What is most valuable for personal development: Being a mentor or being a mentee?

My answer is: to be a “mentoree”.

A “mentoree-session” is when you first mentor someone for one session and then you switch places and let the person who just was the mentee become the mentor and you become the mentee.

Today I had the privilege to sit on my island in Sweden and spend some time with Gil Petersil and his wife Ekaterina Petersil who stayed with us for a couple of days.

Gil is perhaps the most resourceful speaker I know. He his a great speaker, but also a great business person who, together with Ekaterina runs a series of different companies.

So today I sat down with Gil for one hour to help him refine his inner theme as a speaker.

After lunch we literally switched seats and he became my mentor to help me with some business development of my speaking business.

That way I get the best of both worlds.

By being a mentor I got to think about the topic I am an expert on which helps me reflect on it on a deeper level. (“the best way to learn is to teach”.)

Being a mentee I get to learn from someone who is more experienced than myself in some areas and who has a different perspective on speaking.

Here are some suggestions on how to do a successful “mentoree-session”.

a) Pick someone who is different than yourself.

For a Mentoree-session to work best you both need to have something to teach and something to learn from each other,

Gil and I are very different speaking styles, personalities and strengths and that makes it very effective to be “mentorees” to each other.

So try to find a speaker that is different from you where your strengths and weaknesses are different and invite that speaker to a mutually beneficial meeting.

b) Find an “equal”.

The best mentoree-sessions are when two speakers meet who look at themselves as peers. Where both feel they are (on some way) at the same level as speakers, even if they might be different in many other ways.

c) Be humble, yet confident.

Understand that the other person will be able to give you insights about yourself that you just can not find yourself, and at the same time have the confidence to tell the other speaker what he/she should be doing/changing

d) There is a time and place for everything.

A mentoree-session is not a “conversation between peers”. When you are the mentee be the mentee, when you are the mentor be the mentor. That creates a structure which makes sure that that you really focus on one speaker at the time.

e) Push each other.

Do not try to make the other speaker become you. Instead try to see the specific strengths and opportunities of the other speaker and push him/her to do more with that.

I learnt so much today both mentoring Gil and geting mentored from him.

I am sure you will too if you find the right “mentoree”. So go out and fine one.

(Picture from our lunch as we not only “talked shop” during their stay to our island, we also enjoyed some island family time together.)

I did not do any speeches this week, instead I went on a one week vacation with my wife to San Fransisco to visit family, friends and to attend a wedding of a good friend.

I might not have been working, but I took any chance I could get to become better as a speaker.

An example: While in San Francisco me and my wife decided to go to Oaklanda stand-up performance with the cult comedian Sinbad.

I also attended the final game between the Golden State Warriors and Houston Rockets in the Oracle Arena. Well, technically the game was in Houston but the whole stadium in Oakland was full with fans who wanted to watch the game on the big screen jumbotron TV.

Watching Sinbad do his stand-up routine I was reminded about things like:

• the importance of looking like you enjoy being on stage.
• the power of improvised storytelling
• the value of engaging with the audience in a non-threatening way.

Watching a basketball game in a sold-out stadium where there was no team playing (!) I was shown the power of how the surroundings around the main event (be it – like in this case – a basketball game, or in my case, a speech).

It was fascinating to see how the audience would scream, cheer and boo even as neither team was there to hear it. It felt – almost – like being at the actual game.

(On this trip I also came up with what will, perhaps, be the theme for my next book, while sleeping in in our hotel room one day.)

As professional speakers we have a lot of time of, ie time when we are not speaking. (I am guessing the average professional speaker makes 70-150 speeches per year leaving close to 200-300 days in a year when we are NOT speaking…)

But if we want to be on top of our game we have to think about speaking every single day. That is one of the things I love with this job: that we get so much time over to live a life we want, yet can spend so much time developing ourselves in the area – speaking – that we are passionate about.

The best of both worlds. Not just work-life balance. But work-life harmony.

 

The pictures in this blog posts are for two speeches that I have done in the last month or so.

One from a classic old hotel in Rome for a speech for Visa’s clients from EMEA.
And the other one from the iconic Waldorf Astoria on the Bund in Shanghai a few days ago where I spoke to the top managers at the global management conference of Permira.

Both conferences had about 200 attendees (which means they were not a very large conference) and both conferences had substituted the traditional backdrop for a LED-wall stretching the full length of the big stage.

Big LED-walls are of course not something new, but they used to be used only for big conferences with 500-1000 people in the audience because of the cost of setting them up.

I am writing this post because at both the Visa conference and the Permira conference the event managers joyfully told me: “The cost of getting a LED-wall was virtually the same as to get a traditional backdrop”.

I guess that means that we speakers have to get much more used to speaking in front of an LED-wall. (And as a speaker I can see that happening: In the last 6 speeches I have done 3 had LED-walls and 3 had printed back-drops.)

So what is the difference, you say? Not a huge one, but a few things to think about:

1) Less chance that the laser-pointer will work (the light on the laser pointer is just not strong enough to show up on the LED-wall) so if you are going to pinpoint something on stage be sure you have an alternative way of doing it.

2) More light behind you (so make sure you do not only do a sound-check, but also a light-check, especially if you are using a flip-chart where it becomes very important that the light facing the stage is strong enough)

3) If you are not using slides: Make sure you have a background picture that re-inforces your message, or that you at least approve of the back-ground picture they will be showing during your speech (Like in the picture to the left where they threw up a huge picture of the Chinese Wall behind the panelists, if you are panelist you would like to know that beforehand.)

4) If you are using slides: Ask to see the back-ground framing-picture that will be used around your slides (your slides will be “picture-in-picture” on a much bigger picture, be sure you know what that picture is. (I guess I am saying, do not only do a sound-check and light-check but also a “background check” 😉

5) Especially notice if there are any animations happening in the background picture and decide if you want the background to be animated or not (most of the time they will have an animated background as well as a static background. Personally I would choose the static background DURING the speech, and let the animations happen between speakers.)

6) If it is a big conference, or if you find out about the LED-wall early enough to make changes to your slides, check if the client wants you to leave the “safety” powerpoint slide and instead want you to go for the slide-deck that shows up on the full wall. (So add that question about “what kind of technology will be used for the backdrop?” to your briefing call list of questions.)

7) Realise that our audiences is quickly getting used to huge, animated, lit up stages – even for small conferences – and that puts different demands (and expectations) on us as speakers. No, it doesn’t mean we HAVE to have flashy animations in our speeches, but it does mean that audiences will expect it more and more.

That’s my thoughts on professional speaking this week based on what inspired me the last few days.