a month for dinner and just share our experiences, our businesses, personal, whatever there is to talk about. We take turns to tell everyone how we are doing and it’s a great thing to do because sometimes when you are an entrepreneur it can be a solitary occupation. The mentors I have gathered around me or mentor to, have been really great. Also, I find in my consulting business it allows me to mentor, and again I feel there is so much for you to learn from everyone around you.

Steps to Success: Because I didn’t have the resources to go the easier route, the first step was to start small in my kitchen. I would get up in the morning at 4 o’clock and start baking and I would sell to little coffee shops in the city I lived in.

After I was on the Oprah show people contacted me because they had this product, this idea, and they would give it to friends and family for free and everybody loved it. But when you are giving things away for free you don’t have a neutral or unbiased focus group. You have to test the market with your product, and have people who are willing to buy it, and buying it more than once, then you have a product that the market will sustain.

If you’re just depending on friends and family, if they like it, it really isn’t a true sense of what the market will do in this very competitive business that we’re in. And every business has to have the ability to rise above everyone else’s, so what I did was tested it in the field with smaller shops, and then grew from there. That is one of the ways that I would recommend to people is to find out if the market will sustain their products.

A lot of people have an idea, they have a product that they want to get out to the market and they spend an awful amount of money on the packaging. By the time you have something that you haven’t even sold, I see people have put hundreds of thousand of dollars into a product before they have even sold one dollar of it. There are ways to do that without such a huge investment with your product and I try to advise people that there are ways to do that. There are many steps to be successful in your field and one of the biggest steps is controlling and having a handle on how much money you’re spending. I’ve seen people run out of money before they made one sale.

Name: Annemie Ress

Big Break: I have never really planned anything and things usually just happen, but the biggest opportunity I had was being asked if I wanted to work in Switzerland by a professor I was studying with, and saying, “Yes, that would be great,” not thinking for one second that I’d get the job. He obviously had more confidence in me than I did in myself and the next thing I knew I was on a plane and working in Switzerland. That’s my biggest break, having someone have faith in me. I had no international experience, I was South African, and had never worked abroad, but had someone believe in me and that has opened doors for me to work globally.

Mentor’s Influence: My mentors have taught me the amazing power of powerful questions, and how you don’t necessarily need to guide by telling, but that wonderful things can happen if you’re open to asking questions and always thinking that you don’t have all the answers but that by asking powerful questions in a given circumstance you can unlock many possibilities.

Steps to Success: Relationships and sponsorships and being authentic. It’s about building meaningful relationships with key opinion makers and stakeholders at all levels in your organizations. It could be with the person who brings you your coffee in the mornings, if you work in that type of environment. Or it could be with the security guard who is at the entrance when you come in to work, or the president of the corporation. But it’s not just about the relationships, it’s also about celebrating the uniqueness in the other person and really connecting with them authentically. In my environment that’s the one thing I’ve tried consistently to do because it builds trust, integrity and respect and that stands you well in both good and bad times.

From what you have  read, does Big Breaks + Mentoring + Hard Work = Success? Tomorrow we will look at five men.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Further Reading

Patty DeDominic Interview (Part I), (Part II)

Kamel Hothi Interview (Part I), (Part II)

Runa Magnusdottir Interview (Part I), (Part II)

Nadja Piatka Interview (Part I), (Part II)

Annemie Ress Interview (Part I) (Part II)

These are some of the people I interviewed this year to act as your mentors. In case you missed any of the interviews, when you get the opportunity, take a moment to read them. While you are reading the interviews, think of what you have in common with the interviewees, and ask yourself, what can I learn from them that I can use in my work and life? You can also find these interviews and more on the Mentors page of the blog

1. Mind your Qs please! She was the first female CEO of a steel company in Canada (Part I) (Part II)
2. She left a successful search consulting business to become a human excellence coach (Part I), (Part II)
3. The life coach who is also an artist (Part I), (Part II)
4. Someone who knows what leadership is about (Part I), (Part II)
5. The “hip accountant” (Part I), (Part II)
6. The entrepreneur’s friend (Part I), (Part II)
7. Head of PR for a technology firm, a writer, and very witty (Part I), (Part II)
8. The social justice film producer (Part I), (Part II)
9. A mentor directed her path to success (Part I), (Part II)
10. Someone who is a career and employment counsellor and a LinkedIn Heavyweight (Part I), (Part II)
11. A leadership and career coach, and a very straight shooter (Part I), (Part II)
12. An internet marketer and social media trainer (Part I), (Part II)
13. Someone who is a relationship builder (Part I), (Part II)
14. An IT executive who sang at her own wedding (Part I), (Part II)
15. Someone who is into food safety (Part I), (Part II)
16. She is an Assistant Deputy Minister (Part I), (Part II)
17. As a youngster he read biographies (children’s) of “great people” which taught him the importance of reading and learning from the experiences of others (Part I), (Part II)
18. The founder of Athena International (Part I), (Part II)
19. A successful business owner who attended 17 schools in three countries while growing up (Part I), (Part II)
20. Founder of Connected Women (Part I), (Part II)
21. Someone who was a former editor of Chatelaine Magazine (Part I), (Part II)
22. She started in the library and ended up in the executive suite (Part I), (Part II)
23. She launched the International Women’s Festival, and also operated a very successful business which she sold (Part I), (Part II)
24. Someone who died for four minutes (Part I), (Part II)
25. Someone who used to hide under the table from bill collectors, now she is a success story (Part I), (Part II)
26. When she first became a leader, she was referred to as Godzilla, but a mentor helped to smooth off the rough edges, now she is a remarkable leader (Part I), (Part II)
27. His best friend was embezzling so he gave him the opportunity to do the right thing (Part I), (Part II)
28. A busy senior level banking executive who escapes from it all through fiction (Part I), (Part II)
29. Someone who is a CFO of a restaurant chain (Part I), (Part II)
30. Someone who is a marketing and communications consultant (Part I), (Part II)
31. Someone knows what it means to fall down seven times get up eight (Part I), (Part II)
32. Someone who is an entertainer and comic artist (Part I), (Part II)
33. Someone who is a goldsmith and jewelry designer (Part I), (Part II)
34. An entrepreneur who blends health and technology (Part I), (Part II)
35. The medical doctor (Part I), (Part II)
36. The serial entrepreneur with mild superpowers (Part I), (Part II)
37. Serial entrepreneur and expert interviewer (Part I), (Part II) (Part III), (Part IV)
38. Founder of First Fridays (Part I), (Part II)
39. Someone who does cross-culture consulting (Part I), (Part II)
40. This senior executive made a tough decision that no parent should ever have to make (Part I), (Part II)
41. The reinvention guy (Part I), (Part II)

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Interviewee Name: Mike DeSousa

Website: http://www.mikedesousa.ca

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Mike DeSousa:  I am a Career Social Media specialist who helps recruiters & employers find superior employee talent FAST using Social Media.  As well, I am a Public Speaker who trains Non-Profit Agency staff on how to market their job-seeking clients, helping them to find work FAST.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Mike DeSousa: Waking up at 6am, work at 7am reviewing daily goals set the night before, create presentations, researching clients online/phone networking, sourcing opportunities, setting up appointments, cleaning up paperwork, invoicing clients/following up on  building an online presence & my community, and learning new Social Media.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Mike DeSousa:  I focus on attainable short-term & long-term goals that move me towards my desire outcomes that I list on my Vision Board. Also I LOVE learning about new resources (Social Media & other), acting on new opportunities, and CREATING innovative opportunities & successes. Speaking to me puts me in the Zone, especially when my audience appreciates both the knowledge that I impart and my entertainment value (“edu-tainment”).  About 5-10 people approach me after one of my presentations, which tells me that I’m adding value to their lives and helping them out, as a “Social-preneur”. I love helping others, using my gifts — this is what makes me happy and I strive for in my legacy: being of service to others and making an empowering impact in their lives that moves them forward toward their committed goals. Conversely, I dislike working with people who state their goals, though are not committed to do the prep, work to reach them, and expect these goals to magically appear.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Mike DeSousa:  Take entrepreneurial courses, found business mentors, apprenticed under great people, start my own part-time business earlier, set compelling goals with deadlines, act on my gut instinct — I saw the value in the web in the early 90s, before it was mainstream, and my lack of action to follow my gut instinct cost me huge financial opportunities.  Never waste time crying over spilt milk: there are always other opportunities — look, observe, read, ask questions, study…don’t wait for them to find you: find them and create them.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Mike DeSousa: That I can do and achieve great things NOW (vs. in the future) and that I need to leverage the power of volunteers and interns to help me get there.  Setting aggressive goals and finding ways to achieve them are critical.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Mike DeSousa: 1. Not acting fast enough 2. Self-limiting beliefs 3. Not working on priorities & getting caught up with trivia.  I resolve these three threats by:

1. Waking up earlier to get more work done
2. Giving myself positive self-talk, and
3. Focusing on 1-3 long-term, capacity-building priorities each day (am getting time management software to help me with this last one).

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Mike DeSousa:

1. The creative way that I combine many different sources & the way that I show people how to apply this (vs. theoretical knowledge)
2. Innovative workshops on the latest programs, before most people have heard about them (early adopter)
3. Imparting wisdom while entertaining/motivating my audience & challenging them to take one action step right after the seminar

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Mike DeSousa: Failing swimming classes as a kid and watching other kids get their swim badges was a pivotal moment and great learning experience for me.  It resolved me to work harder, set goals, persist, get help, have patience with myself, and persevere in front of a challenge.  To this day, when I am faced with a challenge, I draw upon this experience to remind myself of the habits that caused me to climb out of a valley of a “learning experience”, into a successful mountain peak.  Failing a few swimming lessons as a kid was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it allowed me to react positively to it and gave me a great background that I use to this very day. Incidentally, the determination that I gained from these early “learning experiences” propelled me to eventually train/teach swimming instructors and lifeguards, rank in the finals of one Provincial Lifeguard Competition in Spinal rescues, and complete an Olympic Distance & IronGuard triathlon.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Mike DeSousa: My Best Friends kept on pestering me to act on my Public Speaking gifts, and I finally listened to them when I realized that other speakers who were less polished and knowledgeable than me were making a great living because they were marketing better.  My Best Friends take credit for my “Big Break” with helping me to ‘reprogram’ my self-limiting beliefs, reminding me of my strengths, and encouraging me to take action.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Mike DeSousa: One of my biggest failures was entering a depression (which I didn’t recognize or know what a “depression” or its symptoms were, so it remained undiagnosed) and consequently failing first year university.  I took an inventory of all the lessons that I learned that year, knowing that I would eventually return. When I did return, I took out my “lesson sheet” and created an action plan that fuelled my work ethic, goal-setting, and discipline, and propelled me to the top of my class.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Mike DeSousa:  One of the toughest decisions I’ve had to make was to face the fact that I “quit” in a couple of key pivotal moments in my life, when I promised myself that I would never do this.  With reflection and journaling, I discovered that sometimes, there is nothing wrong with “quitting”, as long as you learn something, grow from it, re-frame your experiences, strive to be a better person, help others, develop patience, compassion, kindness, and understanding for both yourself and for others.  I developed new meaning from this to learn the “assumptions” that informed my “quitting”:

1. Avoid comparing myself to others in certain ways (rather than to myself and seeking to focus on my own “Personal Bests”)
2. Not finding and communicating with a mentor who could explain to me how my self-limiting beliefs were holding me back.
3. Not willing to admit/refusing to admit my weaknesses to myself or to others

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Mike DeSousa:

1. Moving to Toronto as a teenager, and having to re-start my life in a new environment, having to make new Friends from scratch, and emerging successful from a tough transition
2. Going into Leadership Aquatics, which developed my teaching skills, speaking skills, and supervisory skills
3. Going back to school (university) as a mature student, which opened up new opportunities to me, helped get self-limiting beliefs and the monkey off my back, increase my awareness of undiagnosed depression in my life (which I got help for, keeping me healthy and stable for the past 4 years) and propelled my career in a new direction.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Mike DeSousa: Winning a 1,200m high-school wide running race as a 15 year-old. I had just had a growth spurt after being a pudgy kid, and I resolved to become more athletic.  I had a great cross-country fall running season, and a good track training season.  I trained in track and got some advice from our gym teacher (“stick with the race leaders from the beginning”).  At the starting line, I tripped and fell. I picked myself up and started jogging, when all of a sudden I felt a roar inside me “NO!!!” (Don’t give up), and knew that I would give it my all, and that I would rather fail this way than to just throw in the towel. I caught the race leader on the 1st lap, and stayed with him for the whole race, despite feeling like I was going to die.  Each time someone cheered for him, it strengthened my resolve and I pretended that they were cheering for me.  I breezed past him in the final 300m.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Mike DeSousa:  I’ve learned many great things and unique lessons from different mentors.

1. As a youngster, I would read the (kids version) biographies of Great People (e.g. Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, Benjamin Franklin, etc.), fables and stories, and Marvel Comic Books, all of which made me feel that there was World-Class Greatness and a Hero inside of me awaiting to emerge — in what area I didn’t know, though I knew it in my gut and Soul that I “had it, whatever this area of greatness was.”
2. Peter Fujiwara, my most important mentor and high-school teacher taught me to strive for Excellence in all aspects of one’s life, to seek balance, and to believe that you could do anything and not to listen to the “experts” or take self-limiting advice from “mentors.”
3. Mr. Dixon, another mentor high-school teacher taught me the value of hard work (“Brains without hard work is wasted talent, Mike.”).
4. Alexander the Great taught me to be strategic. A common lesson each of these taught me was to wake up early and outwork others.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Mike DeSousa: Outwork, out-strategize, and be of service to others.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Mike DeSousa:  Pick an invisible mentor from one of the “Greats” of all time and an existing one who resonates with your personality, your needs, and/or your direction.  Read everything you can and learn from each. Picture them talking to you, giving you advice.  Contact the “existing/living” mentor!

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