Finding a mentor or business coach : Part 2

Mike has had some great responses to his question on his blog which you can read here

The best one is number 10 : )

Having read through the suggestions people have made, I still think that the key thing is to make sure that you very clearly understand, in your own words, what it is that you are going to ask a mentor or coach to help you with.

I think it is easy to pass over this point, in the excitement of finding and discussing your business with other interested parties. It can also be tempting to wait to let someone else who has already been in your position to simply ' tell you the answer" if there is such a thing.

I don't think this helps you - certainly not in the longer term. You want someone who has experience in your area for sure, but more than anything else, you want someone who believes in you. Sufficiently to keep you on the straight and narrow. Sufficiently to put up with your objections, excuses or other reasons why you don' t think their advice is sound, the first time you hear it...but then later, the penny drops, and it does make sense.

How to find a great mentor or coach

In previous posts, I've mentioned the blogger Mike Michalowicz, otherwise known as "The Toiletpaper Entrepreneur" and more specifically his blog which you can find at http://www.toiletpaperentrepreneur.com/blog/index.php

He posed a good question recently which I have written a contribution for. The question being - how do you find a great mentor to help you in your business? Perhaps more specifically, Mike asked - "while people who carry the title guru, coach, mentor, etc. seem to be a dime a
dozen....So the question is how do you find the truly extraordinary one to direct you?".

Good questions eh?

My quick thoughts on this are:

1. You need to have at least some sense of your short and longer term goals and sticking points. Ask yourself - do you know what they are? If not - then that is where to start. This informs what kind of coach or mentor you need, and what to work on. Revisit this question and recognise your needs will change over time.

2. You need to decide what kind of mentoring or coaching arrangement you want. One-off, for a specific problem, or ongoing, as a sounding board. You might benefit from spending time with different people at different times. This is easy: mentors can be found on mp3 tracks, DVDs, in books, and in person, over lunch.

3. Often, on reflection, you will realise there is someone suitable in your immediate network. Do not be afraid to approach and ask for their help. But be committed to be totally honest, open to new ideas, and time sensitive. Their reward is often simply seeing you grow. Their time is precious; use it wisely, and find ways to give back something.

The new look TradeMe sucks

At least, that's the impression you get if you browse through the comments on the 'community' page of Sam's old auction site which earned him a nice amount of pocket money. Last night TradeMe had their standard website layout up - this morning it has all changed, with adverts way more visible across the site, and several changes in layout.

It's only 9am and there are already 485+ comments on the community noticeboard for the site of which I would estimate 90% + are saying "why change what was already great?" ..or much worse, using language I do not want to replicate here.

Interesting example of how easy it is to disenfranchise your user base by fiddling about with things that they want left well alone thank you very much. That's assuming the comments already made are representative of the 50,000+ people who visit and log into TradeMe at any one point in the day.

Will be interesting to watch as this develops and see if and how TradeMe responds..