Let's Think About It Podcast
🎙️ Welcome to the Let's Think About It Podcast with Morice (Coach Mo) Mabry! 🌟
Are you ready to conquer fear, silence doubt, and unlock your limitless potential? 🚀 Join Coach Mo, an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) accredited by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and a published author, as we explore the transformative power of mindset mastery and mindfulness. 🧠✨
In every episode, we dive into insightful conversations with certified coaches, career professionals, and successful entrepreneurs. Together, we’ll uncover practical strategies to:
- Tame your inner critic 🗣️
- Build resilience 💪
- Boost confidence 💡
- Navigate challenges with clarity 🌊
- Overcome self-imposed limitations 🚧
- Seize opportunities for growth and success 🏆
💡 Whether you're a leader, entrepreneur, or simply seeking personal growth, the Let’s Think About It Podcast equips you with tools, insights, and inspiration to thrive. Gain clarity, embrace uncertainty, and chart your course to fulfillment.
🎧 Tune in to #LetsThinkAboutItPodcast and start your transformative journey today! Don’t forget to subscribe for weekly episodes that inspire greatness and help you break free from what's holding you back. 🌟
Let's Think About It Podcast
Why Mentorship Matters: Building Connections for Lifelong Growth
What if one conversation could change the trajectory of your life? In this powerful episode of the Let's Think About It Podcast, we dive into the life-changing concept of mentorship with Deborah Heiser, an applied developmental psychologist and the CEO of the Mentor Project. Discover how mentorship goes beyond just passing down knowledge—it's about forging deep, meaningful connections that can redefine personal and professional growth, especially in midlife and beyond.
Deborah shares her inspiring journey into the field of psychology, ignited by her grandmother’s experience with depression. She highlights how mentorship provides a profound sense of purpose that often diminishes later in life, and how this process of self-discovery enriches both mentor and mentee. The Mentor Project connects students with experts from various fields for free, creating an opportunity to share invaluable knowledge globally while overcoming fear, limiting beliefs, and self-doubt.
Gain clarity on the differences between mentoring, coaching, counseling, and consulting—the key distinctions that significantly impact professional development and personal growth. Deborah explains how mentorship can overcome imposter syndrome, boost confidence, and foster leadership development. Through compelling real-life success stories, including one that shows how one mentor's guidance positively impacted an entire community, we explore how mentorship drives professional growth and tackles challenges like burnout, work-life balance, and difficult conversations.
Join us as we challenge conventional norms about aging, leadership, and decision-making while uncovering the transformative power within mentorship. If you’re ready to make a difference in your life or someone else’s, visit www.mentorproject.org to learn how you can become a mentor or mentee today. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Let's Think About It Podcast for more insights on overcoming fear, boosting confidence, mindfulness, energy, and creating lasting professional development!
Welcome to the let's Think About it podcast, where we embark on a journey of thoughtfulness and personal growth. I'm your host, coach Mo, and I'm here to guide you through thought-promoting discussions that will inspire you to unlock your full potential. In each episode, we'll explore a wide range of topics, from self-discovery and mindfulness to goal-setting and achieving success. Together, we'll challenge conventional thinking and dive deep into the realms of possibility. Whether you're looking to find clarity in your personal or professional life, or seeking strategies to overcome obstacles, this podcast is your go-to source for insightful conversations and practical advice. So find a comfortable spot, chill and let's embark on this journey of self-improvement together. Remember, the power of transformation lies within you, and together we'll uncover the tools and insights you need to make it happen. So let's dive in. Welcome to another episode of the let's Think About it podcast. I'm your host, coach Mo, and I'm here with another amazing guest. Her name is Debra. Hi, sir, what's up, debra?
Speaker 2:Hi, thanks for having me on your show. I'm delighted to be here.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. Where are you checking in? From what part of the country?
Speaker 2:I'm in New York, right outside New York City.
Speaker 1:New York City. Okay, born and raised.
Speaker 2:No, I'm originally from Des Moines, Iowa.
Speaker 1:How'd you end up in the New York area then?
Speaker 2:I've been here a long time. My parents moved, my dad was an artist, and so we moved from Iowa when I was a kid to New York. But I'm the only one out here.
Speaker 1:Nice. So tell my audience about who you are, what you do and the type of value that you bring.
Speaker 2:Sure, my name again is Deborah Heiser. I'm an applied developmental psychologist and I focus on midlife and older. Most developmental psychologists look at kids, so I'm unusual in that respect. I also am the CEO of the Mentor Project, where we bring the top 1% of experts in their fields to mentor students around the world for free, and I also just wrote the Mentorship Edge defining mentorship and saying what it isn't also, and so I also. I do other things. I write for psychology today and I am an adjunct at a university out here in the psychology departments. That's about it.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. How did you develop the strong curiosity around psychology and mentorship? Where did that develop from?
Speaker 2:So it was actually. It didn't just happen, it really came out of a few different things. So I originally went into the field of aging because my grandmother got sick down in Florida with depression. I didn't know what depression was, I was like 20. I went down to visit her and she wasn't herself and I asked the people that worked in the independent living facility what's wrong with grandma? And they said we'll fix her, don't worry. And I was like fix her, what do you mean? They said she's just depressed. She's taking a new med and it's making her depressed. She'll be better next time. I went back down a couple months later and she was great. She was back to herself. So I said that's it. I don't want to go to school for business anymore. I'm switching my majors and I'm going to become a psychologist and I'm going to fix grandma's. And it was before the field of aging really. So it was an unusual field to decide to go into, but I was pretty determined.
Speaker 2:I took a long time to get my undergrad because I switched majors and finally got it and I went into work right away in the field of aging in a psychiatric hospital doing research on depression, and I took about six years doing that. I went on for my doctorate at a university that said, hey, we will allow you to study aging. Nobody really focused on that, but they said they'd let me do it and I was grateful for that. And I then went to work in a nursing home. So I was studying everything no one wants to ever have or get and I was thinking this is what aging was, and all things that are bad, things that no one wants to ever look forward to.
Speaker 2:And I went to a dinner party and I was really feeling pretty good about myself. I was, I had just written a book and I was in my early thirties. And so I was like, oh, I bet everybody's going to think I'm so amazing when I go to this dinner party I'm going to tell them all about myself and everything I'm doing. And I told them and it was like crickets in the room. No one was impressed. And then one person chimed up and said all you're doing is like putting a bandaid on everything we don't want for our future. What do we have to look forward to? And I was like, oh man, like that was hitting me with a brick. Oh, I know I can imagine.
Speaker 2:It was like crushed. So I left that dinner party and it was truly an aha moment where I said I need to find out what we're looking forward to, because then I needed to feel like I needed to look forward to something for the future.
Speaker 1:Can I stop you there real quick In that moment? What was the inner critic telling you about yourself at that point in your life?
Speaker 2:My inner critic was not going easy on me. I was really and truly saying what have I been wasting my time on? I'm not helping anybody. I am actually literally, like this person said, putting a Band-Aid on our future. Because he said, ok, you're studying depression, what does that do for us? And I said we can make it so that you can have less depression and it'll be less of all this bad stuff. And he was like that doesn't make me want to get old. It was really. It sounds like this guy was being cruel, but honestly, it was a pivotal moment for me and I was. I'm grateful because I actually changed my trajectory based on that conversation.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:It made me actually say, oh yeah, have you ever gotten into the workspace and you have your head down and you're just going forward and you're not thinking about anything? I had those blinders on and when I picked my head up and I looked around and I heard a voice from somebody else saying there's more to what you're thinking about. I actually felt at first I was really crushed, but when I went back I said wow, that was a gift in a way, because I really did go back to the literature and I did not realize because this is the olden days, nobody's talking about. Aging was the wild west. So I went and I looked and there was so much research that had been done and theory for decades on all the good stuff we have to look forward to, but it never made it to the media.
Speaker 2:If you Googled old age, it was you're going to get robbed and there's going to be a scam and everybody's in a wheelchair, infirmed in some way. Alzheimer's was something people were so afraid of getting when they got older that they were all taking blood tests to see if they had the gene. So when I found that out, I was like, oh okay, I'm running with this now and it gave me such a feeling of really not a completeness, but a sense of I have a more complete picture. I can tell now there are some stumbling blocks that we might come across, but really our lifespan is opportunity, not obstacle, and that was new to me. It was we don't have to look for the obstacles. It's really a door is going to open. You're going to walk through it and you're going to find the emotional journey is what carries us. That never wanes. It only gets higher and higher and we get happier and happier as we get older.
Speaker 2:So that's where I started my work on mentorship was. I saw the midlife stage is a point where we are built to want to give back to others without expecting anything in return, which sounds totally counterintuitive to everything we ever learn. But that's really. We're built to do that, like breathing. It's that much part of our system. And that led me to really talk to a lot of people who are mentors and I found out the top 1% of the leaders that I had been talking to, which was about 45 people, did not have connections with mentees. They felt like they were irrelevant. And these are really amazing people that they had that they didn't have purpose because they weren't connected with somebody. They that they could pass on like they had all this knowledge and some of them were famous before and no one was there to connect with them and I was like no one talks about that. We all go find a mentor and here they are. They're like here I am, look at me and there's nobody looking.
Speaker 2:So that's how we got started with the mentor project was Bill Cheswick, who's the one of the fathers of the network firewall how we're communicating now safely on the internet. He said I'm going to be retiring and moving to a farm and there's nobody that I'm going to have connections with. I'm going to feel terrible and I'm going to feel useless and irrelevant and I want to feel validated that all the work I did actually mattered. It was so moving to me that I was like hey, bill, let's get you into schools. So a few of us formed this little group to get Bill into schools, just because we thought how can we it's like burning down a library if we don't. So we did that and everybody out there said no one is ever going to want to join you band of weirdos. That's crazy.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 2:And then six months later we had 60 people that called and said can I join? Then a couple months later, eight, it was 80. And then a year later it was a hundred. And it was just us volunteering our time and we found out that people all around the world crave being a mentor. It's something we crave. We get something out of it as mentors. It's not the mentee, of course. They get something, but we get to feel like we matter in the world.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And there's this communication gap too, because you have people or young students who want to be mentored, but they have, they carry a fear to ask for mentors and they don't know who to ask. Yeah, exactly, so I can see how I'm just visualizing your mentor project and how you connect people, because I remember going through college right Years ago, by the way, years ago, I know how that feels.
Speaker 1:But I was just winging it. I was winging it and I didn't have that connection. I didn't have that person Come here, let me tell you what's what and put their arm around you and just give you some guidance. But mentorship is very important, but here's the question that I've been just dying to talk to you about what's the difference between mentorship, coaching, counseling, consulting, because it always gets commingled into one. How can you break that down for us?
Speaker 2:I'm so glad you asked that I actually wrote the mentorship edge, because it's so crazy, making for me that those all get commingled together which then means none of them work. So when people are like a coach is a mentor, is a coach, you need both. You should have a coach and you should have lots of mentors. So here's what it is and what it isn't. And I like to say right off the bat if you're getting paid, you're not a mentor, you're a coach. That doesn't devalue coaching. Coaching is needed. You might be an advisor, you might be a sponsor, you might be something else, but you're not a mentor. And here's why and how. So if you're going to be a mentor and this goes for mentee also if you're going to be in a mentoring relationship, somebody has to be generative. And generative is where you. It's that developmental life stage where you say I want to give back without expecting anything in return. Now, we do this all the time. If you have a friend who says, hey, can you help me solve this problem? You're not going to be like, figure it out yourself, buddy, bad friend. You're going to say I'll help you. Now, we're engaged in that all the time. That's lateral mentoring, so it's something where it's like breathing for us. We do it all the time now, so we need that. And that also means that we need a mentee who wants to accept what it is that mentor is giving. So say I, say, hey, I'm giving out wisdom on accounting, and the person that is assigned to me or comes to me says I want mentorship on dance.
Speaker 2:That's not a mentoring relationship. One is giving something the other one doesn't want, and vice versa. If somebody is asking for something that somebody doesn't want to give, that's not mentoring. It also has to be intrinsically motivated, and what I mean by that is we're often motivated and particularly in the workplace and often in school also by external rewards. That's a grade, that is, we don't care about anything but the grade or the paycheck or the performance evaluation or getting a certificate of some kind. That is an external reward. But let me tell you the example of how it looks. If I were to say to you hey, coach Mo, do you want to go volunteer your time at a soup kitchen giving out food and beverage to hungry, thirsty people, you might say, yeah, I feel good when I do that.
Speaker 1:I feel good when I give to others.
Speaker 2:Now if I said hey, you know what, coach Mo, on your way to the soup kitchen, just take a left and go volunteer time at Starbucks, instead giving out food and beverage to hungry, thirsty people for free?
Speaker 1:How are you going?
Speaker 2:to feel about that. The same activity, but two very different feelings. And we often put an external or extrinsic reward attached to what we call mentoring. That voids mentoring. That means no, no, that is not mentoring. Then it becomes coaching, it becomes something else, it's something other than mentoring. Then we also need a meaningful connection.
Speaker 2:If you say, hey, debbie, I'd like to mentor you in something, and I say, sure, I love everything you're doing, and we hit it off and we become, I really say you know what he's great, I really want to learn from him. You say, sure, I love everything you're doing, and we hit it off and we become. I really say you know what he's great, I really want to learn from him. You say, hey, she's great, I really want to learn. Give, teach her everything. We have a meaningful connection. However, if I go to you and I say, hey, coach, mo, you want to? Let's, I'll mentor you in something, no-transcript, next is and we see that oftentimes at work Somebody feels, ooh, I've been paired up with somebody, but I'm too embarrassed to tell anybody that I don't like this person because it'll make me feel like it's a failed mentorship. No, it's not mentorship to begin with, because you need that we also need to trust the person. So imagine you're at work and you are looking to go to your boss for, or somebody two levels above or wherever.
Speaker 2:A lot of people feel too vulnerable to say I don't know something, because they want to feel like they don't want to feel like they don't want to feel like that person is going to give them a bad eval or then think poorly of them. Maybe they won't give them a promotion. We've been taught to be indispensable. An indispensable person doesn't have questions, so we have to trust that person. Likewise, the mentor has to trust the mentee. Is that mentee going to steal my idea and run away with it? Are they going to and that happens in finance are they going to steal my clients and go? We need to make sure that there's trust and, finally, there has to be a goal, and that goal is one that could be a one-off hey, show me the lay of the land of this new workplace or school or it could be an ever-changing goal that happens over time, and so if you break that down, it makes it much easier to see like what coaching is. Coaching is a really structured environment where it's goal-driven and you don't have to love your coach and your coach doesn't have to love you, but you are both going to work towards getting that goal and that is. There is wonderful stuff in that I coach, but there's a difference between the two.
Speaker 2:And likewise, if you're engaged in sponsorship, sponsoring is where you're opening doors for people. You are talking about them in places where they aren't and saying, hey, have you seen Coach Mo? He's amazing. You got to check out Coach Mo. You're doing that. You're promoting that person in ways that'll get them seen and heard. That's not mentorship, that's sponsorship. We need to do all of these and if we commingle them, we're doing none of them. So we're doing ourselves a disservice by not knowing which thing we're engaged in, because mentorship should not be one. We should have countless mentors. I would say one coach. We don't want to have more than one coach. That just gets ugly. You could have multiple sponsors. If you're in a network, you want to have a nice big network. That's all potential mentors and you want to make this as many connections as you possibly can, knowing their definition and where each person lies.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It contributes to your growth process, and we should always be growing in just different areas, and particularly when you're talking about running a business too. Right, you have the sales aspect, you have advertising, you have marketing, you have the people skills, technical skills, all of these different things, and as an entrepreneur, you don't know it all. So those are opportunities to have mentors, but one word that like really stuck out to me when you were talking about the mentorship relationship is trust. How does and this might be just off the top situation, but I can imagine there are some people who wants to stroke their ego a little bit, and that's why they become a mentor. And so they become a mentor, though they do want to give, but they carry a certain ego. That I'm right. You need to do, as I say, that type. From that viewpoint, how do you help mentors that come into your program establish trust and work to build trust, to teach them how to build trust? What does that look like?
Speaker 2:So you described two things. One is that you said a person came in and wants to give, but they want their ego taken care of. That's not generative. You want to give without expecting anything in return? Right, if you want your ego stroke, that's getting something in return. So right there, not mentoring. So that happens all the time, right, and we see this. We can sniff that out in a second. And then what happens is people say we just got to teach that person to be different. But it's like saying the baby isn't walking at six months. You can walk at six months or 16 months, it's all the same, right, baby's not walking at six months. We're going to sit there and work with that baby to walk and get it to walk. Babies are going to walk when they walk. That guy might not be generative at that moment we got to say you know what? That's all right, maybe he's better at doing something else. He might be a great sponsor for somebody, maybe a good networker, connection maker, whatever, but he's not a mentor.
Speaker 1:What about how you approach a person who's really generous and open carries a certain fear of perfectionist into giving their mentorship. They just carry. I've never been thinking as a person that's going into mentorship. That carries certain fears. I'm not good with people. How am I ever going to be a mentor? But I want to give. How do you help those people?
Speaker 2:Here's what it's like. Have you ever met a friend who you've just described? The person might be insecure about themselves. Does that stop you from being their friend?
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:No, you are. You're going to either be their friend or you're not. You're going to say you know what? That's too much. I don't want to take that on. I don't want to have to work with a friendship where I'm going to have to boost my friend up. But a lot of us say you know what? This person, I'm going to boost this person up. They're my friend, I like them, I care about them. That's no different. That's part of the meaningful connection.
Speaker 2:When you connect with somebody and that a mentor cares about you, and maybe they say you know what? I don't have a degree. What kind of mentor am I? I've heard that it doesn't matter. A mentee will then say what you're giving me matters and then everything melts away. It's like magic, just like when you make a friend and you're like I know that when I call that person they've got my back and vice versa. Everything else falls to the side. Do you sit around and think about it and analyze it? No, it's just how it is. So with mentorship, as soon as you get that meaningful connection, you have a bond now with that person. That means something and it matters to you. Personality goes out the window. Some people love a good, funny person that's going to crack them up all the time. That's the kind of person they're looking for. Another person is I want somebody who's going to be vulnerable. Everybody has a different friend style, mentor style, whoever it is that they like to connect with.
Speaker 1:The other aspect of mentorship. At least through my experience of being a mentor, I learned from my mentee. I may have an expert in coaching let's just stay in that lane Expert in coaching, giving insights, this and this, but, man, when it comes to social media technology, this person is teaching me something as well, giving me certain tips. Because it goes back to what you said, the relationship and trust. And so it goes from the standpoint of, yeah, I'm giving you information, giving you insights and things like that, but with the trust, it creates vulnerability too. And so, as I'm giving you insights and I'm learning about you and you're learning about me, that opens me up in areas where I'm vulnerable and I'm open to share because I see it as a strength in you.
Speaker 1:And then, hey, what are your thoughts about this? What are your thoughts about this type of technology? I see you're efficient in that. What can you tell me about this? And then, next thing, you know this person, the mentee, is teaching me something. And now it's just an ongoing relationship, right. And then with that ongoing relationship, it becomes like a brotherhood or something, right? That's lifelong, that you just respect this person, you just, and they're just a natural friend, even though the relationship is mentor mentee, but this person is my friend. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:And so that's yeah, you can change and turn into that. Yeah, mentorship is an emotional thing. Coaching is more transactional and but mentoring is an actual emotional life stage. So everything you just described, yes, we can have mentorship that morphs into friendships.
Speaker 2:One of my mentors was a boss at a job I was working at, united Cerebral Palsy and we were working with really kids with a lot of disabilities and I didn't know what I was doing and I said and my boss saw me struggling and after work outside the classroom setting, outside of work, she sat me down and she started the mentoring with me by saying you just got to find something in each of the kids that you can connect with. It's not going about it rote. It's not about going in and doing a bunch of tasks, it wrote. It's not about going in and doing a bunch of tasks. You need to feel a connection with each and every kid and whether that you come in and the child and you say I don't have anything in common with that child, you find it and you so. This was the first step towards mentoring.
Speaker 2:This wasn't during the classroom time. It's more than 30 years later and we're still friends that mentoring changed and morphed and moved into a friendship, but that's what you're talking about also. Everything I'm saying is emotional. You don't know how my job turned out when I talk about it. You don't know. You know I don't work there anymore, right? When you're talking about coaching, you're going to be talking about performance, where they reach what they do, what they get to. You're going to hear that in the conversation. So if you find yourself really talking about an emotional sort of interaction with somebody, that's one that's really ripe for mentorship. That's one that you should really be thinking about.
Speaker 1:I also see it as being a coach, one being nonjudgmental in the situation, right, and I always say don't get caught up in their story, because sometimes people come into the sessions and they're dealing with some really unique situations. And as a coach but then if I had the mentor hat on, it's okay to get into the story with them because now that I'm in there with them, I have a more of an ability to share my experience and how I've used to navigate of what you're going through. And that's the beauty of mentorship versus coaching, right? Coaching, I'm not going to get emotionally into what you got going on. I'm going to stay nonjudgmental and help you self-discover what you need to do to get through it, whereas a mentor perspective I'm all in there with you and I'm going to help you through my experience, get you through this, and I want to get you there as fast as possible and if you listen to me and we stay connected, you will get there faster. And that's how I differentiate the two.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and it's interesting. I'm so glad you brought that up, because a lot of people will think that mentoring is being a psychologist or being a therapist, and it's not. You weren't. You know. Yes, you want to get in there and be able to emotionally connect with somebody, but you also don't want to take on therapy with them. I have so many people will say we need to talk about these sorts of things. I'm like no, that's for a therapist, that is not for a mentor. It's also not for a coach, which you already highlighted, and I just am glad you brought that up, because a lot of people co-mingle therapy with these as well, and I've heard people say I don't need a psychologist or a therapist, I need a coach. And that's a big burden to put on a coach because that's not what they're there for. That's another thing to look out for.
Speaker 1:So take me through your process of how do you connect in your project. Do you connect people reaching out? Hey, I want to be out for. So take me through your process of how do you connect in your project. Do you connect people reaching out? Hey? I want to be a mentor. I want to be a mentor. What does that look like? How do they connect and become a mentor?
Speaker 2:So when we first started, we have the top 1% leaders, we have an astronaut, we have astrophysicists, we have you name artists. Whatever what happens is they've called and then we actually put them through a ringer where they have to fill out a long form and then they have a background check. They have to meet with several people. It's not easy and they don't get paid Like they're coming on to do this for free, and then we say and have to give two hours a month or something, which sounds like it's nothing and most people want to give way more. But just to keep them engaged. Because one thing we did find is that a lot of people want to join up because they're like Ooh, I'd like to network with all those people that are in there. And then we have to like make sure that they're not there for that. Once they're on board, what we do is we have a button that you can click on the website that says become a mentee and we're free for any student around the world who wants to get a mentor, from kindergarten all the way through graduate school. They click the button and they fill it out, and if they're a minor, they have to have a guardian also sign it and they tell a little bit about themselves and who they'd like to be connected with. And then we have another person, after all that's done, who helps them to navigate where they need to go and who they should meet. And we always have them meet more than one mentor, because most people think they know who they want to meet, but we all, no one knows what they don't know. And you always find out that you connect with somebody who's the farthest away maybe than you would ever think, just because you haven't been exposed to that before. And so then you realize, like when I was, like there's a psychologist in the world. What does that do? Someone fixes grandmas. That's exactly what we're trying to do is get them to do something like that.
Speaker 2:So the way that it works for us with the mentor project is that we first try to get people to know something new. So we'll do some panels, we'll give talks, the mentors will go out and give presentations, because a lot of people are like, some of these things I've never even heard of, and so once they have that, then a lot of people will say, ooh, now I want to meet with that person or several of the people. And then they sign up. We also have an innovation lab where people can innovate, start their own company, maybe patent something, do stuff like that, and they meet as a group.
Speaker 2:We also have a research group where students can learn how to do research. We have hackathons that we've done in the past, where we've brought students from different countries together to solve big problems with the help of mentors, so they can come in different ways. It can be hey, I have a question or, like the case of a graduate student who's doing a psychology graduate student who's doing a psychology graduate student who's now working with one of our mentors on how to make a big new shift in psychology based on AI, so she's helping him with his dissertation. We've got all these things happening in lots of different ways. It's not all one-on-one.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's awesome. Are the students from all around the world or specific in the United States?
Speaker 2:Seven different countries. Last year we were in five countries, two countries we weren't in. We weren't in Russia last year and we weren't in, I think, india last year, but we've been in five countries last year, seven in total, and we were able to deliver $3 million worth of mentorship hours in 2024, which I thought was pretty awesome and we've reached about 100,000 students around the world.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. And it's all free. Congratulations, thank you. What an amazing idea, and just to see it through and move it forward, that's impressive. It really is. Share a success story, just one.
Speaker 2:I know there's hundreds, but oh, there are Of the mentee or the mentor.
Speaker 1:Either one, take your shot, I don't care.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'll give you one that just happened, which is cool. There's a mentor, justin Thompson. He's the senior artist for Schultz Creative Studios. So you know Snoopy, he's the guy that draws Snoopy and goes around the world doing Snoopy drawings on murals and whatever he does doing Snoopy stuff. So he became a mentor. He was like I want to be a mentor, I want to teach kids art, mentor them in art, guide them. We were like great.
Speaker 2:At around the same time, somebody from who runs a school in Sharadi, tanzania, said we'd love to have a mentor come to Tanzania to work with our students. And Justin was like I'd love to go. So he went all the way to Sharadi, tanzania, to teach 500 students cartooning. They had never had Western art, they had not learned what cartooning is. So we sent a ton of supplies that would last them a really long time, like around a year. We selected 15 students that would work one-on-one with him. But when he got there he did a giant mural on the side of the school. There was nothing on any wall, it was completely bare brown walls everywhere.
Speaker 2:So, he did a gigantic mural that was beautiful. So just as you drive up to the school, that's what is this big mural. And then the community came out. Then it just wasn't the kids, the community came out. People were helping him to set up scaffolding to reach the high things. They were helping with the stirring the paint and helping with everything. Moms were holding babies. The kids were like running around. It was fabulous. No one expected this.
Speaker 2:Then he went into the school and he was teaching the kids and they were unbelievably thrilled with this. So then that worked so well. So we went back the next year, so in 2024, he went back and this time he taught the teachers, not just the students, he was mentoring everybody and how you can not just draw a picture, but how do you infuse emotion into it. And so he was doing that with them and the teachers. And now in January he went, with the same sort of premise that he did with that, to Flatbush Brooklyn to do the same with the same age group in a school after school program with New York Edge. It's an after school program in Flatbush Brooklyn.
Speaker 2:Our goal is to get the kids from Brooklyn and Tanzania eventually to connect with each other, from Brooklyn and Tanzania eventually to connect with each other, and so that one man, one man, Justin has impacted not just one child but a community, and soon it's going to be two countries that he's going to be connecting. It gets bigger and bigger with one little pebble becomes such an enormous ripple that no one can even imagine it until you've actually experienced it. So imagine that feeling if you got to know the impact that you make just one person and how you can change a whole community.
Speaker 1:It's so powerful. That is a success. Thank you for sharing that. I am so encouraged. I really am. I'm very encouraged. How can potential mentors get in contact with you?
Speaker 2:People can contact us. There's a contact button so you can press that contact button and you can send us questions. We even have an ask a mentor question. You don't have to be a student. You can just say I have a question and we'll get a mentor to answer it. But you can become involved and there are three ways that a person can become involved. Some people say you know what? I don't know, that I want to be a mentor, I want to volunteer. We're all volunteers. We all do this as a volunteer and we get a lot of pleasure out of that. You can involve yourself in the philanthropy side of it, which is funding projects. Or you can say hey, I'd really like to mentor and we can see if we can fit you in. It's really just reaching out and clicking a button on the website.
Speaker 1:Where's the website?
Speaker 2:wwwmentorprojectorg.
Speaker 1:There it is, everyone there. It is Any lasting thoughts as we close out?
Speaker 2:Look to your left and look to your right. You're looking at a mentor or you're looking at a mentee and go out and mentor somebody who needs help.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. There it is. Thank you, Debra. Thank you so much. I appreciate your wisdom, your thoughts and your wonderful story that you share. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, and thank you for having me on and for doing all the good work you do, coach Mo.
Speaker 1:Thank you, and thank you for having me on, and I'm here to support you every step of the way. Connect with me on social media for updates and insights. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook, at Coach Mo Coaching or LinkedIn at Maurice Mabry, or visit my website at mauricemabrycom for exclusive content. Until next time, keep reflecting, keep growing and, most importantly, keep believing in yourself. Remember, the most effective way to do it is to do it Together. We're making incredible strides toward a better and more empowered you. So thank you, and I'll see you in our next episode.