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Glenn Mattson
Let's look at the value of mentorship. Building Blocks of success. Welcome back. When we look at mentorship, gosh, you've heard it a million times I'm sure people have said it, you've read it in other areas, you see it on social media, right? Mentors, mentors, get mentors. And it's a great idea of mentorship. Now, the reality is that when you look at the value of mentorship, there's so many studies out there that show a direct correlation between mentorship and business success. It consistently demonstrates that having a mentor or mentors significantly increases the likelihood of achieving your personal and your financial success.
Glenn Mattson
Look, speaking from my own experience, mentors have played an absolute insanely pivotal role in my journey, and in my success, and more importantly in all that in my ability to overcome and deal with the journey that I was on. So when we look at mentorship, let's take a look at in essence, there's really two different types, you have organic or natural. And then you have what's called structured. Now structured mentorship is really found in corporate America, where you're going to have a senior will mentor a junior or a newer person. And what they're really trying to do is impart experiences, impart wisdom, and impart historical situations that they can share with other people in terms of what worked, what didn't work and what to watch out for. So one of the things about mentorships is that inside of a corporation, if it's structured, historically, you will have someone two to three levels above you. And oftentimes, they're in the same department. Depending on if you're going up to leadership ranks, they may be in different departments or even different companies within the corporation. But historically, a mentor is an individual that has walked the path that you're either about to walk or you're walking now, they have successfully walked that path. And in a structured scenario, this mentorship has some dynamics to it, right? There's a purpose, there's a reason that we're doing the mentoring, the mentor does have to have a desire to be in that role. It's not just given to him or made because a mentor has to have certain criteria also, just like the mentee, but inside of corporate America is structured, you typically have areas that need to be worked on. And that's given to them by other people. Typically, there's a process that they meet, they have summaries, they have follow ups, and then the mentor does do some evaluation or write ups etc. So it works very well in structured scenarios. You may have someone who needs to learn how to potentially deal with you know, 30 or 40 people reporting to them when they only really had to deal with two. Maybe that now they're in corporate America and they have to navigate through the noise or navigate through the internals. That guy I know an awful lot of people that are in the world of sales, and they would say selling outside their company is seven times easier than selling internally. And again, mentors can give you insights on what's around the corner, what would work, won't what work because they've tried it, they've been here they've walked the walk. So that historical data is just really, really powerful.
Glenn Mattson
So when we look at that structured piece, if you ever have the opportunity, you definitely should raise your hand and say that you want to be part of it. If you don't know if they have one, you definitely should go look and find out if they do. You just go by going to your managers saying, hey, do they have a mentor program in the company? And if it's big enough, they typically will, smaller ones, they don't really have a mentorship program installed in terms of organic.
Glenn Mattson
Which then leads me to the second type of mentoring. And that's not structured that's actually organic. And what I mean by organic is, is that a senior will take a liking to a junior, and that just is tenure. That's all it is. And when they take a liking to that person, historically, what you'll find is the mentor can recognize certain values, they recognize certain beliefs, in the mentee. And in their mind is they like the person in air quotes. They like who they are, they like what they're trying to do. And in many cases, a organic mentor sees themselves in the mentee. So in an organic scenario, just like in a structured, you do need trust, trust is really critical when it comes to mentorship. Trust being that the mentee has to have the ability to honestly be a little naked, they have to expose some of their emotions or their feelings or where they're coming from. And you know, so that that's very important and a mentor, they have to understand that their part of their role is to socialize the mentee, part of their role is to help them understand the curves before the road gets there. So they both have this belief that it benefits both sides, right? And a mentor has to look at a mentee and say that I get just as much excitement, I get just as much joy of seeing my mentee grow as the mentor grows. So a really good mentor is just as excited as the mentee when they win. They get just as excited when they hit certain accolades because the mentor was impactful in that success. So organic is something that happens over time, organic is usually with a mentor will quite honestly give some tests to the mentee to see if the mentee is quite honestly willing of their time and energy and effort. So organic is really great. And if you ever have someone leaning in to help, take the advice, take the time, take the energy.
Glenn Mattson
Now mentees, there's certain rules to be a mentor. One is a mentor should be a leader within whatever they're mentoring you on. You don't want to go into a sales organization and have your mentor be number 65 out of 65 people, that's not what you're looking for. So a mentor historically has to have success, they have to be top of class, they have to have not just past success, but continuous success. The second thing a mentor has to have is they need to own what the proper way to do things are, for instance, if you're in sales, and your first call, looks like this, whatever it may be, you have to do one, two and three, a mentor does one two and three exceptionally well. They don't do just number three and skip one, two. So a mentor is in essence, a almost a walking billboard of what should be done and how to do it. So they know the process. They know what the company's processes and systems; they also abide by it. They're also very good at it. So a mentor has those.
Glenn Mattson
The third piece that's really important for a mentor, besides having excellence, and besides owning excelling at what they're doing, and being good at the job themselves, but also a mentor has to have that part of their DNA, where it's not an inconvenience, helping others and in essence a mentor. When their mentee wins, they're just as excited if they won, right? So a mentor has a very different mindset. They're helpers. But they don't do for, they're the kind of individuals that will say, this is how you do it now go get it done. And part of the quote unquote test is having you do it. So mentors are just phenomenal, they really are impactful. And again, just make sure that your mentor is the one that's giving you advice, sharing with you the right stuff, not noise, or the bad stuff. What I mean by that is, is that if you have a mentor inside of a company, and your mentor saying things like Don't try that hard, don't really push it, no one really cares anyways, that's not the advice that you're looking for from a mentor. And historically, the people that give you that advice are usually not in the top of the food chain. So again, mentors are supposed to displace success and failures, but how to navigate and grow. So they don't want to be someone who is giving you bad records, bad advice, and telling you to be an at least or right. So make sure that you your mentor is an eagle, not a not a turkey. Right. And you've heard me say that before.
Glenn Mattson
So when we look at mentors, a couple of things I'd like to share with you that I have found incredibly important, right, so a mentor, really is they have to have a shared synergy of vision, and drive, I have found my mentors are individuals that are just as committed, and have ambition and drive and the same level of commitment as I do. And that's kind of what made us work well together. So when you align yourself with individuals who share your vision, your drive, remarkable things can happen. Collaboration and collective efforts really amplify when your attitudes and your beliefs are in line.
Glenn Mattson
If you really look at the most successful entrepreneurial, you can look it up in Instagram, or YouTube or wherever and you look at it. And LinkedIn, many if not all, achieved greatness by working with like-minded individuals who complemented their skills, and really shared their passion. And so having those individuals that have the same mindset, what I call is the ingredients, right? The ingredients are how you look at the world, how you look at work, how you look at balance, and are they all in sync, and usually your mentors, the DNA internally, the attitudes, the beliefs, are very much in line with the other individual. Now how they get to the grocery store may be a little different, but they are in line.
Glenn Mattson
Years ago, in my journey, I've had many, many mentors. I remember back in my late 20s, I was 28 years old, I've been doing what I was doing for three years, maybe I was 29. Married, we just had our first little baby, right, our little baby girl. And our son was probably on the way. And at the time we had a semiprivate program that would happen in our office four times a month, and it was called the President's Club. And the President's Club is where clients of ours would come to our office and sit in a room and they would learn programs. Like we would have a program in listening and then the following week would be on the art of asking questions, and then it would be on prospecting. So they had a table of content that would be rotating to learn competencies, right competencies and behavior and attitudes and sales techniques. So in this President's Club, people would come back every single month for at least two of the four sessions. So you can imagine relatively quickly, the room where we would have anywhere from 60 to 80 people, sometimes it'll be about 20, but mostly 60 to 80. And it's the same people and after about 10 months, 12 months, a year and a half, some would slowly leave out, some would come in and it was just this movement. But over the years, keep showing up and sitting at the same tables with the same people, you start to have a relationship. And I had two individuals, Steven and Stefan. And Steve was older than I was. He owned a CPA firm. And Stefan was older than I and he owned a jewelry store. Now, Steven, Stefan, were both clients of mine. So realize they were coming to our office to learn sales. Coming to my program. I was teaching them, and we would go out to lunch a lot of times because the sessions we had in our offices were two of the four were full day programs. And when I would go out to lunch with a lot of the people that would attend the programs, it's pretty common. Well, Stefan was a professional soccer player in Europe for many years. And during lunch one day, he brought up this idea that he's done for years. So Steven and I are having lunch with Stefan and he brought up that when he was younger playing professional soccer, they would have, they didn't call them mentors, but in essence, they were men groups, right, or mentorships. And Stefan started talking about how when he was in professional soccer, and traveling to different countries, and playing for different teams, that that mentorship really shaped and had a massive impact in his life. And he was wondering if Steven and I wanted to start that process. Now, of course, there's some rules to this.
Glenn Mattson
The rule is, is that you have to be open. The rule is, there's no attacking, i.e. you can attack the idea, you can attack what someone said, or react to it, but not the person. Were also the other rule was no judgments. We weren't here to pass judgment, we were looking for an opportunity or an environment where we could openly have a conversation about a topic, we would want to talk about that when we were struggling, and the people around us could help us give some perspectives to it. So we had these little guiding principles, and we first showed up at Steve's house and we had a conversations and then it started to really develop. And then it took probably about three months where we would get together every other week or so or every third week. Because if you have it too far apart, you just don't build the relationship. If you have it too close, it just becomes more social. So when we would get together, really, Stefan in the beginning did most of the talking. And because Steve and I really didn't know what we were doing until we got comfortable and shared.
Glenn Mattson
So Stefan would talk about work, he would talk about his family, he would talk about his daughter, he shared with us. I mean, he had one point we had people with guns broke into his house. Remember, he was a jeweler, so he came home and there was you know, someone with a gun to his wife's head and his daughter's head with a, you know, automatic rifles in his house. Very troubling times. You know, what do you do when you're, you know, he grew up very poor. And they became very successful, obviously, and we talked about how and if that was doing, what was doing to his daughter, and in terms of moving into nice places, and is it corrupting her? Is it giving her the good values? So we had conversations that went everywhere. I shared conversations about me starting out, about building my business. And they shared because they both had their own businesses, even though they were a client of mine, they shared a ton of great information about growth, and being on the same page. And Steven is one of the ones that really, really black and white, and he was so adamant about this, is that he asked me years ago, when again in the very beginning. Does my wife know my goals? Such a simple little question. And I'll say, of course she does. The more I thought about it, she didn't. So Heather didn't really have clarity of exactly what I was trying to accomplish through work. She had the big picture. And I remember Steve talking about the two of us are a team. And the two of us are part of this. And would you give your team only the game plan, right? For the first quarter.
Glenn Mattson
I thought about it for a long time, it was probably one of the you know, it wasn't great thing. Went home, had lengthy conversations with Heather about what I was trying to create for us, the path I was going to need to take. The time, energy and effort that I need to put into the business to get that output. So all of a sudden it wasn't Glenn, creating a better life for Heather and the family. It was we were creating a better life for our family. So it was a phenomenal insight.
Glenn Mattson
So having the opportunity to really have mentorships was amazing. And I have had other mentors were individuals that I worked with, right, so for instance, one of my most influential mentors was a gentleman named Mark. Mark really helped me understand not what business was like when I was in my own business previously, coming into the training business. I got in and I worked for Mark. And the ability for Mark to be a mentor to me was phenomenal. And many things that he did. I want to give him credit that he had reason and purpose to it. But it could have been just genius luck. But Mark had really the ability to mentor me about planting my feet, about me actually making decisions in my life on how hard did I want the things I wanted? What was I willing to fight for? And he really started to have me understand there's big differences between things that you hope for and things that you want. And if you want things, are you willing to fight for them? And if you're willing to fight for it, what does that look like? And what Mark really pushed me to take a look at is, there are 1,000s of ways to be successful, they're all over the place.
Glenn Mattson
It's not the path to success. Mark would always say, whatever your path is, be consistent. So Mark's message was be consistent with your plan, whatever you decide to do, do it. So Mark was not a big person about let's talk about it. Mark was a very big person around action. Take action, then edit. Live by the world, the tracer bullets, it was fantastic. I would typically overanalyze things and think everything through so wouldn't drop the ball. And Mark had nothing, had nothing to do with that. He's like, you know what, let's get started. Do it, get into it, you're gonna drop the ball. Don't worry about dropping the ball, drop the ball's good. Every time you drop the ball, it's good, don't look at it as negative.
Glenn Mattson
So Mark was about action, not about talking. Mark was about commitment and follow through. And if you say you're going to do it, then do it. Be a person of your word. Mark also pushed me heavily to be my best. That's interesting, right? So having a mentor that when I do better, they do better, right? Because I was a salesperson. And the more I sold, the more I did, the more they made and obviously, the more I made, and the more we helped people. It was a great trifecta. But one of the things that was really impactful for me is each time I would take that staircase up and that staircase was growth and income. And for some people, a staircase may be a $5,000 step up. For some people, it could be a $50,000 difference. For some it's four or $500,000 difference from one year to the other in terms of growth. In a lot of respects, the growth number is conceptual. But what he taught me, what the mentorship helped me with is comfort zones and complacency. Mark would always say if my goal was for instance, just to do hypothetically, you know, 100,000 in a month, 10,000 a month 1,000 in a month, the number is not important, but if it was 100,000 and that was my goal. And I did it, the congratulations that Mark gave me lasted about 30 seconds, no matter how hard I had a bust my butt to get to that 100. Because he would always turn to me and say, but that's what your plan called for. Congratulate yourself for doing what the plan says and achieving it. After you're done patting yourself on the back for accomplishing what you should have, it's time to get back to work.
Glenn Mattson
Mark was real big on if you had a great month or a good month. Okay, so what? You had a good month. That was part of your plan. Don't sit on your morals. Don't sit back and say to yourself you're doing better than you should have. Don't have a comfort zone. Mark was like Attila the Hun, on making sure that you never had a comfort zone. If I had a big hit and you know made a nice commission, very common that people right after you have a nice commission, they slow down their behavior. Mark would make me double down. So every time I had a big head and nice commission, the DNA in the body was go get more. Follow your plan, congratulate yourself. But don't get too excited because that's what you're plan called for. Why are you excited about doing something that you were supposed to?
Glenn Mattson
So all these things are great for Mark. Mark also had this amazing ability, we call it EBS, equal business stature. The amount of confidence and presence that Mark had was insanely impressive to me. And he shared with me how to have that type of mindset. He also shared with me from very early on how to have conversations with people about money, how to be assertive without being aggressive, a lot of great things. Then, of course, you have family members, you have individuals that are friends, and I've been blessed enough to work with my family in certain jobs and certain careers. And that's a really interesting dynamic where having a brother, for instance, or a sister, that's part of the business are in the business. And you have to find out your area, where is your corner, right? What is your shadow? Having a brother or sister, especially if they're very successful in that field, some would take it as a negative. Reality is I think it's great. I have a brother, and he's a mentor has been a fantastic mentor, sharing with me things about work sharing with me things about corporate America and how to navigate through corporate America. It's been phenomenal.
Glenn Mattson
So one of the things I really want to make sure that for all of us listening in, that I personally have witnessed in experienced the massive impact of having a supportive network, especially in critical moments. Back in COVID, it was amazing in how we as Sandler trainers got together and really pooled our resources and helped each other through. But a mentor is really surrounding yourself who genuinely want you to succeed and can provide you with the support and motivation needed to overcome those challenges. So part of it is you got to build your network.
Glenn Mattson
So how do we do that? First thing I'll tell you is to join industry specific communities. Back in the day, that would be called networking, you actually show up at networking meetings, get to see somebody, get to see their face, walk over and say hello. Start to get to know them, who they are. And if you want to have icebreakers, I've given us in the past, it's called form. It talks about the family, you talk about the occupation, you talk about recreation, then you talk about money, which is work. So you can definitely do some small talk and get to know people. So for sure, finding someone or an industry specific community is good. Online forums are fantastic. I always like to look for mastermind groups where you can connect with like-minded people, like-minded successful people also. Make sure that when you're in there that you really are looking for shared vision, shared drive, shared values and attitudes.
Glenn Mattson
But I also have you think about this: when I was young Mark would bring me out to play golf with his friends. All of them were significantly older than me at the time. They are at a very different place in their professional careers and financial life. But one of the things that was amazing was to listen to them talk about money, how they spent it, what they spent it on, how much they spent? I remember Jeff one of Mark's friends, we were playing golf. My very first time I've met this guy, super nice guys, one of Mark's best friends. And Jeff is talking to Larry, which is another one of their friends and happens to be an accountant. That he just dropped $100,000 in his kitchen. Now you got to remember, this is 20 years ago. That's an enormous amount of money back then and I'm sitting there saying to myself, oh, my gosh, he just put more money into his kitchen, then is half the value of my house. And it put everything into perspective, very quickly, that I was looking at my life through my lenses and looking at any life through my lenses was very different.
Glenn Mattson
So being comfortable talking about money, what's a lot of money? Were all great things. So what I'm going to share with you is this, having those great conversations with Mark's friends, they were the most open, caring individuals, they would have shared anything with me, if I asked, and it wasn't because I worked for Mark and Mark was their friend. What I found was, is that most successful people do not mind sharing, and often will share, if you ask.
Glenn Mattson
So if you're someone that's looking for mentors, ask people. Flat out, ask, I'm starting my business. I know you're successful. I'm a high driver, who sticks to my commitments and works really, really hard. Love to have an opportunity to have a conversation with you to see if our like minds can be part of a mentorship program.
Glenn Mattson
I am telling you, team, you'd be shocked at how many successful people would love to share their journey with you and to be a mentor. Half of what makes mentors working with mentees is the courage they have to ask, because the mentor would have asked when they were younger, so they're impressed with it. Take a look at, there's lots of activities out there and lots of local networking events, community events, spiritual events that you can go to that all have that connective grouping. So when you go out look for mentoring, find someone who's successful, find someone who has a track record, find someone if you're internal at your own business that owns the systems, owns the philosophies that you're supposed to have and go broach them. And realize they're going to evaluate you. They're going to evaluate you on what you say and how you act. They're going to evaluate you on do you follow up? Are you like them? So after you meet with them if you have a meeting, don't be foolish send a follow up email. Two days later you should send them a thank you note in the mail. Hey, had a great time talking with you. I look forward to seeing more of it. I really found it impactful, and this is what I learned. So give the mentor the juice that hey, I learned something by being with you. Love to do it again. So we talked about networking last time and how to be a great networker. Today I want to talk about mentoring. Right networking is great mentor shift is very powerful. So in your journey, go find mentors. Find them internal and external. If you're a salesperson find someone that's internal, find someone that's on the distribution side, find someone who's on the product manufacturing side, find someone who's been in the company for a long time, has been successful for a long time. They will help and it will be helpful.
Glenn Mattson
Session Six mentorship; Building Blocks of Success. Learn to ask, learn to look and people will help you stay ahead of the curves on the windy road towards your success from an entrepreneurial standpoint. Enjoy.
Glenn Mattson
This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
Building Blocks of Success - S3E1 with Glenn Mattson: The Basics of Behavior and Goal Setting
Building Blocks of Success - S3E4 with Glenn Mattson: Power of Vision