Ever late to the game, this is my entry to the Mentorship Blog Round Table I announced last week. The round-up will be posted on Wednesday, March 3.

I contemplated calling this post something in typical Gen Y fashion, like “Personal Board of Advisors” but I’m not sure that’s going to get your head out of the overly formal idea of mentorship that we have. I think we need to open our minds to a new kind of mentorship.

Ever heard the expression “it take a village to raise a child”? Well, I’m fond of my own little saying: “It takes a village to raise a Holly.” I do have a personal board of advisors – not in the sense that I run everything past everyone of them, but most important decisions are run past a handful of them, while others are called on for technical guidance in their field of expertise. And there are quite a few of them. A village you might say.

The Criteria is Simple, but Not Easy

My criteria for mentors is rather loose, but at the same time, very difficult to achieve. You don’t have to have credentials or references… you don’t even have to be older than me or more senior than I am. But you do have to have something very special and rare.

The people I call my mentors have something I want.

The formal definition of mentor is “a trusted counselor or guide.” All of my mentors fit this definition, but that extra criteria of having something I want is critical. That’s why I find it hard to believe when I hear my peers say they don’t want or need mentors. I learned a long time ago that it was much easier to ask someone who already knew how to do something than to try to learn to do it all by myself. I also learned long ago that it’s easier to know where my weaknesses are so that I can find a way to strengthen them.

Spotting People Who Have What I Want

I’m not usually on the hunt for them. I like to think one of my strengths is my ability to observe. I watch people. I watch what they do, not necessarily what they say. Trying to find mentors based on accolades, awards, job titles, and their swagger has always let me down. It’s usually the people I would least expect that have what I want.

“Have what I want” can range from career experience to industry expertise, from health to general attitude about life, even fashion sense. I’m not sure that most of my mentors even know they are my mentors. I never ask them to sign up. I just ask them to get coffee or if I could call or email them sometime. If I can pick their brain or if they’d like to have lunch. Then I go into sponge mode and just try to soak it all up.

The interesting thing about picking mentors this way is that you don’t always learn what you think you’ll learn. My corporate career mentor, for example, taught me how to make the leap to owning my own business. When you target people based on how happy they are with their career, you learn how to be happy – not necessarily how to follow their career path. And when you pick someone to be your mentor because they ooze serenity and peace, somehow or other you learn how to be angry at the right times.

When A Mentor Doesn’t Work Out

It’s not like I’ve got a divining rod and I sort of blithely go through life with successful mentor after successful mentor. I’ve had my share of individuals who never called me back, clearly used me to get something, and others still who didn’t work out for one reason or another. Some of my mentors I’ve outgrown, realizing that they don’t have anything I would ever want. Sadder still, I’ve had mentors who had everything I wanted in life, and I watched them give it up to walk a dark and lonely path I pray I never follow them down.

I move on. I keep searching. And I learn, ultimately, from those people more about what I do and do not want from life.

Meet Holly’s Village, er… Board of Advisors

And now, allow me to introduce you to my mentors and personal board of advisors.

I have two, yes two, therapists. One is a talking therapist for general counseling needs, and the other is specially trained and she helps me get over my totally irrational fear of flying. I pay them to be on the board. Having been in or around some form of therapy since I was 14, I find that having a really good counselor around is good for me. Both my therapists are people I respect and believe I would have a friendly relationship with, outside the laws of professional relationships yada yada legal stuff.

I have a 12-step program sponsor. She essentially acts as my sounding board for any “great” idea I might have or any major life decisions.
I have lots of these so-called great ideas, and she helps bring me back from the brink of some majorly stupid decisions. And, other times, she’s there to guide back to sanity after I go ahead with said stupid decisions. She is responsible for walking me through the 12 steps of the program, and teaching me how she has gotten and stayed sober. She also sort of acts as a spiritual advisor of sorts. Not in a sense that she tells me what to believe, but more like how to go about finding it.

I had a corporate mentor, but now that I’m not in the corporate world, I guess she’s more of a business mentor. I also have a marketing mentor. Both of these mentors were my bosses at the job I recently left. I’m grateful to have developed the kind of relationship with them that is bigger than employment. Both of these mentors have the kind of field experience in marketing I hope to have one day, and I recognize in them how much I have to learn about traditional marketing in order to run a successful digital marketing agency.

I have a social media mentor, who has encouraged and supported me to do things like start a local chapter of Social Media Club, take on freelance work, and found my own business. He has constantly thrown me into the spotlight (and the trenches, for that matter!) time and time again, and shares openly and freely of his knowledge. I’m proud to say he “raised me right” in social media, passing on to me an intense love for the industry and a desire to help others “get it.”

I have a life coach. While I don’t use her as intensely or regularly as I have in the past, she’s someone who I know is only a phone call away when I’m faced with critical life decisions that don’t necessarily fall to my therapists, sponsor, or other mentors. She’s more like a third party who is more interested in finding out what jives with my life path than any one decision over another.

Those are my primary mentors, the ones who have really stood the test of time. I also have trusted advisors in fashion, spirituality and relationships. Members of my family, friends, business partner, and boyfriend often times resemble mentors to me. It’s difficult to say where that line starts and stops between love, friendship and a desire to teach and be taught.

I’ll leave you with this: In the end, the best mentors are the ones who support and teach you right out of from underneath of them.

I spent a glorious week in New York City earlier this month. My best friend from college lives in hipper-than-thou Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and I spent a few days with her getting to know that neighborhood and its denizens pretty well. Then I spent a weekend in the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania, where my best friend from high school got married. As we toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house marveling at the architecture, and biking the Laurel Highlands that surrounds it, I struck up conversations with intellectuals from Japan, Russia, Israel, France, Italy and the UK. When I returned to Brooklyn, I ate up my favorite Middle Eastern delicacies and gobbled up conversations about great works of literature and laughed my ass off as artist-musician-writer types joked satirically about mass American culture. 

I believe that everyone ought to have a personal board of directors in their life… especially in your 20s. I’m only six years into this (thank god it’s halfway over!), but figuring out finances, romances, career aspirations, and general living sense eludes me from time to time. I seem to bump along fine for a few months, then WHAM! I get something that completely throws me off-kilter. I was just entering shaky ground when I met Jenny Ferry, a life coach.

Now, Jenny and I have never actually met, but I can imagine exactly how she would be from our phone and email interaction. Her warmth actually radiates in every hello via phone and every earnest closing of an email. Not many people can pull off that kind of emotion with sincerity, in this skeptic’s book.

Jenny specializes in helping twenty-something women find direction in whatever it is their having trouble with. We started by identifying what that might be for me. Just picking one or two things to work on was a challenge in and of its self. I believe my words were, “Ugh. Where do I start??” I was working two jobs, running my small business and writing this blog. I was in a new relationship and I was training for a half-marathon. I was just about to freak out.

I took a quick diagnostic survey. The career portion practically leapt off the page at us. That was definitely where we needed to start. Then there was this “fun” category. Fun? What’s that? Work is fun, I said. Heh. We were still going to work on it. “We’ll just sprinkle it in,” Jenny said. I could go along with that.

We tackled my four jobs first. I told her I felt like I had the ability to do all of these really great things, but I didn’t know how to pick just one, or even two to pursue. She helped me break it down and get it on paper. Once we did some simple evaluation and took a look at it, I was blown away. Right there, in black and white, I could see what was most important to me out of my four “jobs.” Blogging was by far and away my number one passion. It was followed closely by my marketing job, then came the café (which lost major points in the income category), and trailing abysmally behind was the one I was putting the most effort into – my IT company. According to that sheet of paper, it was my least favorite thing to do. And I had to agree.

“What can we take off your plate?” Jenny asked. Jenny always asks the hard questions. I drew my breath in sharply and deeply. Hearing me, she said, “Why don’t you spend some time on this one. Let me know what you come up with.” I talked over it with friends, and I thought about it. I looked at that sheet of paper and my decision was clear. I’ve since put the company on indefinite hold. I still have one client who doesn’t require much attention at the moment, but no efforts are being made to attract new ones. I’ve been able to concentrate on my blog more and to scale back my hours at the café so that it’s less work and more just-for-fun.

Jenny challenges me to step outside my boundaries in order to pursue what I want. At her suggestion, I have: asked for my hours to be changed at work, found a mentor at the corporate level, taken a relaxing bath, and have begun researching business schools for my MBA. I didn’t even know I wanted to get an MBA before I started working with Jenny. I was afraid to say that I want the thing that everyone says I don’t need.

One major exercise we did was crafting my life purpose statement. This single sentence would be a tuning fork for my entire life that I could use at any point to see if I was “in tune” with what I felt my life’s purpose was. I was definitely skeptical. After all, I’ve spent at least 14 years trying to find my purpose in life. I was a philosophy major, for crying out loud. In one hour, I’m going to find my life purpose. Yeah, right.

Yeah, right! My life purpose statement kicks some major ass. It is Holly with a capital H. I can go through my week knocking that tuning fork and know pretty much whether or not I’m lined up with my life’s purpose. It soothes me, it invigorates me, but most importantly, it reminds me of who I am and who I want to be. A life purpose statement is really personal, so I’m not going to share it here. You’ll just have to become friends with me and ask.

What Jenny does as a life coach is help define my goal and bring it into focus. We find my obstacles, which are usually my own limits, and then she promptly challenges me to knock them down. She does this with warmth, passion, enthusiasm and empathy. If we were in the same town, I have no doubt every meeting would end with a squeeze. But the woman will make you work – trust me. And in that work, you find yourself. You find these amazing little gems (courage, confidence, self-awareness) that were already inside of you, but you just didn’t know how to access.

I feel more in tune with myself and with my goals, and I feel more confident in the path I’m taking to achieve them. So often my 20s have felt like blindly groping for I-don’t-know-what in a black room. Jenny helps me shed a little light on what I’m looking for and how to grab it.

It just hit me: I’m a writer.

It seems pretty silly that I’ve been blogging here at WorkLoveLife for eight months now, and I’ve only just realized that I’m a writer. This is not unique to me, I know. As blogging becomes more and more popular, others I read have questioned at what point you become a writer. And still others have argued against calling yourself a blogger at all.

I’ve come to realize in the past few months that writing has a place in my soul. It allows me to purge, it allows me to mull and remember, and it allows me to connect. And I love words. I took Latin throughout high school, which really boosted my vocabulary. I love the idea in linguistics that the more words we know, the more efficiently and effectively we are able to communicate. I love finding the perfect word or set of a words that most accurately conveys what I’m trying to say. And I even like that I can’t always find them… indescribable is a good place to be, in my book.

But today, I realized that I am writer. Not just a blogger or a lover of words or a novice, even.

The past few days have been hectic – work is hectic and I have meeting and appointments crammed into every nook and cranny of my waking hours. This evening is my first free evening since Friday. I have a half-marathon I signed up for in two weeks that I am ill-prepared for. Tonight could be a night for training. But when I asked myself do you want to run or do you want to write? Would you like to do the half-marathon or would you like to write? The answer reverberated throughout my head: We want to write.

So I didn’t bring my running clothes. I brought my laptop. Because when I neglect my running, I don’t feel half so unbalanced as when I neglect my writing.

I’d like to be a great many things in my life, and I imagine I wouldn’t be great at many of them, but it sure would be fun. My life coach says that I should honor the Holly Who Writes if I want to – I don’t have to be the Holly Who Runs Marathons right now. That’s pretty amazing to me. I thought if I was one, I couldn’t be the other.

I know that the Holly Who Runs Marathons is inside of me, but right now, it’s time for the Holly Who Writes to shine through. Not everything has to be done at once, and not everything has to be done to the nth degree. What a concept.

Photo courtesy Shiny Things via Flickr Creative Commons.

My life has been accidental. Not to be dramatic, but even my start was an accident… well, I wasn’t planned anyway. But who has control over their childhood?

My adult life has been scattershot, too much choice equaling paralysis. The only thing I’m sure I chose with any conviction was my college major, philosophy. Even there though, I never could choose a philosophy to defend and call my own. The only one I pursued with any real enthusiasm was existentialism, that hodgepodge of thinkers who couldn’t settle on a name of their own or even agree that they were in the same school of thought.

That’s not to say I lacked conviction. Let’s get that straight. After all, I think that’s what I write about – conviction searching for direction.

Here I am, though, four years after graduation, in a city I never meant to stay in, in a job I took because it was available, waiting to hear about a job I’m not sure I should take, except that it would bring about a desired effect – the removal of me from this town. (If you are reading this, dear potentially future employer, don’t worry – I am a terrific hire. Ask anyone.)

I can feel it creeping up in me now, however. Freedom. Options. An opinion.

The past few weeks have been such a struggle. I felt like everything was cloudy – even my face was cloudy, my thoughts, everything. I was so afraid I wouldn’t make it out of that fog. Then I recognized it; I remembered that the fog always brings clarity, that the pain precedes growth. I could feel it, but didn’t know what was growing, improving. I’m blind to that stuff a lot of times.

It hasn’t cleared up entirely, but it’s so light I can tell it’s almost over. I’m beginning to know what I want now. It’s so simple, I think I probably knew before but clouded it all up with other people’s ideas, what other people wanted for their own lives, thinking somehow it would be easier to want what they wanted, that what I wanted wasn’t enough, but I realize now that none of that matters. There really are no standards for life, no measuring sticks or rulers.

What brought me out of the fog was a perfect, turbulent storm. As it got stormier, I knew I just needed to ride through it, weather it.

And finally, I was present.

I stood perfectly in that moment, though it was a sad, heartbreaking moment, and I savored it for what it was – one moment in my journey.

When I was in that tailspin, I wanted to be anywhere other than where I was. Ballerinas keep themselves from getting dizzy while they spin by focusing on one spot with each revolution. When I stood still in my moment, not wishing to be anywhere except right there, I stopped spinning. Everything was clear.

While I never really know what one day will bring after this one, I’m done living life on accident. I’m not sure what form my purpose will take, but I know what it is. And that’s enough for today.

Eating crow: humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proven wrong after taking a strong position

Eat humble pie: to apologize and face humiliation for a serious error

I’m not sure either of these describes exactly how I feel, but they come close. I had a particularly, and unexpectedly, emotional day. Around noon, I learned that a friend’s sister overdosed last night. I didn’t know the sister, but this recovering alcoholic can tell you that there is something about hearing that this disease has claimed another person that shakes you at your core. I believe it was that shaken state that allowed everything to bubble up to the surface.

I can’t write list posts or tell you how to get through your first day of work or even how to make more room in your life for love. The only real thing I have to offer is a candid view of the way I live my life, and to be as achingly honest about it as possible. And I’ve been wrong. About several things.

It started innocently enough. I stopped by Old Navy on my way home from work to pick up a pair of pajama shorts since it’s become clear to me that Date #4 will not take the hint and leave behind the necessary boyfriend boxers I would prefer to sleep in. While there, I decided to be a good auntie to my cousin’s 1-year-old daughter and pick up a few cute little things. I dumped it all on the bed when I got home, changed into my new shorts (ah…) and stared at the clothes. They were so cute, so little, and I couldn’t wait to see her in them. A feeling started to come up… and I shoved it back down.

All day, I’d been shoving it back down.

The loss of my friend’s sister stirred up my still-raw emotions over the loss of my friend Maureen back in March. I shoved it back down. Date #4 not being able to spend his birthday weekend with me stirred up feelings of jealousy, resentment and fear. I shoved it back down. As I stared down at the little girl’s clothes, it stirred up emotions of something I’d lost years ago, and I shoved that down too.

But it wouldn’t stay down.

As I tried to finish going about my night (I needed to blog, get my work and running clothes ready, make some concrete business decisions…), it just wouldn’t stay down. Something wasn’t right. It’s been this way for a few months but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought it was maybe my sinuses, maybe not exercising, not having my work and life balanced just the right way or not doing the right kind of work. I searched, all the while shooing away this nagging feeling that I wasn’t working something important out. Shoved it down.

It came up. All at once.

I miss Maureen and her death has affected me. I can’t ignore that. I don’t want to feel that pain because it is so very strong. I am missing a friend, a person who totally got me, who gave to me and took from me, to whom I told “I love you” every time we said goodbye. I wasn’t dealing with those feelings, that grief. I ignored it.

What I really want when I imagine a good, fine life for myself is to own my own café, just as I envisioned it in December, an airy cozy shop full of funky vintage furniture, good coffee and an owner (me!) who knows everybody. I would be in a cool town, maybe not too big but too small. Somehow I got the notion into my head that it just wasn’t grand enough a business for a smarty-pants like me. So I shelved it, said it was best left for retirement.

The most startling realization to you, my readers, might be what else I see in this picture. As I run my own successful café, I very clearly see children running around my shop. I want children. Three years ago, I was an alcohol who could not bring myself to bring a child into my world. That experience has been far more impacting than I ever thought, and fear has driven me in that regard.

I realize now that when it comes to the emotional things in my life, it’s going to take much longer to heal than I thought. It wouldn’t say much about my friendship with Maureen if I weren’t still moved to tears a mere five months later. I am. It wouldn’t be treating my disease with enough respect to think that the choices I made years ago because of my drinking would just go away on their own. They haven’t.

As to my business choices, I think I simply veered off course looking for something perhaps a little more glamorous, a little more grand than my simple dream of owning my own coffee shop. But now that I’m back there, it’s like a warm blanket, familiar and just right.

In some respects, I’m back where I was in December, which isn’t necessarily bad. I feel a little sheepish, a little humbled admitting that my ego inflated as I attempted to fluff myself up to meet these grand ideas. I don’t always know what I’m doing. I thought I was just putting on a brave face. When I put a brave face on, I only fool myself. And fool myself, I did.

Life is a tricky thing. I’m skeptical of anyone who says they’ve got it all figured out. Especially in these early years, as we try to form ideas of who we want to be and how we can become those people, certainly we’ll look a little foolish along the way. I guess I’m just happy to be trying.

I’ve been cursed my whole life with being both right- and left-brained. Not a lot of people can go from designing a new website to working with raw demographic data tables for an unrelated project. I loved logic and trig while being a total art kid in high school. In college, I double-majored in philosophy and art, though I have to admit I could see no use for aesthetic theory – I couldn’t handle philosophy of art.

Thus far, it’s been really useful in my career. When I worked at a non-profit start-up straight out of college, I needed to wear a lot of hats. I recruited, I mentored, I edited news articles, I did research, I designed web pages, I coded, and I took bids on jobs. I had to be able to turn my attention from page design one moment to researching interviewees the next. As a marketing research analyst in a small department, part of the job description was that the candidate should be able to turn on a dime, and I do, from logo design to demographics mapping.

However, I’ve recently realized that my wonderful little gift is also my curse. There are a lot of things I’m good at. I’m not being an egoist; I’m really pretty good at all sorts of stuff. I like trying new things, and enthusiasm will take you far. I’ve been a DJ at a radio station and a nightclub, artist, barista, magazine editor, proofreader, new media director, special events coordinator, bartender, research analyst, blogger, IT consultant. At some point, I was even a pre-med major. I’ve rock-climbed, knitted, done ethnic cooking, trained for marathons, played softball, volleyball and soccer, been a vegetarian, and done some motivational speaking.

The problem? I’m all over the place.

When recently thinking about my career, I realized that I had no specialty. I’ve always had to twist my résumé credentials to fit the requirements (philosophy degree = critical thinking skills + analytical skills + thesis research = market researcher!). Don’t get me a wrong – I’m a great hire. However, I’d really like to be great at something.

I’d like to be great at something.

Not just good. Not okay. Not just ‘oh, yeah, I did that, too.’

I look at the people I admire, and they are either the giants of their fields or they’ve got a particular niche cornered. I’d like to really have my head wrapped around something, not just have a surface understanding or street knowledge about it. I’m tired of being OK at a lot of things.

I’m ready to be great at something. And not just to be Great, but to put the work into it to really understand it, to be an authority on it. When I was a philosophy major, I dreamed of being the Heidegger scholar studied enough to get a glimpse of his unpublished, untranslated papers tucked away in a small German library. As a new media director, I dreamed of taking our little start-up site nationwide, even global.

Now, I dream other dreams… dreams of a research analyst (believe it or not), dreams of a blogger, dreams of an entrepreneur. There are so many things I could do though; how do I choose? How do you know which one you have the potential to be great at?

This is part one in a two-part series.