Following on from my blog post ‘The Magic of Mentors’, there are things that we need to learn from others but there is much more to be learned from ourselves. 

People can give us advice and tell us their opinion but no-one knows more about us than we do ourselves. 

When people give us advice, it is mostly well meaning, however it is advice based on their knowledge, based on their experience, based on their perspective and mostly based on what they would do themselves.

This advice is not based on our knowledge, based on our experiences, based on our perspective and based on what we would do. The only person who can give us this advice is ourselves! 

This is why coaching is so powerful because it has nothing to do with the coach’s knowledge, experience, or perspective, coaching is focused solely on YOU! 

So how do you become your own greatest mentor?

Here are a few ideas,

• Believe in yourself
• Trust yourself
• Understand yourself
• Grow yourself
• Know what you want
• Know what you don’t want
• Put yourself first
• Listen to yourself especially your gut instinct

Our gut instinct is so important in terms of guiding us in the right direction. I love Karren Brady’s description of what gut instinct is in her interview with Steven Bartlett, 

‘it’s made up of all of the experiences you have had through your career and when you are faced with a problem, you’ve been in that movie before, you’ve had that movie before, different problem in a different moment about a different thing but very similar and you know the outcome. So your gut instinct goes, hang on a moment, I’ve somehow been here before and I know how this plays out’ Karren Brady

Karren goes on to say ‘I find that if I follow my gut instinct I tend to make the right decisions and if I ignore it (gut instinct), it tends to go bad’

I also feel the same in that when I make decisions aligned with my gut instinct I tend to make the right decisions and when I don’t listen to my gut instinct, these decisions usually turn out unhelpful to me. 

Are you your own greatest mentor?

Do you believe in yourself and trust yourself?

Do you listen to your gut instinct?

Do you want to read more about Positive Change?

Download your free e-book ‘The A-Z of Effective Change’ below.

Thanks for reading,

Siobhain

x x