As I See It: Who Feeds You?

by Victor Rozek

Sometimes, if you're lucky, just when you need it most, someone comes along who recognizes your potential. A person who values you enough to take an interest in your life, to share their wisdom, and perhaps guide your career. A person who is patient and encouraging, and for whom your aspirations are important. Someone who sees you with more clarity than you see yourself. Indeed, one of the greatest gifts you can receive when you're stuck, confused, hungry for knowledge, or lacking direction is the gift of a mentor.

Some of us were lucky enough to have a mentor when we were young and struggling. Mentoring relationships, however, are cyclical, and once their purpose is realized both people tend to move on. But what happens when the clock moves ahead several decades and we face a new set of longings? As adults, we may no longer struggle with confusion and have likely learned to harness the unfocused energy of youth. But although we may be settled and productive, an overdose of comfort and familiarity may leave us with a deep craving of a different sort--a hunger for inspiration.

The repetitious nature of most jobs--IT is no exception--drains much of the spontaneity and excitement from life. Which is one reason weekends are so anticipated: They offer the opportunity to do something different than what we're contracted to do with the rest of our time. For many people, aliveness occurs in predictable spurts beginning Friday at 5:00 p.m. and running through Sunday dinner.

If you're old enough to remember the original Kojak, you probably have an enduring mental image of the wry Telly Savales sucking a lollipop and chiding, "Who loves ya, baby?" Well, if Telly was getting weary of busting bad guys and beginning to feel like tinder waiting for a spark, he might ask himself: Who inspires you, baby?

In the abstract, we may have many candidates, but practically speaking, that's often a tough question to answer because the people available to us are also very much like us. To put it plainly, it's hard to be inspired by someone who's no more unique than you are. The hard reality is that the people who are most inspirational are usually dead or unavailable.

Which is somewhat ironic, because for a society obsessed with uniqueness and rugged individualism, we have amazingly few people who exhibit either of those characteristics. Instead, we find comfort in conformity. Drive to work and all of the rugged individuals around you are driving similar cars and wearing interchangeable clothing. They come from predictably shaped houses and go to predictably repetitious jobs. They listen to the same syndicated media, spout the same packaged insights, and struggle against the same short list of dysfunctions. And what's inspirational about that?

Even the rebels of any generation tend to look and act like other members of their peer group. Beatnik, hippie, grunge, goth, hip hop; same, same, same as snowflakes. Oh sure, there may be subtle differences, but you'll have to strain to see them. Culturally, the expectation is not that any of us will be fundamentally different, but that we will become self-contained; able to go it alone, need no one, want nothing, eat pain like candy. Well, if you're not living in some remote part of Alaska, that expectation is unrealistic.

Bottom line: We all need help occasionally and finding a mid-life mentor requires someone exceptional. It probably doesn't help that the bar on what we consider to be exceptional rises as we become wiser and more discerning. For that matter, with maturity we may also become hardened in our beliefs and convinced of our limitations and therefore restrictive of the diversity of influences available to us. If we found a mentor, would we even listen?

At least when we were young, mentors found us; but in middle age, few people care about our potential if we haven't already fulfilled it. So, if we want assistance gaining clarity about a career move, or need additional confidence to overcome inertia, there are few alternatives but to take the initiative ourselves. As people who wait to be rescued eventually discover: No one is coming.

But how to go about it? Saying "Hi there, would you like to be my mentor?" lacks something in both subtlety and dignity. But what if we shift the focus slightly from the actor to the action; that is, look to the outcomes we wish to accomplish rather than the availability of someone to inspire us. Inspiration, then, becomes an inside job and what is needed is not so much a classic mentor, but a coach.

Happily, coaching is a purchasable commodity.

Coaching, as a profession outside of the sporting arena, is a relatively new phenomenon. It has grown in popularity, in part, because it provides adults with a practical version of mid-life mentorship. One of the functions of personal coaching--identical to the aspirations of mentorship--is to help you perform to your highest potential and assist you to stretch beyond what you thought was possible.

As defined by the International Coach Federation, coaching is "an ongoing partnership that helps clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives." If that sounds vague, it is by intention because in a coaching/client relationship, the client is in charge and is therefore free to create whatever results he desires.

The major difference between coaching and other modalities such as classroom instruction, therapy, consulting, and mentoring, is that the coach does not purport to have all of the answers. While those other disciplines focus primarily on a problem state, seeking to fix it through the application of knowledge or advice, coaching is concerned with outcomes. A good coach does not provide expertise, but rather elicits solutions and strategies from the client. The presupposition is that the clients are creative and capable, and that they have all the resources they need.

The stumbling block for most people is that all resources are not available in all contexts. For example, some people are very articulate when communicating one-on-one, but are terrified of public speaking. Others enjoy very successful careers, but suffer from a disastrous personal life. The job of a good coach is to help the client transfer resources available in one context to another in which they may be lacking.

Coaches also assist clients to be more flexible by expanding their repertoire of behaviors. They encourage them to try the unfamiliar, to venture into new territory, to take some risks. The specific goals are chosen by the client, and the coach keeps the client focused, accountable, and resourceful enough to surmount the obstacles which present along the way. During the process, your coach will become your biggest fan. In the words of John Whitmore, author of Coaching for Performance, "Coaching is unlocking the person's potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them."

Many CEOs and top managers employ personal coaches, as do nearly all top athletes. In fact, for every hour an athlete competes on the links, or the court, or the ice, he receives about 30 hours of coaching. For those committed to personal excellence, working with a coach is not an admission of lack, but a reflection of a desire to improve. As such, coaching offers us the opportunity to become our own mentors, finding within ourselves the inspiration we formerly hoped would find us.

Composer Ned Rorem, in his book Music from Inside Out, defined inspiration as "inhaling the memory of an act never experienced." For adults anxious for a deep lung-full of their own dormant inspiration, coaching may well unleash the creative winds.