Welcome to the John Matzell Leadership Podcast. This is Tracy Marrow and I am so excited and happy to be co-hosting with my dear friend, Mark Cole.

Today, we are going to be hearing from John. Now this lesson was taken from a live video that John did on his Facebook page and it's entitled Maximizing Your Mentoring.

You are going to want to grab the notes. So put a pause on us right now and go to maxwellpodcast.com forward slash mentor where you can click on the bonus resource button to get that. Print out those notes and go along with us.

Now here's Dr. John C. Maxwell.

Hey John, Maxwell back with you. I've really looked forward to our weekly times where especially during the coronavirus, I just kind of talked to you about what's happening to us and how do we respond especially as leaders because we not only are responsible for ourselves or responsible for a lot of people.

And I want to talk to you about how to maximize mentoring and really this comes out of a conversation that Mark Cole and I had together, you know, Mark is the CEO of the John Maxwell Enterprise.

And Mark was sharing with me that during this crisis time that I'm mentoring him a little bit differently. And I thought, oh, that's kind of interesting. And so I kind of ask him, well, what do you mean?

But then he said, well, John, he said, you're mentoring me a lot on on perspective because how we how we view things is how we do things. And he said, you're really helping me to to see a bigger picture than what the crisis is because remember this crisis has a tendency to reduce the picture.

It has a tendency for us to begin to go inward and say, oh, my it's happening to me and it's probably the worst thing that's ever happened and nobody's probably ever gone like this and gone through this before. And so Mark said, John, you're just constantly keeping a big picture perspective during the crisis for me.

He said, secondly, you're just helping me with creativity and the creativity is a fact that we've all had to change a business is not as usual. In fact, for some businesses, not period.

So how do we get creative and what do we do when we can't do business as usual. So he said, you're helping me with the creativity. And then he said, thirdly, you're helping me balance realism and optimism. And you know, it's realism without optimism is so discouraging that.

That we instead of leading together, we're going to have a wake together and optimism without reality is pie in the sky. And there's that that's not even that's not even right for a leader to do that in the fact of.

You have to give people not only hope, but you also have to help them and the hope is in the optimism, but the help is in the realism. And so he said, you're helping me with that balance there.

And then he said, what's probably biggest difference is your your less instructive and you're mentoring right now and you're just more available. In other words, I'm just basically saying, Mark, this phone is call me at any time.

Whatever comes up, I'm just here to help you. And so I almost I almost call this lesson mentoring during a crisis. And then I thought, you know what, that's a little too small. I've got to get a little bit bigger here.

We are mentoring right in a crisis. I'm mentoring you today in a crisis. But there's a bigger picture there that not only will help us today in the crisis, but will help us tomorrow or when we're when we're out of this.

And so I'm just kind of excited about this lesson. I just developed it for you. And I hope it adds value to you because there are four questions that you want to ask yourself to maximize mentoring in the relationship that you either have with people that you're mentoring or the person that's mentoring you.

Here are the questions number one, who mentors me. That's very important. It's not only what they say, but who says it now all four of these questions. I'm going to come back and teach on number two.

When do they mentor me? And there is obviously that question is theirs because timing is very important. And there are times where we're more receptive to mentoring than others. For example, during a crisis, we're much more receptive to what leaders have to say when we're in trouble than what they have to say when we see to be going along well.

Question number three is, is how do they mentor me? I'm very excited about sharing this with you because I think this is meat and mentoring that very solemn any of us ever get.

So I went inside myself a lot on this and I just said, OK, how do I do it? And intuitively, how do I share with you? How to really how to really mentor people to get a maximum return for that person that you're sharing with it? And then question number four, how do I maximize the mentoring?

How do I maximize the mentoring if I'm mentoring you? How do I maximize the mentoring if you're mentoring me? In other words, after after we're done, we're not done. And that's the thing. I think so many people never realize in success. They think that, OK, I just finished that. And they don't really appreciate nor value nor understand the return on what I would call sustained thinking. In other words, when everybody else is done thinking, if you'll stay with that,

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