Learning conversations

Welcome to Love Mondays, a weekly newsletter designed as a 3-minute hit to fire up the other 10,077 minutes of your week.

Does the idea of mentoring feel a bit overwhelming? Let’s talk learning conversations instead. While mentoring and reverse-mentoring works well for some, it can also feel like an overly official arrangement. The idea of learning conversations is far simpler but hones in on the ultimate goals of bringing cognitive diversity to your thinking, assessing risk, testing ideas and building momentum just as effectively.

Who might you initiate a learning conversation with this week?

Write down a few names.

Consider: whos voice could add lived experience to a conversation playing out in your head?

Practice: people with a similar risk appetite to have learning conversations with.

Decide to: send out a few requests to people who might let you pick their brains.

The Coffee Experiment

Mentoring is the topic I get asked about most regularly at the end of my keynotes. ‘How do I find a mentor?’ ‘What makes a good mentor?’ ‘How do I ask someone to be my mentor?’ I also see how overwhelmed people are by the idea. I think it auto-generates some sense of rigidity, like someone forgot to give us a manual for the secret handshakes to get let into that elite mentoring club. I think it also triggers people who optimistically embraced their company’s ill-fated attempt to assign everyone a random mentor and got a dud.

Ditch the notions of obligation and formality. Take the pressure off and literally think of this as a coffee experiment: how much can you learn from someone’s life experience over a coffee? Beautiful things happen when we put our heads together!

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