Mentors Come in all Guises. Including Chronically Unemployed.

I sat on a panel yesterday. Fear not, that isn't the setup for a splinter gag.

As I listened to the folks I shared the Denver Ad Club panel with, it dawned on me that all of them presently had far more important jobs than mine, but that we all shared something in common.

We'd all had mentors.

And while that didn't keep any of us from fucking up along the way, it did help us in a meaningful way.

Having mentors teaches you how to course-correct after you fuck up.

And therein lies the real difference between being a leader and a manager. You don't just manage a crisis. You lead the way out of it. A leader takes the heat. Full accountability. You have your people's backs, even if it costs you some skin or all of it for that matter.

That's the price of being a leader.

The best leaders share the credit unilaterally for victories but assume the brunt of the blame for failures. Leaders fail just as much as managers do. But they succeed at failing by owning failures and learning from them.

POINTING FINGERS WILL ONLY GET YOU SO FAR.

The actual subject of the panel I sat on was how to make the transition from an underling to an overling. How to move up. And out of all the good advice that was tossed out, and there was a lot of it, what resonated most to me is you have to remember to take risks.

Not stupid personal ones, mind you. But big, scary, unprecedented marketing risks. The kind of risks that make people famous and your work absolutely impossible to ignore.

The other biggest point for me was the importance of finding mentors.

My advice on this is semi-loaded. I've made the mistake of seeking mentors within the agency I was at. The trouble being, they're only as good as their own agendas. Look beyond the walls of your agency. Sometimes it helps to tell your problems to a stranger on a bus, to coin a setup to a great Steven Wright gag.

My point being, it helps to step outside the internal fray to seek out objective answers. It's also okay to have no fucking idea how to fix a situation.

Look back through your career for those who were there for you in the past. Guess what, they still are. And chances, are they always will be. All you have to do is ask, listen, and never ask the same question twice. I still seek guidance from a boss I haven't worked for in twenty years because she cuts through the bullshit as few others can.

Always has, always will.

MENTORS ARE EVERYWHERE AND CLOSER THAN YOU THINK.

Some mentors charge a lot of money from consultations. Some charge a little. And some simply just get a charge out of offering their insights and accept gratitude as their currency.

As you hit the inevitable turbulence every career does, look around you for those who have succeeded and failed in your role before you. Look beyond people who have skin in the game and agendas within your own organization.

Look for those who'd rather live on their feet than die on their knees. Even if it means being chronically unemployed.

Cameron Day is a CD who has learned to trust his gut and his mentors over all else and sometimes appears to do things the hard way from the outside looking in. He provides mentorship through his website but if you buy his book and speak highly of it, he can generally be counted on for snippets of free guidance, in bite-sized doses. He has written an Advertising Survival Guide and would love to hand-sign a copy for you unless you absolutely refuse to kill trees. In that case, Amazon will just as happily sell you a tree-friendlier Kindle version.

www.chewwithyourmindopen.com