Кен Робинсон - The Element

The fourth role of a mentor is stretching. Effective mentors push us past what we see as our limits. Much as they don’t allow us to succumb to self‐doubt, they also prevent us from doing less with our lives than we can. A true mentor reminds us that our goal should never be to be “average” at our pursuits.

James Earl Jones is known as a superlative actor and one of the great “voices” in contemporary media. Yet most of us never would have heard that voice had it not been for a mentor. One can only imagine what Darth Vader might sound like if Donald Crouch hadn’t entered Jones’s life.

As a child, Jones suffered from crippling self‐consciousness, largely because he stuttered and found it very difficult to speak in front of people. When he got to high school, he found himself in an English class taught by Crouch, a former college professor who had worked with Robert Frost. Crouch discovered that Jones wrote poetry, a fact that Jones kept to himself for fear of ridicule from the other boys in school. “He questioned me about why, if I loved words so much, couldn’t I say them out loud?” Jones says in the book The Person Who Changed My Life: Prominent Americans Recall Their Mentors .

“One day I showed him a poem I had written, and he responded to it by saying that it was too good to be my own work, that I must have copied it from someone. To prove that I hadn’t plagiarized it, he wanted me to recite the poem, by heart, in front of the entire class. I did as he asked, got through it without stuttering, and from then on I had to write more and speak more. This had a tremendous effect on me, and my confidence grew as I learned to express myself comfortably out loud.

“On the last day of school we had our final class outside on the lawn, and Professor Crouch presented me with a gift—a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self‐Reliance . This was invaluable to me because it summed up what he had taught me—self‐reliance. His influence on me was so basic that it extended to all areas of my life. He is the reason I became an actor.”

Mentors serve an invaluable role in helping people get to the Element. It might be overstating things to suggest that the only way to reach the Element is with the help of a mentor, but it is only a mild overstatement. We all encounter multiple roadblocks and constraints on the journey toward finding what we feel we were meant to do. Without a knowledgeable guide to aid us in identifying our passions, to encourage our interests, to smooth our paths, and to push us to make the most of our capacities, the journey is considerably harder.

Mentorship is of course a two‐way street. As important as it is to have a mentor in your life, it is equally important to fulfill these roles for other people. It is even possible that you’ll find that your own real Element is as a mentor to other people.

Anthony Robbins is one of the world’s most successful personal coaches and mentors, often credited with laying the foundations for the personal coaching profession. This sector is growing exponentially around the world and has become a multimillion‐dollar industry. All of this speaks eloquently to the appetite for mentoring and coaching and to the profound roles these can fulfill in many of our lives. More and more people are discovering that being a mentor, for them, is being in the Element.

This happened for David Neils. His own mentor was Mr. Clawson, a neighbor who came up with multiple successful inventions. When Neils was a child, he would go to visit the neighbor while he worked. Instead of chasing the kid away, Clawson asked for Neils’s advice and criticism about his work. This interaction charged Neils with a sense of self‐worth and an understanding that his opinions mattered. As an adult, Neils founded the International Telementor Program, an organization that facilitates mentoring by electronic means between professionals and students. Since 1995, the program has helped more than 15,000 students around the world receive professional guidance. David Neils literally made mentoring his life’s work.

More Than Heroes

I’m sure that several of the mentors mentioned here, including many of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters, became heroes to those they mentored. We all have personal heroes—a parent, a teacher, a coach, even a schoolmate or colleague—whose actions we idolize. In addition, we all have heroes we’ve never met who stir our imaginations with their deeds. We consider Lance Armstrong a hero for the way he overcame a life‐threatening illness to dominate a physically grueling sport, and Nelson Mandela one for his critical role in ending apartheid in South Africa. In addition, we forever associate people with heroic acts—Rosa Parks’s triumphant stand against bigotry, Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon.

These people inspire us and lead us to marvel at the wonders of human potential. They open our eyes to new possibilities and fire our aspirations. They might even drive us to follow their examples in our lives, moving us to dedicate ourselves to public service, exploration, breaking barriers, or lessening injustice. In this way, these heroes perform a function similar to mentors.

Yet mentors do something more than heroes in our search for the Element. Heroes may be remote from us and inaccessible. They may live in another world. They may be dead. If we meet them, we may be too awestruck to engage properly with them. Heroes may not be good mentors to us. They may be competitive or refuse to have anything to do with us. Mentors are different. They take a unique and personal place in our lives. Mentors open doors for us and get involved directly in our journeys. They show us the next steps and encourage us to take them.

CHAPTER NINE Is It Too Late?

SUSAN JEFFERS is the author of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway ® and many other best‐selling books. She didn’t begin her writing career until she was well into her forties. How she did it is a remarkable story.

As a child, Susan loved to read. The best time of the day for her was when she could curl up with a book in the quiet of her room. “I was always curious, and my father was a great one for explaining things. Sometimes he would go into so much detail my eyes would roll back. I remember hearing something on the radio once that I didn’t understand. The word was circumcision. True to form, he didn’t give me a short explanation! He was like a teacher. I think he missed his calling. He’d always wanted a boy, and I was treated to all the things he would have done with a son. I got to go to a lot of wrestling matches!”

Susan went off to college, where she met and soon married her first husband. She dropped out when she got pregnant with the first of her two children. After four years at home, she decided she had to go back to college. This decision created much anxiety: “The years at home had shattered my confidence, and I wasn’t sure I would succeed.” She eventually found her feet at college and even graduated summa cum laude. When she learned of this honor, she began phoning everyone she knew. “Finally I dropped the phone and began crying as I realized that the one person I was trying to reach was my father, who had died a few years earlier. He would have been so proud.”

With the encouragement of one of her teachers, Susan enrolled in graduate school and ultimately received her doctorate in psychology. Then, through an unexpected turn of events, she was asked to become the executive director of the Floating Hospital in New York City. She hesitated at first, as it was a very big job and she didn’t know if she could handle it. But finally, she agreed.

By then, she was having trouble in her marriage, and she filed for divorce. This was a difficult time for Susan. “Even having my doctorate in psychology didn’t help. While my job was rewarding beyond my wildest dreams, I was miserable. I soon got tired of feeling sorry for myself and knew I had to find a new way of ‘being’ in the world. And that is when my spiritual journey began.”