Leading With Authenticity - Food For The Soul: Meaningful Mentorship

Hello, Cadre family. It's Monday. We're here. My name is Jean Chills. I'm very excited to be here with everybody today. Again, starting with excitement and joy. Moving back slightly. Today I had a conflict with a dog appointment. Hello. Speak wonder. Happy Monday. Hope you are having the best start your day. I'm in Minneapolis. I'm hoping it's not too noisy, but maybe I need some slightly. I'm working from a coffee shop today and it's really noisy in the coffee shop, so I'm trying to find a less noisy space.

Hello, Hello. Happy Monday. We're here. So a little excited to be here with all of you and I'm hoping that I didn't just drop the call. So if you're still here, could you give me a heart? Seems that I dropped my wi fi connection and if I need to, I'll jump back in. It's possible. I need to jump back in. Oh, I see some hearts. Okay, great. So we're still here, going at it live. So today I'm so excited to talk about meaningful conversations and food for the soul. So when I say that, my question for all of you is, how many of you have been a mentor before?

Raise your hand or type in the chat if you've been a mentor. And the other conversation is maybe say, yes, I've been a mentor. The other question would be, do you have a mentor? And if you are able to type in the chat that you do have a mentor, please do that too. So why I feel like this is really an important topic is twofold. One, One of the hats that I wear, I have a lot of hats. One of the hats that I wear is doing work for a non profit that provides scholarships for students who are graduating high school and graduating out of the foster care system.

And as a part of this scholarship program, they get a full four year scholarship. So the organization tries to fill the gap between whatever financial aid they have and whatever they have remaining. And as part of this program, as part of the scholarship program, it's a family foundation. We also provide mentors. And when I get to work with these students and I get to help find mentors, we only have eight students in our program. We're small, we're growing. But when I get to find mentors and do the matchups with them, I'm very particular.

I'm a certified strengths coach and I think that mentors, they happen organically. But also if you're getting partnered with someone, it's really important that you have a good match because you're going to invest time and it's going to take on average, about 60 hours of time before you really get to know someone. Right. So knowing that it's going to take time, having somebody that's a good fit at the beginning can be really important to the start of that relationship. So I do different things like onboarding documents and introductions to help people start to get to know one another a little bit better sooner.

I'm doing the strengths finder inventory with all of the students and all of the mentors so that they have a common platform, a language that they can use together. But more importantly, it's really fun when I get to talk to all the mentors and hear their stories about why they want to mentor these students or how they were inspired by these students. And it just gets me to thinking how lucky I have been in my career to organically discover mentors. The most prominent mentor. Sorry, there's a truck.

And I'm hoping you can. I can't hear it very much. In my experience, when I was, gosh, probably in my late 20s, working in finance, corporate finance, there was a person that I started that started working at the company that I was at at the same time. And I was low person on the totem pole in this role. I worked in corporate finance and I have a lot of expertise in technologies. And so in this particular instance with this technology, at that time I would have to be at work, sitting at my desk, logged into the system after hours, which meant I needed to know that people across the country weren't dialing into the system to do their budgets and forecasts.

So that meant that I was literally sitting in the Office sometimes at 12:30 or 1:00am making updates to the system because I had to take it offline and then do some things and then put it back online. And that was during our budget season. So there were about two weeks that I was a part of a team of three. So in this one instance, there was somebody still online and they were like, mitchell's my last name. What are you doing online? And I was like, done his last name. What are you doing online? Because it was so late and I didn't expect anybody to work.

And he was a director, so that was the start of our story. So fast forward over the years, we would continue to check in. When he had questions on this technology, he'd bring me in to talk to his team. I had started building out some content around networking and personal branding because I had become a strengths coach while I worked at this company. And he would bring me into his teams. And we just developed this mentor mentee relationship that turned out to be really super beautiful and was unintentional.

I remember sitting at my desk one day and I was on the verge of tears because I was working for a manager and we did not see eye to eye. They were a great person with great intentions, but how they worked was fundamentally different than how I worked. And it just made it really uncomfortable for me as an employee. So he's this big, tall, six foot something guy. I had stuffed animals on top of my computer. I'm that girl. I had a lot of toys on my desk. And he would come up, grab one of the toys and flick them at me.

And then he would duck like I didn't know it was him. There's nobody else that tall that could reach over my cube to flick these. And on that particular day, I literally started crying and he yelled at me. He's like Mitchell's conference room now. And we sat down in a conference room. I explained to him the situation. And then a week later, I got an email from a lady asking if she could meet with me. I never met this manager before. She said she had an open position on her team in a different department, and that this guy had referred me to her and said that I would be a really great person on her team.

So not only did he help me in that moment, give me a language that I could use with my manager in conversations, he also realized my potential and sought out opportunities from other people that he worked with in this same organization to help me get a new job. And it turned out to be probably the best job of my career at this company. And I got so many doors. I had so many doors open because of this one particular opportunity, and I couldn't be more grateful. org if you're looking to be a mentor for students, you can go out to this particular organization and you can apply to be a mentor and they can try to match you.

So there's the formality of doing mentorship. There's also the part of mentorship that says this is inorganic. It's something that it's organic. It's just something that happens. You find somebody that you connect with and you continue that relationship. So my invitation to you today is, when was the last time you talked to that mentor? Was it Last week? Was it last month? Have you not checked in with them? Have you fallen by the wayside because life got busy? Life gets busy. So this mentor of mine, who I met way many, many years ago before I started my own company, which was 15, so I've probably known them for about 20 years.

And we get together at a minimum once a year for lunch. And sometimes we'll text message or I'll see him and his wife for dinner and we'll connect that way. But this person stuck with me. And what's beautiful about it is as they became a CFO in a company, they called me for advice. They wanted me to come in to coach them on how to engage with their team or do a different type of work. So it went from being a mentor mentee to common ground where we could rely on each other both as a mentor and as a mentee as the years had gone on.

So along with this foundation, as I mentioned, we have students, and there was one student this year that we didn't give a scholarship to that I really, really, with all my heart believe should have gotten a scholarship. But we're a small family foundation, they gave out four scholarships, which is the most they've ever done in one year. And I helped balance the P and L. So I get it. But dang, this kid. I just know that they need someone to believe in them. So when I had to turn them down for the scholarship, there were five final candidates and he was the one that got cut.

I reached out to him and I was like, hey, here. Some not so great news. I said, but at the same time, if you would like to have a mentor, I would love to mentor you while you're in college. And he was sad, but also very taken aback that I would be willing to invest time in him because there are so many people in his life that hadn't invested any time. So I'm helping to try to find new ways to get scholarships for him. We did a phone call to vet through what would be the best loans that he and his step, like his caretaker should try to apply for based on their financial situation, which is pretty slim.

But he's really smart and he's like, very honest. He was like, nobody in my family has gone to college, so nobody knows how to apply for these applications, these loans, and how to look at them. And so I am starting a new relationship with this really smart, soon to be engineer. In four years, he'll be an engineer. And trying to help him just have somebody that he can rely on throughout the college experience that has gone through it before because he doesn't have anyone in his life that has. And so there are times that we can give, there are times that we can receive.

But when we think about the possibilities of human connections, isn't that what it's all about? We do so many tasks in our day. And whether or not you're a leader, a manager, a mother, a sister, a father, a dad, a brother, a cousin, a minister, vice president, whatever your title is, a nurse, it doesn't matter. We're humans first. And what I've discovered over the last, gosh, several years, but for sure, the last few months, people are craving human connection just like this. Even here. It's so beautiful when you guys type in the chat because it gives us that little extra that we're in this together.

So seeing the possibilities of human connection, for me, that is food for my soul. Being able to step outside of my computer, step outside of my day to day, and create that human connection where I know that Speak Wonder is an amazing writer, so you should jump into her Cadre sphere sometime. I know that Jules is out there doing great things in her community all the time. At the same time, she's maybe still recovering from an injury that set her back from a goal, but we're in it together. So finding that human connection, being able to take your shared life experience and offer that as guidance for someone else's shared life experience, what a beautiful gift.

And it doesn't have to be formal. You don't have to have rules around it. You don't have to have structures around it. You can simply be in that space with people. You can simply create that connection and see their possibility and they can see yours. So for me, I'm super passionate about this topic. If you can't tell, and if you want to learn more about mentorship or you want to become a mentor, feel free to reach out. I am still looking for two not gonna recruit, but recruiting. But find those people.

And if you had a mentor that you haven't checked in with for a really long time, whether or not you called them a mentor, they were somebody that paid attention to you in school or paid attention to you at work, that they didn't have a direct responsibility in your career potential, your professional reviews, what's stopping you today from reaching out to them and maybe sending them a quote that inspired you and saying, hey, just thinking of you, or finding an article you know that they would love and emailing it to them and saying, hey, thought you'd love this article.

Let's chat. There are tiny, tiny ways to maintain these really beautiful connections. So my invitation to you on this amazing Monday, rainy or not, is this. Simply connect. And if you're looking to become a mentor, do it. You will make an amazing one because you are feeling it in your heart. It's calling out to you. So savor that opportunity to be that guide to be that connection. Because here's the thing I know for sure. Whenever I mentor someone or I am the mentee, I learn something new every single time.

So whether it's this student who's going to become an engineer and listening to their perspective about life, I learn so much about a perspective I never would have known otherwise. So stretch out that hand. Ask for that help. Be a mentor. Become a mentor. It literally will feel like food for your soil. I hope you have a great day. I look forward to talking you again soon.