Maximize Your Time With Your Mentor: Prepare The Questions You Want to Ask
The first time I sat down with someone whom I had formally identified as “mentor”, I had no idea what to expect, ask, or even what to talk about specifically. I just knew that having a mentor was important and one of the key elements for my professional development.
I sat down at a coffee shop, waiting for my mentor to walk through the door. We had never officially met, nor did we have any acquaintances or friends in common. I had used a tool that matched mentors and mentees and saw him as one of my potential mentor matches. I reached out and scheduled a time to meet. There I was sipping my americano, wondering what I should expect. I knew the basics about a mentor-mentee relationship, but I had never “formally” been in one (I had already been in plenty of them without me recognizing them as such, but more on that in future posts).
My mentor walked through the door and I waived. He sat across the table and we introduced ourselves; we spoke a little bit about our background. “What do you want to get out of this meeting?”, my mentor asked. “I want to know what the key elements are for me to succeed in my role and take my career to the next level”, I was quick to reply. My mentor nodded. He proceeded to ask me a series of questions — in hindsight, I see he was following the Socratic method to really get to the crux of what I wanted.
Our thirty minutes passed, we shook hands. “Let’s meet again in the future and let me know how things go,” he said. I nodded and walked back to my office. As I walked back I still didn’t feel that I had taken full advantage of those thirty minutes — I didn’t feel I had learned anything groundbreaking. At the same time, I knew I hadn’t prepared a concrete request— what do I really want? How do I want this person to help me, specifically? After all, this person had taken time out of his busy schedule to meet me and hoping to have an impact — had I really made good use of our time? The answer is yes and no.
If I hadn’t taken this first step, I would have still been doing my day-to-day job without expanding my network or looking for a mentor. These thirty minutes showed me that I needed to first take a deep look at my career needs and how to ask for help. After our first meeting, I started putting pen to paper formulating ideas of what I wanted to accomplish. My ideas were still vague — mostly because this was the first time I worked at a big company where I had been in for a little under two years. There were so many possibilities, it honestly felt like the paradox of choice.
Our next meeting was still vague in terms of what I wanted to get out of it, but it had improved. I had better questions to ask compared to my “I just want to succeed” declaration in our first meeting. As time went by I started to understand that, just as you craft a business mission, vision, metrics of success, and opportunity sizing, you should do the same for your own career path. After all, you are a business yourself, whether you’re an entrepreneur, “renting out” your time to a company, or any other way you want to look at it. To paraphrase one of my favorite authors, Simon Sinek, you need to find your “why”. Only then can you reach out to mentors or other folks to learn about the “what” and the “how” to get there.
Finding your objective or your why doesn’t have to be overnight. You may still be exploring, and that’s completely fine. You don’t have to have all the answers right away and things might change over time. However, taking the time to ask yourself what you want is key. Otherwise, no one will make choices for you — a mentor does not make choices for you, they can only guide you. You need to let them know where you want to go. It would be like stopping someone on the street and asking for directions. You first need to tell them where you want to go before they can tell you how to get there.
Once you know your “why”, formulate a set of questions around how to get there. These questions might evolve over time as you have new information and more experience. Tim Ferriss makes a great point about asking the right questions in his book “Tribe of Mentors”. In his book, he asks the same set of questions to hundreds of top performers in his network. You may want to use the same approach — asking the same questions to different mentors — or designing a specific set of questions depending on the expertise each mentor brings to your table.
In the end, the time both you and your mentor are investing in each other is precious. Having a prepared set of questions based on your “why” will make things far simpler for your mentor, you will maximize your time together and you will learn valuable insights that can get you closer to your goals. Over time, you’ll start seeing tangible results.
It’s always a work in progress for sure. I still have to perfect my own set of questions, they’re always evolving as I learn more and garner more experience. If I compare my first “official mentor-mentee meeting” to my current meetings with different mentors, I can see the tangible evolution and impact. Try it — take the first step (if you haven’t already) and formulate your own set of questions based on your “why”. You’ll see what difference it makes.
