Mentoring isn't about giving advice, it's about creating motion

Over the years I've been a mentor to a variety of people. Some are students at university and others are professionals who are in a very similar stage of life to me. I love doing it. Not exactly sure why though, but I have this inner desire to help people course correct their future and have a compounding effect on their happiness and impact.

But there's an elephant in the room. I'm yet to find a method really creates lasting change for those who I am helping. Maybe I'm just bad at it, but I also feel there is something else at play.

When mentoring, I often want to find out how I can help my mentee. We discuss what they're struggling with and what they want for their future. Sometimes they don't know what they want and we try to figure that out.

As the conversation unfolds, we start to form a path to get them to where they want to be going, then break this down into a starting task that they can carry out over the next couple of weeks.

Such tasks might be to write a blog post sharing their skills in a particular area—something very powerful if you're looking for a job. Or it might be putting their experience together in a portfolio, or record a video to share their expertise or passions. You know, something to start doing to dip a toe in the water.

Yet, almost always, they don't do the task.

"Oh, I didn't have the time" or "I thought about it, but I wanted to solve these other problems first" or "I've got a lot going on, I'll need to wait until the time is right"

It's a common pattern. And I think is the biggest single hurdle I need to figure out to truly help someone achieve the happiness and success they deserve.

What I keep coming back to is this feeling that your words are not your decisions, your actions are. It makes me think that what we discussed was off the mark and you really didn't want to follow it. After all, if it was something that really fired you up, you'd obsess about it enough that you'd do the task.

I often think that my mentoring style is best suited for people who are already in motion, not for those who struggle to get in motion. I find when you're starting out, there's a lack of willingness to fail—unless failing to try counts.

The task I set is not about completing the task. It's about gaining the skills that trying the task gives you. Want to start a YouTube channel, then record yourself on camera. Want to have a killer portfolio, then start by creating a rubbish one. Everything can be improved incrementally, and as you do it more and more, you gain the skills you need for it to become effortless.

There is another aspect of just doing it. When you're in motion of being a doer, you find yourself in places you never imagined possible. For example, my YouTube channel is closing in on 14K subscribers, with 1.4 million views. I didn't plan to do this, I followed the inspiration and took action!

The success of my channel came from serendipity by having a conversation on Twitter (before it was 𝕏). I had a pinned tweet about the Zettelkasten note-taking method and someone asked about it. I took the muse and said "I totally need a one tweet summary for this. Let me create something and get back to you."

Then I followed up with this image:

But this wasn't enough, I felt that I needed a video to explain the image. So I created a YouTube video on the topic. But after creating this video, I felt it needed some more examples to work with. So I followed up with another YouTube video. None of these were planned, it just made sense at the time, and I had the skills to action it.

As you can see, both those videos have performed quite well with a combined number of views of 640,000, 16,000 likes and 360 comments.

But it didn't stop there. Through this YouTube channel I was approached to give a seminar teaching the Zettelkasten note-taking method to PhD Students. This was at the Queen Mary University of London for their Artificial Intelligence and Music centre—of which I am very proud to have a payslip as an employee of the university for just one day!

But you'd think that would be enough. I followed my muse here and felt I wanted to have something to give the students at the end. While I didn't quite accomplish this, it sparked my journey to write Atomic Note-Taking—a 268 page book going from zero to hero in the Zettelkasten method.

And while I could just sell a book, I wanted to offer a video course, which ended up being 9.5 hours long, which accounts for 66% of the revenue. This book and course has gone on to sell over $35K, to over 700 customers in 70 countries across the world.

Think about that. All this came from a tweet replying to someone who was asking questions.

I appreciate this is quite a rabbit hole of events, but bringing this back to mentoring, I could only do this because I knew how to be in motion. I knew how to take action when the opportunity strikes. That comes from the 10,000 hours I put in over the years doing stuff. Building, writing, video creation, blogging, graphic design, etc.

So when I'm asking you to do a simple task, it's to help you get in motion. It's to help you have the skills where the act of doing is almost no effort. It's so you can get into flow of creating and then capitalise on the opportunity in front of you.

But alas, the biggest challenge is getting you in motion from being stationary. If you how to solve that, reach out to me on 𝕏 or send me an email.

And if you want to know why I wrote this, it's because Lee McLaren took the time to ask me and I shared my thoughts. And then I thought, this should be a blog post. I had the skills to be in motion, and here we are.