Living below Coit Tower in the San Francisco in the 60′s was every bit as adventurous as you might imagine! In a coffee shop in the shadow of the Tower, a friend sat me down to teach me to play chess. I knew checkers, yet chess is something altogether different. You know if you’ve played both.
I quickly latched on to the game and became an avid enthusiast. Losing consistently and every time did not deter me. I was persistent and eventually, I beat him! What a day! I whooped and hollered and danced around like a crazy woman.
We continued our lessons until I was winning half the time … then 75% and pretty soon I was the better player.
“It was time,” he said. You have to find a player who is much better than you so you can grow! And so I did.
I have had many amazing and famous mentors. I chose the best because I thought, really, “you’re too old to start at the bottom,” and I had done 10 years of study before I took on a big time mentor for my own personal growth and development.
I absorbed their training like a sponge, practicing and adding this information to my own platform. And then something odd began happening. You may have experienced this same thing yourself.
I began to notice there were things about my mentors (several at this point) that began to feel uncomfortable to me. Things I never noticed before. I saw behaviors I would not replicate myself, yet they continued feeding great information.
After a few months, more and more things that were not in alignment with how I do business with folks, were showing up. In some cases they were doing the opposite of what they had taught me.
Deeply disappointed, I left them and moved on to other mentors who were aligned with my own standards, values and ideals.
I had simply outgrown my own mentors in awareness and in some cases, ability. I don’t really know why I was so surprised when this happened as I had experienced this same scenario playing chess. Perhaps I was enamored … working with some greats. In any case …
… As with my chess mentor … I moved on. How about you? Is it time for you to boost your own personal growth? Have you outgrown your mentor?
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©Leslie Flowers May 2012, exponential personal growth expert, helps mature women re-engineer their lives by steeping them in living life with principles and virtues. You may read her archived voluminous personal growth teachings — Drops of Awareness — at PathsofChange.com, which house each step on her own path of change over the past 10 years.
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