You don’t know what you don’t know.
This may sound a bit confusing unless you have a mentor – a trusted professional you can rely on when you need guidance with situations you may never have experienced before in your practice.
The value of having a mentor is an important message for anyone – particularly CHEK Professionals – and the subject of my latest video conversation with CHEK Faculty Member Warren Williams.
You can have all of the book knowledge in the world at your fingertips, Warren says, but there’s no replacement for experience. This is why mentors are so critical for everyone to have.
In fact, being a capable CHEK Professional means you need to be comfortable not knowing what a client will share with you during an initial session.
“That’s why it’s called a practice. You’re practicing,” Warren says. “You have to be brave enough to make mistakes, then learn from them. Over the years I’ve been teaching, I’ve overwhelmed my clients in sessions with tremendous amounts of knowledge and left them with a headache. I had to learn that was wrong. But if I had a mentor, they could’ve probably avoided that.”
Having the experience of a mentor at your fingertips also means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel – they’ve likely seen the problems you’re facing and have a solution ready at hand. A five-minute talk with the right mentor can be worth 10 hours of coaching, Warren adds.
On the other side of practicing is failing with a client. How do you handle that? Mentors can be invaluable here, helping you to pick yourself back up, dust yourself off and get back to it while providing you the perspective to learn from your failure.
Learn how mentors can help you and figure out how to determine the best mentor for your needs in my latest conversation with Warren.
