34. Be Your Own Mentor
A mentor is an amazing asset to have, and I have several women in my life that I am lucky to be able to count as mentors. But this week, I want to teach you about a different kind of mentor, one that’s always available to you but is often overlooked.
It’s YOU.
It might not be the you that you’re used to engaging with.
But I promise you, there’s a lot of guidance and inspiration and brilliance already inside you, and this week I’m going to teach you how to tap into it.
This part of you has insights that you haven’t thought of (which makes no sense right now but stick with me!) and ideas that will move you forward. And understanding how to engage your inner mentor is one of the most empowering things you can do for yourself.
Tune in this week as I share why your inner mentor is such a powerful asset to have and teach you how to start tapping into her (or their) power right away!
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to teach and talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
How to tap into your inner mentor and guide yourself with this powerful tool.
What you get from your inner mentor that you can’t get from another person.
The way we talk to ourselves as our inner mentor versus how we usually talk to ourselves.
Why your own agency matters so much and how I teach that to my clients even as I’m also a guide and resource for them.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we are talking about how to tap your inner mentor.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, I'm excited to talk about inner mentors with you. You may be wondering what that is, we will get to that in a minute. But first, I wanted to share something that came up recently. I actually can't remember who I was having this conversation with, I think it was a client. It could have been my girlfriend, I'm not 100% sure.
But what we were talking about was basically having high standards and then like not being able to meet them and how painful that is. And what I said was, “If you want to have high standards, like standards you can't currently meet, then you need to really be celebrating all your efforts towards meeting them even when those efforts fall short of the standards.” Right?
So let me explain. Like just to have like a really crisp example is to go to bed at 10pm every night and that's really hard for you for some reason. And you go to bed at 10 five nights out of the week and not two nights. If you want to stay with this high standard, stay with this goal until you get it, you have to celebrate the shit out of doing it five times out of seven.
So that's one example. Let's see, what's another example? Let's say you're learning a foreign language. I studied French in high school and college. I actually lived in France for a while, which was super fun and also really hard in some ways. Because like I moved to a country where I spoke the language somewhat, like having learned in school, but then had to like do shit like set up a bank account and like negotiate places to live, which brought up some interesting challenges actually.
And now when I remember it, I'm like, “Of course I can figure out what the fuck I'm dealing with right now because I moved to France as a 23 year old and sorted that out. Anyways, that's a little tangent for you.
So let's say you're like trying to learn French and you want to be fluent. And you're not fluent, right? And you fuck up your grammar all the time, and you put things in the wrong tense and things like that. I'm like, it's been so long since I've even spoken French my brain is like “Look, how do we even speak a language? What could we mess up?”
Like in French I remember one thing we learned was like subjunctive tense and that was really confusing for me. So like, if I had a really high standard like I always get my subjunctive tense right, I speak French fluently, I never make mistakes. That's a pretty fucking high standard y'all. Like, first of all, y'all know my thoughts on perfection, not a real available goal.
Well, let's just say you wanted to get the subjunctive case right like nine times out of 10. If you're going to have a high standard like that, and you are not able to currently meet it, you need to celebrate your efforts in order to be able to get to that high standard.
Because here's what I see people do. I see people have a really high standard that they can't meet, not meet it, beat themselves up, and give up. That's never going to get you there. It's just going to make you feel like shit, basically forever, right? We don't become the person who can do the thing we can't do yet by beating ourselves up. I know a lot of us try to do shit that way, but it doesn't work.
And if by some weird miracle you do get to there, it won't feel good if you've used beating yourself up as the fuel. Because as we've talked about before the destination will feel like the journey. So if the journey to getting there feels like judging and shaming yourself, achieving the thing will still feel like judging and shaming yourself.
If you want to speak French fluently and you judge and shame yourself and somehow still manage to get there, you will still experience your French is not good enough because the destination will feel like the journey. Does that make sense? I hope it makes sense because y'all aren't here to tell me if it makes sense or not. So come tell me on Instagram. I would love to get your questions and help elaborate or explain the finer points of that if it doesn't make sense to you. I'm here for your feedback and requests. Y'all hit me up at Kori Linn on Insta.
Okay, now what we're going to talk about this week is your inner mentor. What even is an inner mentor? So my idea of the inner mentor is this part of your brain that you can tap into that is like a mentor. It has these really great ideas, and it has insights that you haven't thought of, which maybe won't make sense to you immediately because like it's your inner mentor, it's literally your own brain. We'll get into that in a minute.
And I love this concept because I think it's such a source of inspiration and guidance that doesn't require anyone else. I mean listen, getting outside mentors is also great. I've got several, I talk about them all the time. I also have like other people in my life, like my girlfriend who's super supportive, who listens to me talk and reads a lot of my work. And we do, you know, go to each other for advice and guidance all the time.
But an inner mentor is something else. It's something really special, and wonderful, and self-contained. And I think there's a way also in which the inner mentor helps you reestablish personal agency. When we go to an outer mentor, we're sort of like deferring sometimes to their ideas. And it's not that that's wrong.
Like I talk to my mentors who have like businesses that are, you know, bigger than mine, or they've like successfully done things in their businesses that I haven't done yet. And I'm like, “Hey, how'd you do that?” They have great information, they can tell me how they did it. But they're always going to be telling me how they did it. And they're going to have like external guidance, which is not the same as internal guidance. Right?
And that can be valuable, but I'm really big into this idea that you're in charge of your own life, right? It's like we talked about in the podcast about when is it time to leave your job? And the answer is whenever the fuck you want for whatever reason you want. Because you are an adult and you're in charge of your life.
So as much as we may want to get insight, and advice, and guidance from outside mentors and outside resources, hello Google searches anyone? We're ultimately the one who has to like make the decision about what we're going to do with all that information. And what I see people do all the time is just defer to an outside resource. Honestly, sometimes people defer to me, right, I'm their coach, and they're like, “Well, what does Kori think? What does Kori think I should do?”
And that's why I'm always telling y'all and my clients, I also consider y'all my clients, just so you know, you're just my podcast clients versus my one on one clients. I'm always telling y'all and my one on one clients, you are the one who has to decide what you're going to do. Like you're the one who knows for you.
I can be your coach. I can help you see what your thoughts are creating. I can help you see why maybe you don't have a result you want yet and how you could get to that result, how you could create more of what you want. But at the end of the day, what I'm also trying to teach you is to have agency and to take agency over your life and not just defer to outside people.
Because like the way my mentor grew her business might not be the way I grow my business. Now, her information is still really killer and worth me finding out. But I, at the end of the day, have to make the choices about my business and my business is going to be my own, right, it's going to be different.
So here are two key components I want y'all to think about when you think about the inner mentor. One component is how does the inner mentor talk? How do you talk to yourself when you're the inner mentor versus how we talk to ourselves most of the times as human, which is often not great, right? And the other thing is like the quality of ideas and where the ideas come from.
Okay, so thing one is like I know that for most of us, you know, me included, we have a lot of critical voices inside our head. Our brain says a lot of fucked up shit to us like all the time. My brain still does this, right? So one of the metaphors I use here is the idea that there's a part of your brain that's like a parrot, so it just is repeating shit it heard.
Like I always think of my brain parrot as like repeating mean shit it heard in like 1996. And that it doesn't actually know what any of it means, even though it can use the language properly in a sentence. And the reason I think about it this way is because I think it's easy to think like, “Oh my God, my brain is such a fucking asshole. Why is it mean to me all the time?”
So I don't think my brain is a mean asshole anymore. I used to think that, but now I think about it like this. I’m like, “Well, my brain just wants to keep me alive.” Right? Like that's what it evolved to do. It's like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to keep this bitch alive. Are you fucking kidding me? Keep her alive, keep her alive, keep her alive.”
And so it thinks a lot of things are dangerous. It wants to keep me alive and the way that it tries to do that is by parroting things it heard from authority figures, parents, teachers, cool kids from middle school. None of those people are who I want to take my directions from in life now as an adult. But there's like a part of my brain that doesn't realize that.
And I do things, especially as a person who, like I quit my safe, cozy corporate job to launch a business. I stopped identifying as a straight person and decided to identify as a queer person. I have left identities that seem safer, they aren't necessarily actually safer but they kind of seem safer in our cultural narrative. I have like left them to go do something else.
And when we leave things that seem safe to go do something else, it can kind of freak our brain out. Part of our brain is like, “Listen, we've been in the cave and it's not great in here, but we want you to stay in here because nothing came along and ate us. You're trying to go out in the sunshine and that seems really good, but we don't know what's out there. Something might come along and eat us or like you might eat a berry and then die.” Right? If you think about how the brain evolved, I think this metaphor actually makes a lot of sense.
So when my brain says mean shit to me, one way to think about it is like my brain understands what it's saying and it's like systematically trying to like sabotage me and destroy my life. I understand why we might think about our brains that way sometimes. I just don't think it's true. And I just don't think it's useful, right?
Because then it just makes me want to have a fucking war with my brain. And I live with her, like we're together all the time, like it's not going to work. Well we, me and my brain, won't get anything else done in our life if all we're doing is fighting with each other. Versus if I'm like, “Oh, my brain just wants to keep me alive. And it’s confused about how to do that and it's just a parrot that's parroting shit it heard a long time ago. And the shit that it's parroting doesn't mean anything.”
So if my brain tells me, you're being dumb, I can be like, “Oh, my brain thinks I'm being dumb.” Or I can be like, “Wow, my brain found like, an old cassette tape.” To like change the metaphor now from a parent to a cassette tape, right? My brain found this old messaging and it's playing it back because, you know, it senses potential danger and it thinks this is what it's supposed to do when there's potential danger, right?
So back to the inner mentor, with the inner mentor, we're not going to fucking talk to ourselves like that, right? Because the inner mentor is not a parrot from 1996. We all have an idea of like how a mentor talks to a mentee, or how we would want a mentor to talk to us. Like I'm sure there are some mentors out there who maybe talk the same way my brain parrot does. That's not what we're going for here, friends. Okay?
So I want you to think about like if I had a mentor I loved and respected, who loved and respected me, how would they talk to me? That is the quality of talking you want to do to yourself when you're talking as the inner mentor, right? You can even think like, how would I talk if I were mentoring someone else? Or like how would I talk if I were speaking to a friend I really like love and admire who's facing a similar situation? How would I talk on purpose to someone like me if I were not also me?
Because we have like these ridiculous, crazy, like high, bizarre expectations of ourselves. And then we say all this like mean shit to ourselves, thank you parrot brain. But we don't do that to other people generally. I'm sure some people do but most of my people don't.
They're letting their parrot run wild when they're talking to themselves but I'm like, “Well, what if like your bestie did that?” And they're like, “Well, she's amazing. And she's like going to figure it out. And like she's going to be stronger because of it.” They have this like totally different type of speech when they're talking to someone else. And that's what I want you to tap into for this.
Now, the second thing is the quality of ideas, right? So when most of us think about like how to figure things out, or how to problem solve, or like how to navigate our career, we are thinking about it from the lens of being ourselves.
Now, that might make sense because we are ourselves, right? You're maybe out there like, “Who else would we be thinking about it as Kori? Like what the fuck?” But I actually think it really limits our view when we think about our problem as ourself, with our resources and our capacities. And there's a really simple trick for finding other high quality ideas. And I'm going to share it with you.
So, the simple trick is to basically just ask yourself like what would someone else do? Don't just say someone else though, your brain will look at you with some side eye like, what? Pick a specific person, right? Like, what would Brené Brown do? What would Michelle Obama do? What might Oprah say about this?
Like I don't care, particularly who the people you choose are to use this framework, but I want you to choose on purpose. I want you to choose somebody that you think is brilliant, that you think has like really amazing ideas. It might be someone in your industry. It might be like someone actually in your office, like maybe there's like a really bad ass female VP that you're like, “Yeah, what would she think about this? If she were my mentor, what would she say to me?” Right?
Now, here's the thing. You might think like, “Well, but asking myself what I should do and like asking myself like what Michelle Obama would say, like why would that come back with something different?” But it actually does because your brain is doing like a completely different, I'm going to call it Google search, right?
The Google search with like, “What should I do?” Is limited by your brain’s perspective about you and what it thinks is possible for you. Whereas when you think like, “If Michelle Obama were my mentor, what would she say to me?” Your brain will suddenly tap into this like whole other well of creativity and everything you've ever read about Michelle Obama, and it'll be like, “Oh yeah, this one time she did this one thing, and she figured this thing out this way.”
I don't have actual examples, that would have been helpful, I don't have them. It doesn't matter, the point is you can tap into so much inner knowing that actually already exists in you. That's just not currently available to you because you're not doing the right search terms to get it, right?
This is kind of like we talked about confirmation bias, like confirmation bias is like whatever you already believe your brain will do that little search and then it'll come up with data to support it, right? So if you're in a situation at work that you're like, “This is fucking unsolvable.” Your brain is like, “Yeah, I agree it's unsolvable, I will suppress any data I have about how we could solve that.”
But if you come into the same situation, and you're like, “Okay, but what would this like mentor I'm imagining, what would they tell me to do?” Your brain is coming in with a different set of biases. Your brain is coming in with like a bias for solutions, especially if you think the other person's fucking brilliant.
Your brain is like, “Well I think they're brilliant, so I think they'd be able to find a solution. And if they would be able to find a solution, what would that solution be?” Tada, and then your brain has an idea that was like previously unavailable to you. Not from the other actual person, but from you. This is your inner mentor. Your inner mentor is actually you. Your brain, your ideas, but we're just like kind of using a little roundabout way to tap into this knowledge that you always have inside of you, but your brain is just generally sort of not presenting to you.
So for you, it might be like, what would so and so do? Another frame that I've used for this that was really successful with a client was I was like, she was dealing with something in her personal life. And she thought it was like totally unsolvable, right? And I was like okay, but if you were at a job interview, and they gave you like this paper to fill out, and they presented this exact same problem to you and said, “Hey, this is like a logic puzzle for this job application thing. And there is a solution to this, and we just want to see your logic of how you would solve it, then what would the solution be?”
And it totally changed how she was thinking about the thing in her personal life. Because she was looking at the thing in her personal life like this is just what it's like to be a woman who has a demanding job and two kids. And like fucking our country just shits all over women, and like misogyny and the patriarchy, and it's like never going to get better. And like I have a great husband, but it's still like some bullshit and I just have to feel terrible.
And listen, y'all know me, y'all know I agree that there's a lot of like misogyny, and patriarchy, and bullshit, and social conditioning women get, and social expectations that women receive all the time. So like that's all real, but that didn't actually mean her thing was unsolvable.
But if she's looking at it going, “I just have to feel fucking terrible.” Then guess what's going to happen? She's going to feel fucking terrible and she's not going to come up with a solution, right? She's just going to feel terrible and wait for the thing to like go away. Or she's just going to like suck it up about that thing and then be mad about it, right? Like, be low key resentful, or maybe high key resentful.
Versus if you think about it like this is a logic puzzle and there's a way to solve this and I actually don't have to live my life this way. Then guess what happens? You come up with solutions. And then you get to choose, like would I rather just keep this thing and not solve it? Like what kind of solutions are these? Do I want to choose them? Then you're in this position of agency where you get to decide versus thinking like this is just the way it is for a woman, and it has to suck.
That's not a super fun or empowered way to look at things. Like even if I agree that there are forces in the world, like patriarchy forces, right, the patriarchy forces, but you know what I mean? Like there are people we're going to run into in life and in the office who are sexist, who are going to offer us some patriarchal bullshit. But how we respond to that is where our power is.
Whether our response is like, “Yeah, I guess my life has to be terrible in this way.” Or whether our responses like, “I'm going to get creative and solve this for myself.” Or like, whether our response is like, “I'm going to file a lawsuit.” Lots of things are available to us, right?
But for us to choose a different choice we have to see that we have agency and one of the ways we can see that we have agency is to see that we have options. And one of the ways that we can see that we have options is to tap into the inner mentor.
Okay, so to recap, your inner mentor is just you using your own brain differently. It's you coming at problems or situations in your life from a slightly different framework, or a wildly different framework or lens, right?
So it's going from like, this is my personal problem in my personal life, to like, what if this were a logic puzzle in a job application process? Or like coming at this from what if this were my besties problem, instead of my problem? Or coming at this from, what would this really famous brilliant woman say if she were my mentor?
And that just allows our own brain to come up with new insights, guidance, solutions, ideas that were always in there but were not being presented to us. They were not available in like the old Google search our brain was doing when we were just thinking about it as like, this is my problem slash situation and I have to come at it with like my current know how and abilities blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So that's one part of it. And then the other part, which is not to be overlooked, is the quality of the self-talk. Right? So it's not just tapping into these high quality ideas and solutions that already exist inside our brain. It's also talking to ourself about our problems and situations in a different tone of voice internally. I mean, maybe externally. Maybe you talk to yourself out loud. I for sure talk to myself out loud.
But even just inside our own head, it's a really different experience when, you know, something doesn't go the way we want it to and we think to ourselves like, “Oh, you're a fucking idiot.” Versus thinking to ourselves like, “Okay, that didn't go the way we wanted it to and that's okay, because we're going to figure it out. And like what went well? Let's look at that first. Let's look at what went well, then we'll look at what didn't go well. And then we're going to look at what we're going to do.” Right?
So even if we did something and it didn't work out, and we want to do better, we want to correct it. Looking at the quality of speech, the quality of voice we're using to talk to ourselves about that. And also looking to tap into that higher quality set of solutions and ideas that's always available to us, it's part of our brain, we just have to do the right Google search to find it.
All right y'all, I would love to hear from you about your own inner mentor. What she has to say. What situations you're tapping into her knowledge about. And what's changing in your life now that you are using this tool.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life. I've got good news for you, I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call. I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also, bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers, and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category. So you can check that out on the testimonials page. All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y'all, I'm excited to talk about inner mentors with you. You may be wondering what that is, we will get to that in a minute. But first, I wanted to share something that came up recently. I actually can't remember who I was having this conversation with, I think it was a client. It could have been my girlfriend, I'm not 100% sure.
But what we were talking about was basically having high standards and then like not being able to meet them and how painful that is. And what I said was, “If you want to have high standards, like standards you can't currently meet, then you need to really be celebrating all your efforts towards meeting them even when those efforts fall short of the standards.” Right?
So let me explain. Like just to have like a really crisp example is to go to bed at 10pm every night and that's really hard for you for some reason. And you go to bed at 10 five nights out of the week and not two nights. If you want to stay with this high standard, stay with this goal until you get it, you have to celebrate the shit out of doing it five times out of seven.
So that's one example. Let's see, what's another example? Let's say you're learning a foreign language. I studied French in high school and college. I actually lived in France for a while, which was super fun and also really hard in some ways. Because like I moved to a country where I spoke the language somewhat, like having learned in school, but then had to like do shit like set up a bank account and like negotiate places to live, which brought up some interesting challenges actually.
And now when I remember it, I'm like, “Of course I can figure out what the fuck I'm dealing with right now because I moved to France as a 23 year old and sorted that out. Anyways, that's a little tangent for you.
So let's say you're like trying to learn French and you want to be fluent. And you're not fluent, right? And you fuck up your grammar all the time, and you put things in the wrong tense and things like that. I'm like, it's been so long since I've even spoken French my brain is like “Look, how do we even speak a language? What could we mess up?”
Like in French I remember one thing we learned was like subjunctive tense and that was really confusing for me. So like, if I had a really high standard like I always get my subjunctive tense right, I speak French fluently, I never make mistakes. That's a pretty fucking high standard y'all. Like, first of all, y'all know my thoughts on perfection, not a real available goal.
Well, let's just say you wanted to get the subjunctive case right like nine times out of 10. If you're going to have a high standard like that, and you are not able to currently meet it, you need to celebrate your efforts in order to be able to get to that high standard.
Because here's what I see people do. I see people have a really high standard that they can't meet, not meet it, beat themselves up, and give up. That's never going to get you there. It's just going to make you feel like shit, basically forever, right? We don't become the person who can do the thing we can't do yet by beating ourselves up. I know a lot of us try to do shit that way, but it doesn't work.
And if by some weird miracle you do get to there, it won't feel good if you've used beating yourself up as the fuel. Because as we've talked about before the destination will feel like the journey. So if the journey to getting there feels like judging and shaming yourself, achieving the thing will still feel like judging and shaming yourself.
If you want to speak French fluently and you judge and shame yourself and somehow still manage to get there, you will still experience your French is not good enough because the destination will feel like the journey. Does that make sense? I hope it makes sense because y'all aren't here to tell me if it makes sense or not. So come tell me on Instagram. I would love to get your questions and help elaborate or explain the finer points of that if it doesn't make sense to you. I'm here for your feedback and requests. Y'all hit me up at Kori Linn on Insta.
Okay, now what we're going to talk about this week is your inner mentor. What even is an inner mentor? So my idea of the inner mentor is this part of your brain that you can tap into that is like a mentor. It has these really great ideas, and it has insights that you haven't thought of, which maybe won't make sense to you immediately because like it's your inner mentor, it's literally your own brain. We'll get into that in a minute.
And I love this concept because I think it's such a source of inspiration and guidance that doesn't require anyone else. I mean listen, getting outside mentors is also great. I've got several, I talk about them all the time. I also have like other people in my life, like my girlfriend who's super supportive, who listens to me talk and reads a lot of my work. And we do, you know, go to each other for advice and guidance all the time.
But an inner mentor is something else. It's something really special, and wonderful, and self-contained. And I think there's a way also in which the inner mentor helps you reestablish personal agency. When we go to an outer mentor, we're sort of like deferring sometimes to their ideas. And it's not that that's wrong.
Like I talk to my mentors who have like businesses that are, you know, bigger than mine, or they've like successfully done things in their businesses that I haven't done yet. And I'm like, “Hey, how'd you do that?” They have great information, they can tell me how they did it. But they're always going to be telling me how they did it. And they're going to have like external guidance, which is not the same as internal guidance. Right?
And that can be valuable, but I'm really big into this idea that you're in charge of your own life, right? It's like we talked about in the podcast about when is it time to leave your job? And the answer is whenever the fuck you want for whatever reason you want. Because you are an adult and you're in charge of your life.
So as much as we may want to get insight, and advice, and guidance from outside mentors and outside resources, hello Google searches anyone? We're ultimately the one who has to like make the decision about what we're going to do with all that information. And what I see people do all the time is just defer to an outside resource. Honestly, sometimes people defer to me, right, I'm their coach, and they're like, “Well, what does Kori think? What does Kori think I should do?”
And that's why I'm always telling y'all and my clients, I also consider y'all my clients, just so you know, you're just my podcast clients versus my one on one clients. I'm always telling y'all and my one on one clients, you are the one who has to decide what you're going to do. Like you're the one who knows for you.
I can be your coach. I can help you see what your thoughts are creating. I can help you see why maybe you don't have a result you want yet and how you could get to that result, how you could create more of what you want. But at the end of the day, what I'm also trying to teach you is to have agency and to take agency over your life and not just defer to outside people.
Because like the way my mentor grew her business might not be the way I grow my business. Now, her information is still really killer and worth me finding out. But I, at the end of the day, have to make the choices about my business and my business is going to be my own, right, it's going to be different.
So here are two key components I want y'all to think about when you think about the inner mentor. One component is how does the inner mentor talk? How do you talk to yourself when you're the inner mentor versus how we talk to ourselves most of the times as human, which is often not great, right? And the other thing is like the quality of ideas and where the ideas come from.
Okay, so thing one is like I know that for most of us, you know, me included, we have a lot of critical voices inside our head. Our brain says a lot of fucked up shit to us like all the time. My brain still does this, right? So one of the metaphors I use here is the idea that there's a part of your brain that's like a parrot, so it just is repeating shit it heard.
Like I always think of my brain parrot as like repeating mean shit it heard in like 1996. And that it doesn't actually know what any of it means, even though it can use the language properly in a sentence. And the reason I think about it this way is because I think it's easy to think like, “Oh my God, my brain is such a fucking asshole. Why is it mean to me all the time?”
So I don't think my brain is a mean asshole anymore. I used to think that, but now I think about it like this. I’m like, “Well, my brain just wants to keep me alive.” Right? Like that's what it evolved to do. It's like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to keep this bitch alive. Are you fucking kidding me? Keep her alive, keep her alive, keep her alive.”
And so it thinks a lot of things are dangerous. It wants to keep me alive and the way that it tries to do that is by parroting things it heard from authority figures, parents, teachers, cool kids from middle school. None of those people are who I want to take my directions from in life now as an adult. But there's like a part of my brain that doesn't realize that.
And I do things, especially as a person who, like I quit my safe, cozy corporate job to launch a business. I stopped identifying as a straight person and decided to identify as a queer person. I have left identities that seem safer, they aren't necessarily actually safer but they kind of seem safer in our cultural narrative. I have like left them to go do something else.
And when we leave things that seem safe to go do something else, it can kind of freak our brain out. Part of our brain is like, “Listen, we've been in the cave and it's not great in here, but we want you to stay in here because nothing came along and ate us. You're trying to go out in the sunshine and that seems really good, but we don't know what's out there. Something might come along and eat us or like you might eat a berry and then die.” Right? If you think about how the brain evolved, I think this metaphor actually makes a lot of sense.
So when my brain says mean shit to me, one way to think about it is like my brain understands what it's saying and it's like systematically trying to like sabotage me and destroy my life. I understand why we might think about our brains that way sometimes. I just don't think it's true. And I just don't think it's useful, right?
Because then it just makes me want to have a fucking war with my brain. And I live with her, like we're together all the time, like it's not going to work. Well we, me and my brain, won't get anything else done in our life if all we're doing is fighting with each other. Versus if I'm like, “Oh, my brain just wants to keep me alive. And it’s confused about how to do that and it's just a parrot that's parroting shit it heard a long time ago. And the shit that it's parroting doesn't mean anything.”
So if my brain tells me, you're being dumb, I can be like, “Oh, my brain thinks I'm being dumb.” Or I can be like, “Wow, my brain found like, an old cassette tape.” To like change the metaphor now from a parent to a cassette tape, right? My brain found this old messaging and it's playing it back because, you know, it senses potential danger and it thinks this is what it's supposed to do when there's potential danger, right?
So back to the inner mentor, with the inner mentor, we're not going to fucking talk to ourselves like that, right? Because the inner mentor is not a parrot from 1996. We all have an idea of like how a mentor talks to a mentee, or how we would want a mentor to talk to us. Like I'm sure there are some mentors out there who maybe talk the same way my brain parrot does. That's not what we're going for here, friends. Okay?
So I want you to think about like if I had a mentor I loved and respected, who loved and respected me, how would they talk to me? That is the quality of talking you want to do to yourself when you're talking as the inner mentor, right? You can even think like, how would I talk if I were mentoring someone else? Or like how would I talk if I were speaking to a friend I really like love and admire who's facing a similar situation? How would I talk on purpose to someone like me if I were not also me?
Because we have like these ridiculous, crazy, like high, bizarre expectations of ourselves. And then we say all this like mean shit to ourselves, thank you parrot brain. But we don't do that to other people generally. I'm sure some people do but most of my people don't.
They're letting their parrot run wild when they're talking to themselves but I'm like, “Well, what if like your bestie did that?” And they're like, “Well, she's amazing. And she's like going to figure it out. And like she's going to be stronger because of it.” They have this like totally different type of speech when they're talking to someone else. And that's what I want you to tap into for this.
Now, the second thing is the quality of ideas, right? So when most of us think about like how to figure things out, or how to problem solve, or like how to navigate our career, we are thinking about it from the lens of being ourselves.
Now, that might make sense because we are ourselves, right? You're maybe out there like, “Who else would we be thinking about it as Kori? Like what the fuck?” But I actually think it really limits our view when we think about our problem as ourself, with our resources and our capacities. And there's a really simple trick for finding other high quality ideas. And I'm going to share it with you.
So, the simple trick is to basically just ask yourself like what would someone else do? Don't just say someone else though, your brain will look at you with some side eye like, what? Pick a specific person, right? Like, what would Brené Brown do? What would Michelle Obama do? What might Oprah say about this?
Like I don't care, particularly who the people you choose are to use this framework, but I want you to choose on purpose. I want you to choose somebody that you think is brilliant, that you think has like really amazing ideas. It might be someone in your industry. It might be like someone actually in your office, like maybe there's like a really bad ass female VP that you're like, “Yeah, what would she think about this? If she were my mentor, what would she say to me?” Right?
Now, here's the thing. You might think like, “Well, but asking myself what I should do and like asking myself like what Michelle Obama would say, like why would that come back with something different?” But it actually does because your brain is doing like a completely different, I'm going to call it Google search, right?
The Google search with like, “What should I do?” Is limited by your brain’s perspective about you and what it thinks is possible for you. Whereas when you think like, “If Michelle Obama were my mentor, what would she say to me?” Your brain will suddenly tap into this like whole other well of creativity and everything you've ever read about Michelle Obama, and it'll be like, “Oh yeah, this one time she did this one thing, and she figured this thing out this way.”
I don't have actual examples, that would have been helpful, I don't have them. It doesn't matter, the point is you can tap into so much inner knowing that actually already exists in you. That's just not currently available to you because you're not doing the right search terms to get it, right?
This is kind of like we talked about confirmation bias, like confirmation bias is like whatever you already believe your brain will do that little search and then it'll come up with data to support it, right? So if you're in a situation at work that you're like, “This is fucking unsolvable.” Your brain is like, “Yeah, I agree it's unsolvable, I will suppress any data I have about how we could solve that.”
But if you come into the same situation, and you're like, “Okay, but what would this like mentor I'm imagining, what would they tell me to do?” Your brain is coming in with a different set of biases. Your brain is coming in with like a bias for solutions, especially if you think the other person's fucking brilliant.
Your brain is like, “Well I think they're brilliant, so I think they'd be able to find a solution. And if they would be able to find a solution, what would that solution be?” Tada, and then your brain has an idea that was like previously unavailable to you. Not from the other actual person, but from you. This is your inner mentor. Your inner mentor is actually you. Your brain, your ideas, but we're just like kind of using a little roundabout way to tap into this knowledge that you always have inside of you, but your brain is just generally sort of not presenting to you.
So for you, it might be like, what would so and so do? Another frame that I've used for this that was really successful with a client was I was like, she was dealing with something in her personal life. And she thought it was like totally unsolvable, right? And I was like okay, but if you were at a job interview, and they gave you like this paper to fill out, and they presented this exact same problem to you and said, “Hey, this is like a logic puzzle for this job application thing. And there is a solution to this, and we just want to see your logic of how you would solve it, then what would the solution be?”
And it totally changed how she was thinking about the thing in her personal life. Because she was looking at the thing in her personal life like this is just what it's like to be a woman who has a demanding job and two kids. And like fucking our country just shits all over women, and like misogyny and the patriarchy, and it's like never going to get better. And like I have a great husband, but it's still like some bullshit and I just have to feel terrible.
And listen, y'all know me, y'all know I agree that there's a lot of like misogyny, and patriarchy, and bullshit, and social conditioning women get, and social expectations that women receive all the time. So like that's all real, but that didn't actually mean her thing was unsolvable.
But if she's looking at it going, “I just have to feel fucking terrible.” Then guess what's going to happen? She's going to feel fucking terrible and she's not going to come up with a solution, right? She's just going to feel terrible and wait for the thing to like go away. Or she's just going to like suck it up about that thing and then be mad about it, right? Like, be low key resentful, or maybe high key resentful.
Versus if you think about it like this is a logic puzzle and there's a way to solve this and I actually don't have to live my life this way. Then guess what happens? You come up with solutions. And then you get to choose, like would I rather just keep this thing and not solve it? Like what kind of solutions are these? Do I want to choose them? Then you're in this position of agency where you get to decide versus thinking like this is just the way it is for a woman, and it has to suck.
That's not a super fun or empowered way to look at things. Like even if I agree that there are forces in the world, like patriarchy forces, right, the patriarchy forces, but you know what I mean? Like there are people we're going to run into in life and in the office who are sexist, who are going to offer us some patriarchal bullshit. But how we respond to that is where our power is.
Whether our response is like, “Yeah, I guess my life has to be terrible in this way.” Or whether our responses like, “I'm going to get creative and solve this for myself.” Or like, whether our response is like, “I'm going to file a lawsuit.” Lots of things are available to us, right?
But for us to choose a different choice we have to see that we have agency and one of the ways we can see that we have agency is to see that we have options. And one of the ways that we can see that we have options is to tap into the inner mentor.
Okay, so to recap, your inner mentor is just you using your own brain differently. It's you coming at problems or situations in your life from a slightly different framework, or a wildly different framework or lens, right?
So it's going from like, this is my personal problem in my personal life, to like, what if this were a logic puzzle in a job application process? Or like coming at this from what if this were my besties problem, instead of my problem? Or coming at this from, what would this really famous brilliant woman say if she were my mentor?
And that just allows our own brain to come up with new insights, guidance, solutions, ideas that were always in there but were not being presented to us. They were not available in like the old Google search our brain was doing when we were just thinking about it as like, this is my problem slash situation and I have to come at it with like my current know how and abilities blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So that's one part of it. And then the other part, which is not to be overlooked, is the quality of the self-talk. Right? So it's not just tapping into these high quality ideas and solutions that already exist inside our brain. It's also talking to ourself about our problems and situations in a different tone of voice internally. I mean, maybe externally. Maybe you talk to yourself out loud. I for sure talk to myself out loud.
But even just inside our own head, it's a really different experience when, you know, something doesn't go the way we want it to and we think to ourselves like, “Oh, you're a fucking idiot.” Versus thinking to ourselves like, “Okay, that didn't go the way we wanted it to and that's okay, because we're going to figure it out. And like what went well? Let's look at that first. Let's look at what went well, then we'll look at what didn't go well. And then we're going to look at what we're going to do.” Right?
So even if we did something and it didn't work out, and we want to do better, we want to correct it. Looking at the quality of speech, the quality of voice we're using to talk to ourselves about that. And also looking to tap into that higher quality set of solutions and ideas that's always available to us, it's part of our brain, we just have to do the right Google search to find it.
All right y'all, I would love to hear from you about your own inner mentor. What she has to say. What situations you're tapping into her knowledge about. And what's changing in your life now that you are using this tool.
And if you love what I teach, and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life. I've got good news for you, I've got space for a few new one on one coaching clients starting this month. So let's hop on a call. I'll give you some coaching right away to help you get going. And if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the work with me button and get started there.
Also, bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience. And yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers, and we've had great success doing that. There's even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category. So you can check that out on the testimonials page. All right y'all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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