I was invited to speak at a local women’s event yesterday by Indian Business & Professional Women (IBPW) celebrating its 20th year. The theme of the event was both mentoring and Life Hacking: Career, Health, and Spirituality. The following are an adapted version of my remarks at the event:
Since this was a women’s forum I’d like to share some of the life’s hacks that are particularly apt for business and professional women. Of course, men can adapt them, too, for their needs as appropriate.
So, here are my three hacks!
The Serotonin Hack:
First, there is much mystery about mentors and mentoring. Finding a good mentor and knowing how to leverage that relationship to grow your career and to better your life can be transformative. The problem is often that people look at it more transactionally than they do to build a deep relationship with their mentor to benefit from their experience and wisdom. Most accomplished leaders are open to mentoring if you approach them in the right spirit. What a mentor is looking for in return for their investment in you is some satisfaction from guiding you and from making you successful.
So, if you find yourself someone to mentor you, you can build that relationship to give them what they want from it and benefit from it in return manifold. What is gratifying to most mentors is that you acknowledge their contribution to your growth and success. So, when your mentor provides you some guidance to advance in a particular way and you succeed in that endeavor you must acknowledge that by telling them and by thanking them with specifics of how their help made you successful. This is what I call the serotonin exchange: They provide you mentoring and you give them a rush they get from the release of serotonin when they glow in acknowledgement of your success because of their mentoring. This takes very little on your part but it helps cement that relationship, so important to meaningful mentoring. Also, it is a good idea to have many mentors at any given time, who can enrich your perspective in different ways. The other thing to remember about mentors is that you need to have a board of mentors at any given time, much like your own Board of Directors. Throughout my life I had many mentors from whom I have benefited.
The Mindset-Shift Hack:
Now, for the next hack, especially for women: As a career coach I have worked with over 6,000 clients in many countries. Many of these clients are women at various levels in their jobs. What I find interesting about coaching them is that when they face setbacks in their life or their careers they often wonder about themselves. They are good at personalizing their defeats or setbacks rather than taking them personally and acting on them to change things for themselves.
For example, if they get a rejection after a job interview they come and ask me what is wrong with them (this is personalizing their defeat). A man, on the other hand, asks me what he needs to do to improve his interviewing skills (this is taking their setback personally, so that they can make a change). The same is also true about pursuing job opportunities. I find that, often, women who meet nearly 100% of the required job qualifications think that a man meeting only 60% of those same qualification is better suited for that job than she is. So, the hack here is to shift your mindset and to learn how to think differently about yourself. It is one of the hardest things to overcome but one of he easiest things to do. Try this hack and see how it transforms your view of yourself!
The Self-Story Hack:
My third hack is about story telling: We all grew up as children listening to and reading stories. Somehow, as adults we forget how important stories are to shape our own lives. Most clients I first meet are not very good at telling their stories. Instead they are great at bragging about all the things that they have done, but when I ask them, So, what is your story, they fumble.
What I have come to realize is that it is not the story you tell others that matters; what matters is the story you tell yourself. Here, I’ll give you my own example: I started to do career coaching about 18 years back, right after the dot-com bubble. This is now my fifth career and had my own doubts about its success. Initially, I’d introduce myself by saying, I do career coaching. It took me a few years to change that to, I am a career coach. It took me five or so more years to change that to, I am great career coach. When I changed my own story that I told myself, it transformed how it changed my coaching practice. So, what I learned from this experience is that you must learn how to tell your story to yourself before you tell that to others. Try it and see how it transforms how things happen for you.
Good luck!