Finding the Best Mentor for Success.

This isn’t a new model. The same system extends back at least to the Middle Ages. The apprenticeship system was still in place a few decades ago for training architects and lawyers. Modern mentoring can be anything from casual, unpaid, and part-time to a professional, paid relationship.

My conception of the best mentoring isn’t about career boosting or learning a skill. I believe there are intangibles that are not taught so much as assimilated. The mentor’s way of dealing with people, his or her sense of self-esteem and worth, the balance between work and play, and many other things can be silently imparted. Without them, on the other hand, learning a job skill or gaining an influential connection can be short-sighted. Even more profound is a connection made at the level of consciousness. In India, a guru is a kind of “awareness mentor,” one might say. The same was true for the circle of well-born Athenian youths who hung around Socrates. In a way, it’s too bad that emotionally loaded words like guru and disciple are used to describe this kind of mentoring. In reality there’s something so valuable about having an awareness mentor that wider recognition needs to be paid.

Without using the term awareness mentor, the skills acquired in awareness are invaluable. These include:

• Focused attention
• Immunity from distraction
• Being centered, especially under pressure or in a crisis
• Knowing who you are at your core
• Holding on to your own truth
• Mastering the art of listening

Whether we realize it or not, each of us has a certain ability, of lack of it, in each of these areas. Where were they acquired? Everyone owes some portion of their consciousness to other people–parents, teachers, friends–who had a formative influence somewhere along the line. The spectrum of a thing as basic as attention runs all the way from attention deficit disorder to Samadhi, the yogi’s ability in meditation to go deep inside for hours or even days. I think everyone’s nervous system is designed to absorb awareness skills like a sponge. But the process is so subtle that we don’t see what’s really happening all the time. Awareness expands while you think you’re doing something else. So every mentoring relationship has a consciousness component to it. In my view this should be the major component.

A prime example unfortunately comes from the negative side. The 2007-2008 economic crash was rooted in distorted consciousness, an infamous combination of ambition, greed, and recklessness in the financial sector. The worst exemplars of the Gordon Gecko “greed is good” paradigm found themselves running major commercial banks and investment brokerages. Newcomers to the craft of banking, investing, or trading wanted to be like these leaders, and eight years later, unfortunately, many still do. Graduates of the best colleges continue to flock to Wall Street in hopes of making so much money that they can walk away and wash their hands at age 25 or so. But even if this scheme works, how much has improved in their personal evolution? Have they been exposed to the values of expanded consciousness or the opposite?

Since public shame is meaningless in this context and punishment for their misdeeds has been negligible, an entire generation of bankers, brokers, and traders is in serious need of an awareness mentor. Only by exposure to another level of consciousness can lessons be learned on the inside. But we don’t have to single out Wall Street alone. Society in general, from CEOs to union leaders, from politicians in Washington to sports heroes, lack the qualities of inspiration, character, higher vision, common humanity, compassion, forgiveness, and even simple truthfulness.

These qualities aren’t imparted by sermons. They are assimilated by contact with a person who possesses them, and the more direct the contact, the more lasting the influence. So look for someone as a mentor who personifies, not what you want to materially achieve, but the kind of person you aspire to be.