Good Leaders: What does mentoring mean for you?

Eight years ago today – Halloween in 2009 – I quit my job to start Good Leadership Enterprises. It was the strong, encouraging voice of a mentor who helped me turn the question in my head from, “Can I really do this?” into a declaration, “I CAN DO THIS!”  So, along with celebrating Halloween, we’re also celebrating mentoring.

Everything old is new again

Last week Melinda and I were guests at the kick-off of the 2017-18 Gustavus Mentoring Partnership – a program we helped start several years ago to connect students with Gustavus Alumni or parent mentors to help them find their way. I was asked to be the speaker. Here’s one of the things I said:

Formal mentoring is a relatively new concept in the evolution of college life. But it’s really just organizing what’s been happening since the beginning of mankind.

If you think about it, centuries ago when people lived off the land, mentoring was necessary for survival. The tribe needed the young people to learn hunting, farming, cooking, and child-raising to carry on. Somewhere along the way, the kids figured out it was more fun to learn those things from someone other than their parents. That’s mentoring!

Bring a student to the Good Leadership Breakfast for free

So, to fan the fires of mentoring, we want you to bring a high school or college student to the Good Leadership Breakfast on Friday, November 17. It’s the last Good Leadership Breakfast of 2017, and we chose speaker Joe Cecere, a local design firm executive to share his thoughts on Future: How design thinking can shape your work and your life. He caught the design bug creating window signs in his family’s Italian restaurant – encouraged by a mentor!

If you can convince a student you know into skipping school that Friday morning, we’ll have a facilitated conversation about how Goodness Pays, and The Seven Fs following the breakfast.

Register that student here, and receive a free student ticket.

Good leaders find ways to mentor because it helps bring out the goodness in others. And when we bring out the goodness in others we all thrive together.

Special thanks to Mark Bergman, the inventor of the HANDy Paint Pail – he’s the guy who mentored me into changing the dialogue in my head. And he’s graciously matched the donations into the Bucket of Goodwill for more than seven years now. He’s a good leader who radiates goodness.

Please tell me: What student will you bring to the breakfast?