Passion Struck with John R. Miles - The Importance of a Mentor w/John R. Miles EP 11

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

What if you had a friend, a guide who was always there for you in your most difficult times? In today’s show, our host, John Miles shares how the importance of a mentor and why choosing the right one can make a massive difference to your life and career. Sharing his own experiences, John reveals how mentors have helped him immensely in his military, corporate as well as entrepreneurial career.  But, how do you find an accountability buddy who is equally invested in your success? How do you find someone who encourages you, but at the same time, is not afraid to call a spade a spade? John shares the 4C’s which will help you seek out the best possible mentor. Enjoy!  What You Will Learn In This Show The 4 C’s to help you find the right mentor who can take you forward How a well-meaning mentor can help you tide over your most difficult times How to find a mentor who is not afraid to call a spade a spade And so much more… Follow John R. Miles Here: Website - https://passionstruck.com/​ ​​ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_str​uck_life ​​Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Johnrmiles.c0m​ ​ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr​ ​​ Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles​ ​ John's Website: https://johnrmiles.com/​ - John's New eBook - The Passion Struck Framework https://passionstruck.com/coaching/​ - Follow Passion Struck on Instagram -https://www.instagram.com/iampassions​truck

I would encourage you not to pick someone who's going to take it easy on you, but to pick someone who you can really go to and who will tell you the truth. And they're going to give it to you with true authenticity and tell you if what you're doing is completely asinine or if you're on to the right steps. Welcome to the PassionStruck podcast. My name is John Miles, a former combat veteran and multi-industry CEO, turned entrepreneur and human performance expert. Each week we showcase an inspirational person

and message that helps you unlock your hidden potential and unleash your creativity and leadership abilities. Thank you for spending time with me today, and let's get igniting. [♪ music playing in background, music playing in background, Welcome to Momentum Friday. Author and pastor John C. Maxwell said, one of the greatest values of mentors is the ability to see ahead

what others and not see and to help them navigate the course to their destination. And I thought this was a great quote for today's episode on the four vital seas to picking a mentor in your life. But before I go there, I wanna talk about the last few weeks and the different podcasts I've been doing that let us up to here. I started with a podcast around confronting the brutal reality of whatever is going on in your life.

And then I went into a podcast around the mosquito principle and auditing out those influences, activities, and other things that are keeping you from your passion journey. And last week, I talked about how often we are a visionary arsonist in our own life and thwart the very thing that we want to achieve. So in this week's episode, I wanted to unpack the importance of having a mentor, coach, guide in your life. career and the four Cs I have found work time and time again the picking a mentor in your life. I hope you enjoy today's episode and let's get to unlocking

the power within. I want to start today's episode by taking you through three different stories. Once there was a young teenager growing up in Pennsylvania, he was just entering high school and decided that he needed a confidence boost because he was overweight, didn't have the greatest belief system in himself, and needed something to spur him forward. And so he decided to try out for the cross-country team, and at the same time ended up getting a part in the school play. And he was ridiculed because he wasn't the fastest on the team. In fact, he, at that point, was still overweight,

finding his roots, and many of his teammates laughed at him for attempting to take on a role in the play instead of being an athlete. And then there's a mother and grandmother. She is struggling. She is working for different jobs in Tampa Bay to help make ends meet. And yet there are times when she can't put food

on the table for her family. And there are three different occasions where she's evicted from the place she's living and has to scramble to find a home of herself and her family. And she is unable to do the one thing she loves more to do in life, which is to be a chef and to be able to provide great meals for her family and friends. and to be able to provide great meals for her family and friends. The one true passion that she really has. And then finally, there's a young farm boy

from very humble beginnings. He has never met or understood his parents or their influence in his life. And he was raised by his uncle. And unfortunately, just as his life is starting to move forward, his uncle is killed right in front of him in a tragic accident and he is thrust into the world without a guide or anything carrying him forward and is lost.

You know, I saw a troubling statistic today and I had an extremely hard time believing that it was true. It said in the United States alone, there are over nine million, I'll say that again, nine million children were living without a mentor. And it got me to thinking, could you imagine your own life without having a guide in it, an adult, someone who was pushing you forward, getting you to be better than you even thought

you could be providing you inspiration? And as I started to read this article, it went on to say how without that influence in children's life, there are a few of them graduate from college, few of them pursue their dreams. It leads to imprisonment, it leads to homelessness and the growing rise that we have throughout the country and the number of kids who are in foster care. It leads to the shattering of dreams. And it's hard for me thinking about that

to imagine my own life and the importance that mentors have had throughout it. You know, I remember being a young kid and being with my grandfather and him teaching me how to make homemade ice cream, or the first time he taught me how to time ice shoes, or my father teaching me, you know, for the first time how to use a drill or how to put something together, whether it was a rocket project or something I was helping him build in the garage.

And these influences our life are so vitally important. And I thought many of us go throughout life without having the proper mentors in life. And we often think we can do so much of our career, our well-being, our athletic feats, et cetera, without the help of others. And I'm here to tell you, we couldn't be more wrong. I have found mentors in my career to be indispensable.

I remember one of my first mentors was a gentleman by the name of Tuck Williams. And a few weeks ago, I did a podcast episode with him that I would very much encourage you all to check out. Tuck is one of the most authentic leaders I have ever met. And at the time, I was a new Anson, and he was a petty officer, second class in the Navy, and we deployed together on two different deployments. And I can tell you, without his guidance, his steering, his encouragement,

I would have just flopped on my face. And after leaving that command, I was then detailed to joint interagency task force south, where I was handpicked to be the executive officer of the Cruptologic Support Group activity at the command. And I found out I was going to be working for a person named Commander Fitzsendons. And I was excited about it because it was in Key West, Florida. And I thought, this is going to be an amazing opportunity. And then I started to hear about Commander Fitzsimmons.

And that his nickname was actually Commander Fitz Hitler. And so I got more worried and more worried and more worried before embarking on this next chapter in my life and hitting this command. But I thought I've never met this person, and so I'm going to go into this full gusto, jump both feet in, and see if the rumors proved to be correct. And they couldn't have been more wrong. Built that Simmons ended up being one of the greatest bosses

I ever had, and to this day, a huge influence in my life. Was he a hard boss? Extremely. He was tough on me because he wanted me to be the best version of myself I could be. And he got me to focus on things that I wasn't good at. I was not great at that point in my career at writing and knowing how to write succinct messages. And at this time, I was having

to send these messages out to the different ships aircraft, special forces teams, our allied partners from the different countries who were in the command and different people at NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. And he got me to be a better writer. He got me to have more confidence in myself to become a better speaker and to eventually take his place in speaking to major dignitaries, including the vice president, secretary of defense, and others when they would come to visit the command.

But more so than, for more than anything, I knew I could go to him with good news or bad news, asked him for advice, and I would always get the brutal truth from him. And he was both my critic, but he was also my biggest champion. And he would champion me to the admirals in the command to the four-star, at Southern command,

that the superiors and NSA to whoever would listen. And he also had my back. And I made some colossal mistakes, but he never criticized me in public. We would get back to the office and he would tear me a new one. But I learned from those mistakes. And he provided me such a solid foundation that is sat with me to today. So with that as a backdrop, I wanted to go over what I think are the four Cs that are vitally important,

finding a mentor in your life. The first C is a critic. And you might be saying, why on earth would I want to pick a critic? We'll just think about that last example I gave you with Commander Fitzsimmons and how he was my biggest critic at times, but by being that critic, he made me so much better. And how often do we try to find mentors And how often do we try to find mentors for our friends, or who we think, you know, is this big, gregarious person, or a popular person, et cetera? Too often, we shy away from finding those vital critics

in our life, we're gonna tell us the brutal truth like Commander Fitzsimmons did, and are going to act as our critical guide for reaching the destination we never even thought that we could achieve. I would encourage you not to pick someone who's going to take it easy on you, but to pick someone who you can really go to and who will tell you the truth. And they're going to give it to you with true authenticity and tell you if what you're doing is completely assinine or if you're on to the right steps. The second C would be coach. And what I mean

by a coach is I think it is vitally important for you to pick a guide mentor, someone who has been where you want to go. And let me give you a couple great examples of this. I knew, early on in my career, when I was at Arthur Anderson, that I wanted to go from being a senior manager to a partner. And one of the fallacies that they did was they would assign you a coach, which I think is sometimes the worst thing that you can do to a person. Because how do you know if those two people are going to mesh, where if that person really is the person you want to emulate becoming? And so what ended up happening with me is I ended up meeting with that mentor a few times and finding out they just weren't correct. And then I saw this

gentleman rust gates who at the time was leading the firm's risk consulting practice globally. And I really enjoyed the way that Russ interacted with people, the knowledge that he had, the enthusiasm that he had, and the fact that he had this visionary style that I so much wanted in my own career. And so I began courting him, and eventually he became my mentor and took me under his wings. And during that time, he taught me how to lead the cybersecurity practice for the Southwest, but then gave me the

opportunity when I came to him with an idea to start the firm's high growth mid-market practice. And then helped me as a coach to understand how to do it and the steps to take and not take. And similar to Commander Fitzsimmons, was he a critic with me? Absolutely. There were times I made mistakes along the way, and he was brutally honest with me about them. But more importantly, he guided me because he was one of the founders of the risk consulting practice, He guided me because he was one of the founders of the risk consulting practice. How I needed to go about this in the firm and how I needed to build this practice. And in a matter of about 18 months through his coaching, I took it from zero dollars to being a 10 plus million dollar practice. But if I hadn't had a coach who would have been where I wanted to go, I don't think I would have ever achieved it. And later in my career, I met

a gentleman named Jacek Gubinsky when I was the Chief Information Security Officer at Lennlis. And I knew that someday I wanted to be Chief Information Officer. And I knew that someday I wanted to be a chief information officer. And I needed to have guides in my life that would teach me how to get there. So I started working more and more closely with Jay. And he taught me so many coaching lessons that I still apply today. One of my favorite ones that he said that's in a chapter of the Passion Struck Framework is leaders speak with their feet. And there's two ways that you can look at this. How often have we seen a leader who is out with their troops, who is mingling with them,

who's being servant to them, who is understanding what's going on with them, and who is trying to impart their wisdom as a coach mentor, et cetera, on them. Compared to that leader who just sits in their office, closes the door, doesn't interact, have no idea what they're doing and doesn't provide any inspiration at all. Simple lessons like that help completely change the way

that I led others and seeing those principles apply not only when it comes to a leader, but when you're trying to launch an initiative and people actually speak with their feet, you can see coming out of a meeting if someone is going to talk about it versus someone who's gonna truly do something about it. And if it hadn't been for his coaching,

I would have missed that important lesson that over time I've applied again and again. Are you ready to overcome your fears and start committing yourself to mastery and growth in your life and career? If you are, we're ready to help you. Go to passionstruck.com slash coaching right now and you'll be able to download the Passion Start framework and connect with a member of our coaching team. The third C is counselor. And when I mean counselor, I'm talking about picking a mentor who actually put the time in like he would to pay a counselor

put the time in like you would to pay a counselor to work with you to spend time with you to understand what makes you tick and to counsel you on how to go from whatever point you're at to whatever destination you want to go. And similar to the examples I gave for Critic and Coach, I have been lucky to have some very good counselors in my path as well. And one of the counselors I really remember was a gentleman by the name of Steve Sylogy when I was at Lowe's. At the time, Steve had about 25,000 people under his leadership and he was the SVP of distribution systems, meaning he ran all the distribution centers for Loads. He eventually went on to become the head of supply chain at Loads, but he taught me so much and was such an influential counselor to me. And one of the most important things that he taught

me was how you ignite action out of the groups you lead. And I could not believe Steve at times. We would walk into a distribution center and to give you a sense, their below's ones are a million to a million and a half square feet and have thousands of employees at them. And we had flatbed centers where we had our no-work products and we had cross-load facilities where you take product coming off the ships and then you cross-dock it to the different distribution centers and transport facilities, et cetera. But I would go on these distribution center visits with Steve and he would know not only the names of about three quarters of the people in each one of these facilities,

but he would know their wives names. He would know their kids names. He would know activities that they liked. And because of that lesson, and how much the people were willing to go above and beyond, because they felt that Steve cared about them, I learned so much myself about how I needed and could become a better leader by following his guidance

and the counseling that he gave me. And it is vitally important that you find these counselors as well. And specifically, as I said at the beginning, someone who actually has the time to mentor you. Oftentimes we want a mentor who's out there, but they could be preoccupied with launching a new business. They could have a ton of initiatives that they're working on or something else.

So one of the things you have to figure out is, are they a critic, are they a coach, but also are they a counselor and do they actually have time, give you the counseling that you actually need. The fourth C I refer to as champion. I think this is one of the most important ones you could possibly have. I hit upon it in a couple of the earlier examples. You want to pick a mentor who can champion your costs,

who can send it out to the community or in the company or in the industry that you're in and be your biggest advocate for taking on new opportunities. I mentioned earlier how Commander Fitzsimmons did it for me by singing my praises to the admirals who were over the past force that we were on to the four star general who was at South Camp Command, the superiors at the CIA, FBI, DEA, etc. When we worked with, I talked about it. How Jay Skabinsky was not only a coach, but he was also one of my biggest advocates. He was also one of my biggest advocates. Ken and I ended up appearing in computer world together, network world.

He supported me getting my position at lows after I left Lenless. He has supported me throughout my career as I've needed advice, promotion, a reference, whatever it is, he is always championing me. And Steve Saladji did the same thing. As I was helping him and we were improving the performance, the distribution centers, he would champion my cause to everyone around who would hear it.

He would let them know that they could trust me and that if they did, I was going to make the performance of their unit better. And by having a coach like that, it helps you so much, the gain followers, the gain people who believe in you, and also to give you the confidence that you need take-take on each challenges. So I want to go back to the three initial stories that I talked about and apply the four seized each one of them. In the second story, I talked about a mother and grandmother who was really struggling to make ends meet and was working for different jobs. But then fate intervened. In one day, she was working one of those four jobs as an Uber driver.

When she picked up a client in the Uber, she was driving. And when she saw this person, she was immediately attracted to them. This person had kind of a bigger-than-life persona. Was dressed to the nines as she saw her picking her up at the airport in the heat of summer in Tampa Bay. And she got in the car and asked the lady, you know, what she did. And she explained to her that she was an international consultant and had just come back off an international trip and also a well-known worldwide DJ, some quite thing. And as they

began talking, the lady in the front seat knew more and more that she wanted to get to know her passenger better. And so she had talking to her passenger and started explaining all the different things that she was facing in her life. And as they started talking, the person in the backseat ended up really liking her and buying into the potential that she saw that she had, that power within. And so they exchanged numbers and a few days later, the passenger ended up calling the Uber driver, calling her that she would like to work with her.

And they began working together. And she was approached to her, she was a huge critic to her. She ended up championing where she wanted to go and became a counselor to voting tremendous amount of time. And that lady ended up helping the Uber driver figure out that she could launch her own business and actually pursue the dream that she wanted of becoming an executive chef. And she even did it with a twist.

She decided that she wanted to make food that was actually healthy and to show her clients how to eat delicious food paired in a very healthy manner. And in the matter of a year to 18 months, you went from almost being homeless to making over $150,000 a year and owning her own practice now, which is excelling in the Tampa Bay area. In the second story, that humble, farm boy whose parents he never met, whose uncles life was tragically taken in front of him ended up finding a guide. And that guide started to talk to him about the hour that he had within him and that he could achieve so much more and be like his father before him. Only he could use his power for good in the world and his father had unfortunately

his power for good in the world. And his father had unfortunately used it for negative. And he showed him the potential of a world where he could make such a profound difference in so many people's lives. And then he introduced him to an even bigger mentor who acted as his coach, counselor, critic, and champion. In this case, I'm talking about Luke Skywalker

and his guides were Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But if you think about that movie, I think it's a great story and example of the four C's that you want to find. And if you think about Ayoda and Obo, one Kenobi, both interacted with Luke, you will see how they were a critic, a counselor, a coach, and Luke's biggest champion. And the last story, that pudgy high school kid who was trying to make the cross country team, who probably embarrassed himself in the school play, but at least took a chance, was myself.

And along the way, I was lucky enough to meet some teammates, Brian Strong, Keith Dallin, Rob King, who took me upon their shoulders and ignited a fire within me that I could be a championship caliber runner. And I remember for me, they were definitely my critic when I wasn't training as hard as I needed to or doing the workouts like I needed to or going out instead of preparing for our practices on the weekends. They were a coach, you know, there was never a race that we did where they weren't out encouraging me if they finished before me to do better or encouraging me before I went out about what the course was going

to be like, how we needed to attack the race, etc. They were counselors because as we would go on our training runs, they would spend countless hours talking to me about form, about will power, about mindset, about how I could make myself better. And they were my biggest champions. You know, as I got better, they advocated more and more for me to rise up on the team and gave me the confidence that I needed to help them win the state championships and ultimately take myself to getting division 1 scholarships in cross country and track. Now Now I hope through this episode and these different stories I've explained the four Cs and how vital it is to have a coach in our life. And I hope we can also curb this 9 million

children who are out there who don't have coaches themselves because one of the biggest statistics that I saw was that people who have had coaches or great mentors themselves become coaches and mentors to others. And if you're interested in any of our coaching programs, it's one of the main things that we do in a passion strike. And we implement both the passion-struck framework and the personal agility process to coach you on your passion journey and to accelerate it and help you unlock your power within. I hope this episode has given you some guidance and some takeaways and I truly appreciate you listening or watching. How often do we find ourselves stumbling? Because we are not taking the steps that we could

to be the best versions of ourselves. And that is something that a guide, a mentor, a partner can really do for us. It's not always the easiest thing for you to go in requests, and it's difficult because it's going to consume your time just as it's going to consume theirs. But I have found mentorship and being a mentor are some of the most rewarding experiences that I have ever had in my life. And the next episode of the Passion Strike Podcast, I am interviewing Giles Stewart, who I worked with when we were both at Lowe's and then again at Dell.

And I'm happy to say that Giles is someone that I was able to coach for a good decade. And he is now retired, but he will talk about our journey together, but he will also talk about how he has found new passion in his life, and that passion for him is rolling, which he absolutely loves to do. And then after that, in my next momentum Friday, I'm going to talk about my own personal origin story and how I got to this point in my career. Thank you again for listening and watching.

Thank you so much for joining us. A purpose of our show is to make Passion Go viral. By sharing the knowledge and insights you can use to unlock your hidden potential. To hear more, please subscribe to the show in iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you'd love this episode, we'd appreciate a five-star rating on iTunes, where if you'd simply tell free of your most driven and motivated friends about the show, and post

to your social accounts, that would help us grow our PassionStruct Community too. If you want more tools to unlock your potential, please make sure to also visit our website passionstruct.com to sign up to our email list as well as check out all the links and resources in the show notes. Be sure to tune in on Tuesdays and Fridays for our next episode and remember make a choice, work hard, and step into your sharp edges. Thanks again and I'll see you next time. you