123. Ditch Your Public Health Mentors
A mentor in public health may be overrated. What?! This is a controversial opinion, but before you scoff, wait just a moment as, this week, I break down why your mentor might actually be holding you back.
As public health folks, we are socialized to default to those with greater age, experience, and power, rather than championing our own opinions. We are constantly encouraged to find a mentor, have a mentor, and work with a mentor. But I’m here to encourage you to drop that concept, and do the opposite; I want you to ditch your mentor.
This week, I share an experience where I deferred to my mentor’s opinion and what happened as a result of this. Discover how to notice if you are seeking validation from an outside source, and learn how to trust yourself, and create confidence and empowerment around your own knowledge and experience without relying on others.
My Not Your Average Productivity Course was such a success that I’ll be offering it one more time in 2023. To be the first to know of the dates as well as discounts and early bird specials, get on my email list now!
Do you want to stop working late and working through lunches? Do you want to have more control over your time? Click here to download my FREE Top 5 Calendar Tips! They are simple and effective, and you can implement them right away!
What You Will Discover:
What I mean by ditch your mentors and why I want you to consider it.
Why seeking outside validation is problematic.
How to use your mentor’s opinion subjectively.
The problem with the way the public health field promotes finding a mentor.
When to trust your inner knowledge and the importance of doing so.
The very best thing you can do for yourself, your career, and your happiness.
Resources:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey you all, I’m Marissa McKool, and you’re listening to the Redefining Rest Podcast for Public Health Professionals. Here we believe rest is your right. You don’t have to earn it, you just have to learn how to take it and I’m going to teach you. Ready? Come along.
Happy Monday, everyone, how are you doing? For those of you listening as this comes out, maybe you have the day off. I believe this is coming out over Labor Day weekend and if so, I’ll be camping at that time, which will be really fun. If you’re watching it at a later date, I hope you’re having a great day. And if you’re not, don’t worry, I have a story to tell you in one second that hopefully will put a smile on your face. But I realize that every podcast episode I open with, “How are you doing?” And different podcast hosts have their signature intro.
And for a while I was thinking of what I could do but I like asking, how are you because I think that’s important to check in with you and how you are doing. And I genuinely care about how you are doing. So I think I’m going to keep doing that and I encourage you all, when I offer that at the beginning of the episode, to be honest with yourself, I’m doing shit, I’m doing terrible or I’m doing great, I’m doing amazing. I think we tend to respond when people ask us in the middle. I’m fine, it’s okay. Sometimes that’s a true answer but a lot of times it’s not.
So the more truthful you can be with yourself about where you’re at, the more opportunity you have to either enjoy that experience or change that experience. So before getting into the episode, as I said, if you have been struggling lately, if you feel like you’re failing at life, if something happened recently where you had a big fuck up. Listen, I’m going to share a short, embarrassing, but I think pretty funny story about something I did recently.
So you know you’re not alone and you’re not a failure, and even a productivity burnout stress reduction rest coach like me can be all over the fucking place. So I shared this on Instagram last week. But last week, Wednesday was my night to cook and I made lasagna roll-ups. It was vegan ricotta, sweet potato, kale, and some other things. It turned out great.
And then two days later on Friday, Jared and I were cooking together, we were making empanadas and he was going to make the guacamole and he finished making it. And we keep our chips, our snacks, that kind of stuff above the fridge. And he looks up there for the chips and he pulls out on top of the fridge a bag of opened kale. Yes, so it turns out the two days before I did not put the kale back in the fringe. I put it on top of the fridge and I have zero memory of doing this. So that just shows you where my mind has been lately.
I’ve been a little bit scattered. We’ve been doing wedding planning. My family is actually coming this week today, taking the rest of the week off to go wedding dress shopping. We’ve had some other family stuff coming up. We’re planning a trip to the UK. So I’ve been a little bit all over the place and that was a big, oh, boy that is a sign of where I’m at mentally right now. And yes, we did end up eating the rest of that kale a couple days later after we put it in the fridge, we ate it in a Buddha bowl. We are fine. I’m sure some of you are gagging right now at the thought of that, but it’s all fine. We’re all good.
So I hope if you feel like you’ve been all over the place and you’ve been dropping the ball, that you’re not alone from that story. And there’s a few housekeeping things on a different note, I want to just share with you all very, very quickly that’s not going to take too long. But I keep forgetting to kind of share these all out and I want to make sure you all have them.
The first is, I have decided I will run the Not Your Average Productivity Course again one more time before the end of 2023. I’ve never ran a course twice, ever before. This is the first time. I don’t know if I’ll run it again in 2024. That’s my honest answer, but I do know we’re running it one more time before this year is over and I did that because we’re in week two as I’m recording this and I’ve gotten so much positive feedback from the women in the course.
And I know many of you have shared with me, you missed it because you were traveling or kids were going back to school and it was hectic or other reasons, you found out too late. So I want to make sure all of you have access, have a chance to join it again. We have not finalized the dates. So I want to make sure you’re on my email list to be notified of the dates and also I only share out early bird specials with folks on my email list. So it gives you an opportunity to join the course at a discounted rate. So we’ll put a link below to join my email list so you can get those notifications.
Second, I do have a separate free productivity resource that I created for you in the meantime. So I’m sharing my top five calendar tips with all of you. You can download them directly and start implementing them right away. These are tips I started to use when I was at my burnout phase in public health. I used them to stop working late and stop working through my lunches, to shift from a job that I was doing what was the work of three people to an executive director role. And to start my business while I was working full-time and I still use these tips today.
They are very, very, very simple, you can implement them right away and they’re really effective. That’s the most important piece, and it’s completely free. So head to mckoolcoaching.com/free to download your copy of these tips. Again, we’ll leave the link in the show notes.
And lastly, if you are new here, if you’re a new listener or recent listener, first, welcome, I am so glad you’re here. I want you to hit that subscribe button before you forget, no matter where you’re listening. I know we all do it, I do it, you forget to subscribe then you try to find the podcast again. You forget what it was called. It’s hard to find. You want to share the episode with someone, that’s a pain in the ass. I don’t want that to happen to you. In the next couple of weeks the episodes are going to be amazing.
If you’re in a super rough patch or period of the year or your life, like you’ve lost your job or someone’s passed away in your life or you’re breaking up or getting divorced or going through a stressful move or anything else big like that. I have an episode coming out just for you.
I also have an episode coming out about the lie we all tell ourselves and public health tells us that if you don’t do it, if you don’t lead the committee, if you don’t take on that extra project, if you don’t volunteer anything then no one else will. That holds us back so much with reducing our stress. So I have a whole episode coming out on that and much, much more. So make sure you’re subscribed.
Okay, that was a long intro, my apologies, but let’s get into the episode now. And this might be a controversial episode. I posted a little sneak peek on my LinkedIn and I got some interesting responses. I think this hits a lot of nerves for folks, but mentorship is such a hugely promoted concept in public health. And I’m going to offer you a perspective around ditching that concept. I know, how dare I. But I can remember since grad school and every job I’ve had since in public health, you are constantly encouraged to find a mentor, to have a mentor.
Every professional development panel I went to, they talked about it, every career development training they talked about it. I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s shoved down your throats, but it is highly, highly promoted. And instead I want you to ditch that concept, ditch your mentors. And I’m going to explain what I mean by that and why I want you to consider this. And even if I’m your mentor, if you consider me your mentor, ditch me. And before I get into the nitty gritty, I do want to be very clear upfront.
I am not saying that mentors are bad. I’m not saying they’re bad people. I’m not saying the advice they give is necessarily bad. I have had some amazing, I mean truly amazing mentors in my career. Shout out to my mentor, Kimberly Freire from the CDC. Early in my career, when I was a fellow, she really modeled what an amazing supervisor mentor looks like. And I really took from watching her and the lessons I learned from having her as my supervisor and used them when I started supervising staff. And I have so much to thank her for.
I also had a great mentor at UC Berkeley, [inaudible], who recently passed away. She helped me navigate such a challenging time period, working at that organization and so many other mentors. So when I say ditch your mentors, I’m not saying I hate mentors, they’re the worst thing ever, I’ll never have one. I’m not saying that at all because I’ve had some truly fabulous mentors that have made such a big difference in my life and my career.
But here is the problem with the way the field promotes finding a mentor and the sheer volume of promotion around this concept. And I don’t think any of this is intentional, but I think it’s important to draw out. It really further amplifies the message that we’ve already received in school that someone else out there has all the answers, not us, not our internal knowing, not our internal desires, our curiosity, someone else, someone outside of us. And we are already socialized around this so much.
In school from a very young age we are taught just learn and memorize and take the test to pass. Just take the knowledge from someone else that they’re telling you, they have all the right answers, you just memorize it. And then even when you get to college or graduate levels, yes, there’s more critical thinking involved in the training. However, a lot of the critical thinking is really with the frame or the goal that you end up getting to the ‘right answer’. You just have to critically think your way to it.
And again, that’s really promoting this idea that there is a right answer and someone else knows it and you just have to figure out what that is or get that information from them. Growing up, many of us are taught that our parents or people older than us have all the answers. And there’s other examples where we get this messaging. So we already have a lot of socialization, that knowledge, wisdom, insight, perspective, decisions are best left up to other people.
Now, yes, of course other people have different perspectives than us. They have their own opinions. They might have different insights than us. But my point here is that we’re getting the message that they have the right answers, that we don’t know, that we shouldn’t turn to ourselves or listen to ourselves. That we should turn to someone else based on their years of experience, their age, their degree or a million other things.
And unconsciously many of us end up interpreting this and I cannot tell you how many people in public health, especially early career professionals or students I’ve had this conversation with. You are indirectly taught to believe that in order to be successful in public health you have to follow the path that someone else tells you to follow, someone else did. You see that all the time in professional development panels.
I see that all the time when people reach out to me on LinkedIn, especially early career professionals saying, “What do you think I should do about this? What did you do? How can I do what you did?” And intrinsically those aren’t necessarily bad questions. I just want us to really see that we are being encouraged to follow the decisions, the opinions, the direction, the path of everyone else instead of turning to ourselves and doing what we truly want to do.
The concept, the promotion of always having a mentor, that that’s the most important thing for your career and your career success is really teaching you to defer authority to someone else. And I don’t think that message is actually helping any of us because it doesn’t help you create trust with yourself. It doesn’t help you think for yourself. It doesn’t help you create confidence to try doing the things you want to do, even if no one else has done it, even if other people disagree.
It doesn’t help you create a path and a career that deep down you truly want. Instead, you end up seeking external validation or external authority and following in the footsteps of other people who might have had a great career or might be really happy, but it might not be the right path for you. How many of you listening, worry what your mentor will think if you want to do something different or tell yourself you can’t follow your ideas or seek your dreams because it won’t work, no one else has done that or someone told you couldn’t do it or scared you off from doing it?
How many of you ask 10 different people their advice before making a decision or trying something? In my one-on-one coaching program I help women in public health navigate a lot of different things, a lot of different challenges. But there is a theme that runs through all of their stories and experiences and that is that they are stuck in some way, stuck in their career stage, stuck overworking, stuck feeling unhappy, stuck, feeling stressed. And part of that is because they think and you probably do too, that everyone else knows better than them.
Your mentors do not know better than you. And the very best thing you can do for yourself, your career, your happiness is to learn how to trust yourself, believe in yourself to do what you want to do deep down, to try what you want to try, to go for the goals you want to achieve. Because all of you listening have internal knowing. You have desire, you have ideas, you have curiosity, you have creativity, you have goals, you have all these things inside of you. You are muting and keeping the volume of what others think, what mentors think, up way higher.
And I had this experience recently and it’s kind of an extreme end of the experience, but I think it illustrates the point. A mentor I’ve had for a few years who has helped me in so many ways. I am so grateful to them for so many of their teachings and support and the growth that having them as my mentor has really brought for me personally and professionally.
However, at the beginning of 2023 I was getting some mentorship from them and shared something I wanted to do and I was really excited about it and I wasn’t even looking for advice. But this still is a problem even if you are seeking someone else’s advice because she ended up sharing her opinion about it very strongly and it was the exact opposite of mine. She didn’t agree. She wouldn’t do it the same way. She wouldn’t recommend it and so on.
And we have to remember, most often when we have a mentor, there are power differentials there that exist, whether we created them or not. So in this example with me, my mentor is much farther along in their career, has a lot more power in this particular area of professional work skill than I do. And that has an impact. And after the call, I actually got off and cried because part of me felt crushed,
Now, years ago if I had had this conversation, my approach would have been, what do you think I should do? I wouldn’t have even said, “This is what I’m doing. I’m excited about it. I would have had a little voice inside of me that said, “This sounds great”, but I would have never shared it out. Instead I would have been like, what do you think I should do? I’m past that stage. Some of you are still there. But it doesn’t matter if you’re in the stage of, hey, tell me what you think I should do and you’re hiding what you think.
Or you’re at the stage where I’m at, where I’m sharing what I think. Because what happens when your mentor tells you what to do and what they think, and you don’t have the skill to take what they share, still listen, but decide for yourself what’s right for you, instead of automatically deferring to them, needing their approval, needing their validation, thinking they’re the authority, they know best. You prevent yourself from trusting yourself, from creating confidence.
So the next several months after this meeting with my mentor, I shifted away from what I wanted and I did what she advised me to do. And now over six months later, I’m still working on rebuilding the trust in myself that I actually broke in that moment by deferring to her, by doing what she wanted because I wanted her approval because I was scared that I was wrong. Because that moment of ‘mentorship’ wasn’t about who was right or wrong. There really is no right or wrong.
You have to remember that a mentor isn’t someone who has all the right answers. They are also human just like you. They just have an opinion. Their opinion isn’t necessarily right or wrong, it’s subjective. Their opinion is based on their lived experience, which is different than yours. The problem is we deem our mentors’ opinions as more important than ours, as automatically right and ours wrong. And I hope you can see by this story, you’re not alone in this. I still do this too.
And in that experience with my mentor this year, I silenced or quieted my desire, my internal knowing, what I wanted to do, and I traded it for my mentor’s opinion. And sure, there are times I have done that in the past and things have worked out fine and there’s times you have done that and maybe things have worked out great. But the point isn’t really even the outcome, it’s about the experience and the process.
Imagine you have a friend and you break their trust. You create a crack in that relationship where you have to rebuild part of your friendship. That sucks. That takes time. And that’s what happens with ourselves when we defer to our mentor, trust they’re always right, dismiss ourselves and our knowing. That’s what happens when you rely on your mentor’s opinion more than your own, when you defer to them more than you defer to yourself, when you trust them more than you trust yourself ,when you have confidence in them more than you have confidence in yourself.
It has taken me months of getting coaching from other folks, doing my own coaching and processing this experience to start rebuilding that trust with myself and creating confidence that I can go after what I originally wanted to go after. Because that is my true desire and I can trust myself to make that happen. And I’m in the process of doing that and it feels so fucking good, feels so much better than doing what my mentor said, even if the way I’m going about it now doesn’t work out perfectly.
It feels so much better to trust myself, to believe in myself than it does to do what someone else says I should do, but not really be excited about it, but not believe in it, but doubt myself. I don’t have to prove my mentor right or wrong. It’s not about them, it’s about me following my own path, going for what I really want. A mentor doesn’t know what’s best for you, no matter how great they are, how successful they are, how much experience they have. They don’t walk in your shoes. Only you know what’s best for you.
Now, this isn’t to say, never listen to your mentor’s opinion or advice ever again. That’s not what I’m saying, but there’s such a big difference between always deferring to them, thinking they’re always right. That’s one end of the spectrum. And being able to go to them, hear their opinions, have a relationship with them. Take their perspective, but still decide for you what’s best for you.
I find that a lot of times in public health, the way mentorship is promoted and I guess, executed is the right word. I don’t know if that’s the right word, is the idea that someone else knows best. The best kind of mentor is really someone who doesn’t tell you what to do, they help empower you to figure out what’s best for you and to follow that, even if it’s not what they would do, even if they don’t agree, because it’s not about them, it’s about you.
And if you’re a mentor, you can take this and apply this to the mentees you work with. The best type of mentors are the ones who help you believe in yourself, who champion what you want to do, who encourage what you want to do, who empower you to do that. And unfortunately, I think that type of mentorship is rare in public health, not because mentors don’t have that capacity, not because people don’t care, because that’s not how mentorship is promoted.
I think one of the most heartbreaking things that can happen and I experienced this, this year. Is when you do what your mentor tells you to do, when you change what you want because you think they know what’s best, when you make the decisions they tell you to. Even if you get great results from that, you are living the results and the outcomes that you might not want, of a process, of a path, of a journey that you might not have wanted to go on and that can be so heartbreaking.
And it’s hard to admit or see because we tell ourselves they must be right. They’ve worked in the field longer. They have more publications. They have a better title. They are well known, whatever it may be. And I am sure, I actually know for sure I have given my opinion and advice as a mentor because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. And my thinking around how I mentor folks has evolved so much.
And I’ve seen so much more benefit to the people I support by changing my approach and how I mentor. To helping folks create confidence in themselves and feel empowered to figure out what’s right for them and go after that rather than my subjective individual opinion on it because I don’t walk in their shoes. And listen, there are probably still days where I give opinion or advice, I’m human. I mess up, I’m not always in this mindset, but it’s something I’m working on because I think it’s that important.
And the biggest thing that’s helped me shift my perspective is becoming a coach in the past several years of coaching because as a coach that is my role. When I’m in a session with you, it’s not to tell you what to do or my opinions. It’s to help you feel empowered to figure out what’s best for you by showing you your brain, the way you’re thinking about it and how that’s impacting your experience. Because the best tool you can have, the best skill you can have is learning how to not need anyone else’s approval or sign off to go after your goals, learning how to listen and trust yourself.
And I think that’s one of the best ways to create a life, a career that you truly want to live because no one else has to live it but you. So just some food for thought, if you are a mentor, how you can shift your mentorship to change the narrative around someone else having the answers and help your mentees feel more empowered to figure out the answers for themselves.
And for those of you who are seeking mentors or have mentors, I’m offering you a perspective of prioritizing, learning how to trust yourself, create confidence and be empowered more often than you’re seeking the advice, the opinions, the direction from other people. I’d love to know your thoughts about all of this, even if they differ from mine, I’d love for you to share it. I think this is an evolving thing I’m always thinking about and I’m so curious about what you all think of this episode because I know it’s so contradictory to what we talk about as far as mentorship in public health.
Last thing before we go. Last week on the podcast I shared the next couple of weeks, I’ll be reading out some of the reviews you all have written on the podcast as a thank you for taking out your time to rate and review. Because it helps the podcast so much. It helps us grow, reach more people, so I appreciate it so much.
So this week the review is from SF Master 1968 and they say, “Marissa offers amazing ideas, guidance, examples to help you live a better and more intentionally rested life. Do not doubt you need this. I’m just back from a vacation and what I have learned from her helped make that vacation very satisfying and returning to work way more calm and collected. I’m super excited for all she is bringing to the work, proud to be a long time booster and super fan.”
So thank you so much for your view and taking time out. And with that you all, I’ll let you go for the week. I hope you have a great week. And I’ll talk to you next week. Bye everyone.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
Happy Monday, everyone, how are you doing? For those of you listening as this comes out, maybe you have the day off. I believe this is coming out over Labor Day weekend and if so, I’ll be camping at that time, which will be really fun. If you’re watching it at a later date, I hope you’re having a great day. And if you’re not, don’t worry, I have a story to tell you in one second that hopefully will put a smile on your face. But I realize that every podcast episode I open with, “How are you doing?” And different podcast hosts have their signature intro.
And for a while I was thinking of what I could do but I like asking, how are you because I think that’s important to check in with you and how you are doing. And I genuinely care about how you are doing. So I think I’m going to keep doing that and I encourage you all, when I offer that at the beginning of the episode, to be honest with yourself, I’m doing shit, I’m doing terrible or I’m doing great, I’m doing amazing. I think we tend to respond when people ask us in the middle. I’m fine, it’s okay. Sometimes that’s a true answer but a lot of times it’s not.
So the more truthful you can be with yourself about where you’re at, the more opportunity you have to either enjoy that experience or change that experience. So before getting into the episode, as I said, if you have been struggling lately, if you feel like you’re failing at life, if something happened recently where you had a big fuck up. Listen, I’m going to share a short, embarrassing, but I think pretty funny story about something I did recently.
So you know you’re not alone and you’re not a failure, and even a productivity burnout stress reduction rest coach like me can be all over the fucking place. So I shared this on Instagram last week. But last week, Wednesday was my night to cook and I made lasagna roll-ups. It was vegan ricotta, sweet potato, kale, and some other things. It turned out great.
And then two days later on Friday, Jared and I were cooking together, we were making empanadas and he was going to make the guacamole and he finished making it. And we keep our chips, our snacks, that kind of stuff above the fridge. And he looks up there for the chips and he pulls out on top of the fridge a bag of opened kale. Yes, so it turns out the two days before I did not put the kale back in the fringe. I put it on top of the fridge and I have zero memory of doing this. So that just shows you where my mind has been lately.
I’ve been a little bit scattered. We’ve been doing wedding planning. My family is actually coming this week today, taking the rest of the week off to go wedding dress shopping. We’ve had some other family stuff coming up. We’re planning a trip to the UK. So I’ve been a little bit all over the place and that was a big, oh, boy that is a sign of where I’m at mentally right now. And yes, we did end up eating the rest of that kale a couple days later after we put it in the fridge, we ate it in a Buddha bowl. We are fine. I’m sure some of you are gagging right now at the thought of that, but it’s all fine. We’re all good.
So I hope if you feel like you’ve been all over the place and you’ve been dropping the ball, that you’re not alone from that story. And there’s a few housekeeping things on a different note, I want to just share with you all very, very quickly that’s not going to take too long. But I keep forgetting to kind of share these all out and I want to make sure you all have them.
The first is, I have decided I will run the Not Your Average Productivity Course again one more time before the end of 2023. I’ve never ran a course twice, ever before. This is the first time. I don’t know if I’ll run it again in 2024. That’s my honest answer, but I do know we’re running it one more time before this year is over and I did that because we’re in week two as I’m recording this and I’ve gotten so much positive feedback from the women in the course.
And I know many of you have shared with me, you missed it because you were traveling or kids were going back to school and it was hectic or other reasons, you found out too late. So I want to make sure all of you have access, have a chance to join it again. We have not finalized the dates. So I want to make sure you’re on my email list to be notified of the dates and also I only share out early bird specials with folks on my email list. So it gives you an opportunity to join the course at a discounted rate. So we’ll put a link below to join my email list so you can get those notifications.
Second, I do have a separate free productivity resource that I created for you in the meantime. So I’m sharing my top five calendar tips with all of you. You can download them directly and start implementing them right away. These are tips I started to use when I was at my burnout phase in public health. I used them to stop working late and stop working through my lunches, to shift from a job that I was doing what was the work of three people to an executive director role. And to start my business while I was working full-time and I still use these tips today.
They are very, very, very simple, you can implement them right away and they’re really effective. That’s the most important piece, and it’s completely free. So head to mckoolcoaching.com/free to download your copy of these tips. Again, we’ll leave the link in the show notes.
And lastly, if you are new here, if you’re a new listener or recent listener, first, welcome, I am so glad you’re here. I want you to hit that subscribe button before you forget, no matter where you’re listening. I know we all do it, I do it, you forget to subscribe then you try to find the podcast again. You forget what it was called. It’s hard to find. You want to share the episode with someone, that’s a pain in the ass. I don’t want that to happen to you. In the next couple of weeks the episodes are going to be amazing.
If you’re in a super rough patch or period of the year or your life, like you’ve lost your job or someone’s passed away in your life or you’re breaking up or getting divorced or going through a stressful move or anything else big like that. I have an episode coming out just for you.
I also have an episode coming out about the lie we all tell ourselves and public health tells us that if you don’t do it, if you don’t lead the committee, if you don’t take on that extra project, if you don’t volunteer anything then no one else will. That holds us back so much with reducing our stress. So I have a whole episode coming out on that and much, much more. So make sure you’re subscribed.
Okay, that was a long intro, my apologies, but let’s get into the episode now. And this might be a controversial episode. I posted a little sneak peek on my LinkedIn and I got some interesting responses. I think this hits a lot of nerves for folks, but mentorship is such a hugely promoted concept in public health. And I’m going to offer you a perspective around ditching that concept. I know, how dare I. But I can remember since grad school and every job I’ve had since in public health, you are constantly encouraged to find a mentor, to have a mentor.
Every professional development panel I went to, they talked about it, every career development training they talked about it. I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s shoved down your throats, but it is highly, highly promoted. And instead I want you to ditch that concept, ditch your mentors. And I’m going to explain what I mean by that and why I want you to consider this. And even if I’m your mentor, if you consider me your mentor, ditch me. And before I get into the nitty gritty, I do want to be very clear upfront.
I am not saying that mentors are bad. I’m not saying they’re bad people. I’m not saying the advice they give is necessarily bad. I have had some amazing, I mean truly amazing mentors in my career. Shout out to my mentor, Kimberly Freire from the CDC. Early in my career, when I was a fellow, she really modeled what an amazing supervisor mentor looks like. And I really took from watching her and the lessons I learned from having her as my supervisor and used them when I started supervising staff. And I have so much to thank her for.
I also had a great mentor at UC Berkeley, [inaudible], who recently passed away. She helped me navigate such a challenging time period, working at that organization and so many other mentors. So when I say ditch your mentors, I’m not saying I hate mentors, they’re the worst thing ever, I’ll never have one. I’m not saying that at all because I’ve had some truly fabulous mentors that have made such a big difference in my life and my career.
But here is the problem with the way the field promotes finding a mentor and the sheer volume of promotion around this concept. And I don’t think any of this is intentional, but I think it’s important to draw out. It really further amplifies the message that we’ve already received in school that someone else out there has all the answers, not us, not our internal knowing, not our internal desires, our curiosity, someone else, someone outside of us. And we are already socialized around this so much.
In school from a very young age we are taught just learn and memorize and take the test to pass. Just take the knowledge from someone else that they’re telling you, they have all the right answers, you just memorize it. And then even when you get to college or graduate levels, yes, there’s more critical thinking involved in the training. However, a lot of the critical thinking is really with the frame or the goal that you end up getting to the ‘right answer’. You just have to critically think your way to it.
And again, that’s really promoting this idea that there is a right answer and someone else knows it and you just have to figure out what that is or get that information from them. Growing up, many of us are taught that our parents or people older than us have all the answers. And there’s other examples where we get this messaging. So we already have a lot of socialization, that knowledge, wisdom, insight, perspective, decisions are best left up to other people.
Now, yes, of course other people have different perspectives than us. They have their own opinions. They might have different insights than us. But my point here is that we’re getting the message that they have the right answers, that we don’t know, that we shouldn’t turn to ourselves or listen to ourselves. That we should turn to someone else based on their years of experience, their age, their degree or a million other things.
And unconsciously many of us end up interpreting this and I cannot tell you how many people in public health, especially early career professionals or students I’ve had this conversation with. You are indirectly taught to believe that in order to be successful in public health you have to follow the path that someone else tells you to follow, someone else did. You see that all the time in professional development panels.
I see that all the time when people reach out to me on LinkedIn, especially early career professionals saying, “What do you think I should do about this? What did you do? How can I do what you did?” And intrinsically those aren’t necessarily bad questions. I just want us to really see that we are being encouraged to follow the decisions, the opinions, the direction, the path of everyone else instead of turning to ourselves and doing what we truly want to do.
The concept, the promotion of always having a mentor, that that’s the most important thing for your career and your career success is really teaching you to defer authority to someone else. And I don’t think that message is actually helping any of us because it doesn’t help you create trust with yourself. It doesn’t help you think for yourself. It doesn’t help you create confidence to try doing the things you want to do, even if no one else has done it, even if other people disagree.
It doesn’t help you create a path and a career that deep down you truly want. Instead, you end up seeking external validation or external authority and following in the footsteps of other people who might have had a great career or might be really happy, but it might not be the right path for you. How many of you listening, worry what your mentor will think if you want to do something different or tell yourself you can’t follow your ideas or seek your dreams because it won’t work, no one else has done that or someone told you couldn’t do it or scared you off from doing it?
How many of you ask 10 different people their advice before making a decision or trying something? In my one-on-one coaching program I help women in public health navigate a lot of different things, a lot of different challenges. But there is a theme that runs through all of their stories and experiences and that is that they are stuck in some way, stuck in their career stage, stuck overworking, stuck feeling unhappy, stuck, feeling stressed. And part of that is because they think and you probably do too, that everyone else knows better than them.
Your mentors do not know better than you. And the very best thing you can do for yourself, your career, your happiness is to learn how to trust yourself, believe in yourself to do what you want to do deep down, to try what you want to try, to go for the goals you want to achieve. Because all of you listening have internal knowing. You have desire, you have ideas, you have curiosity, you have creativity, you have goals, you have all these things inside of you. You are muting and keeping the volume of what others think, what mentors think, up way higher.
And I had this experience recently and it’s kind of an extreme end of the experience, but I think it illustrates the point. A mentor I’ve had for a few years who has helped me in so many ways. I am so grateful to them for so many of their teachings and support and the growth that having them as my mentor has really brought for me personally and professionally.
However, at the beginning of 2023 I was getting some mentorship from them and shared something I wanted to do and I was really excited about it and I wasn’t even looking for advice. But this still is a problem even if you are seeking someone else’s advice because she ended up sharing her opinion about it very strongly and it was the exact opposite of mine. She didn’t agree. She wouldn’t do it the same way. She wouldn’t recommend it and so on.
And we have to remember, most often when we have a mentor, there are power differentials there that exist, whether we created them or not. So in this example with me, my mentor is much farther along in their career, has a lot more power in this particular area of professional work skill than I do. And that has an impact. And after the call, I actually got off and cried because part of me felt crushed,
Now, years ago if I had had this conversation, my approach would have been, what do you think I should do? I wouldn’t have even said, “This is what I’m doing. I’m excited about it. I would have had a little voice inside of me that said, “This sounds great”, but I would have never shared it out. Instead I would have been like, what do you think I should do? I’m past that stage. Some of you are still there. But it doesn’t matter if you’re in the stage of, hey, tell me what you think I should do and you’re hiding what you think.
Or you’re at the stage where I’m at, where I’m sharing what I think. Because what happens when your mentor tells you what to do and what they think, and you don’t have the skill to take what they share, still listen, but decide for yourself what’s right for you, instead of automatically deferring to them, needing their approval, needing their validation, thinking they’re the authority, they know best. You prevent yourself from trusting yourself, from creating confidence.
So the next several months after this meeting with my mentor, I shifted away from what I wanted and I did what she advised me to do. And now over six months later, I’m still working on rebuilding the trust in myself that I actually broke in that moment by deferring to her, by doing what she wanted because I wanted her approval because I was scared that I was wrong. Because that moment of ‘mentorship’ wasn’t about who was right or wrong. There really is no right or wrong.
You have to remember that a mentor isn’t someone who has all the right answers. They are also human just like you. They just have an opinion. Their opinion isn’t necessarily right or wrong, it’s subjective. Their opinion is based on their lived experience, which is different than yours. The problem is we deem our mentors’ opinions as more important than ours, as automatically right and ours wrong. And I hope you can see by this story, you’re not alone in this. I still do this too.
And in that experience with my mentor this year, I silenced or quieted my desire, my internal knowing, what I wanted to do, and I traded it for my mentor’s opinion. And sure, there are times I have done that in the past and things have worked out fine and there’s times you have done that and maybe things have worked out great. But the point isn’t really even the outcome, it’s about the experience and the process.
Imagine you have a friend and you break their trust. You create a crack in that relationship where you have to rebuild part of your friendship. That sucks. That takes time. And that’s what happens with ourselves when we defer to our mentor, trust they’re always right, dismiss ourselves and our knowing. That’s what happens when you rely on your mentor’s opinion more than your own, when you defer to them more than you defer to yourself, when you trust them more than you trust yourself ,when you have confidence in them more than you have confidence in yourself.
It has taken me months of getting coaching from other folks, doing my own coaching and processing this experience to start rebuilding that trust with myself and creating confidence that I can go after what I originally wanted to go after. Because that is my true desire and I can trust myself to make that happen. And I’m in the process of doing that and it feels so fucking good, feels so much better than doing what my mentor said, even if the way I’m going about it now doesn’t work out perfectly.
It feels so much better to trust myself, to believe in myself than it does to do what someone else says I should do, but not really be excited about it, but not believe in it, but doubt myself. I don’t have to prove my mentor right or wrong. It’s not about them, it’s about me following my own path, going for what I really want. A mentor doesn’t know what’s best for you, no matter how great they are, how successful they are, how much experience they have. They don’t walk in your shoes. Only you know what’s best for you.
Now, this isn’t to say, never listen to your mentor’s opinion or advice ever again. That’s not what I’m saying, but there’s such a big difference between always deferring to them, thinking they’re always right. That’s one end of the spectrum. And being able to go to them, hear their opinions, have a relationship with them. Take their perspective, but still decide for you what’s best for you.
I find that a lot of times in public health, the way mentorship is promoted and I guess, executed is the right word. I don’t know if that’s the right word, is the idea that someone else knows best. The best kind of mentor is really someone who doesn’t tell you what to do, they help empower you to figure out what’s best for you and to follow that, even if it’s not what they would do, even if they don’t agree, because it’s not about them, it’s about you.
And if you’re a mentor, you can take this and apply this to the mentees you work with. The best type of mentors are the ones who help you believe in yourself, who champion what you want to do, who encourage what you want to do, who empower you to do that. And unfortunately, I think that type of mentorship is rare in public health, not because mentors don’t have that capacity, not because people don’t care, because that’s not how mentorship is promoted.
I think one of the most heartbreaking things that can happen and I experienced this, this year. Is when you do what your mentor tells you to do, when you change what you want because you think they know what’s best, when you make the decisions they tell you to. Even if you get great results from that, you are living the results and the outcomes that you might not want, of a process, of a path, of a journey that you might not have wanted to go on and that can be so heartbreaking.
And it’s hard to admit or see because we tell ourselves they must be right. They’ve worked in the field longer. They have more publications. They have a better title. They are well known, whatever it may be. And I am sure, I actually know for sure I have given my opinion and advice as a mentor because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. And my thinking around how I mentor folks has evolved so much.
And I’ve seen so much more benefit to the people I support by changing my approach and how I mentor. To helping folks create confidence in themselves and feel empowered to figure out what’s right for them and go after that rather than my subjective individual opinion on it because I don’t walk in their shoes. And listen, there are probably still days where I give opinion or advice, I’m human. I mess up, I’m not always in this mindset, but it’s something I’m working on because I think it’s that important.
And the biggest thing that’s helped me shift my perspective is becoming a coach in the past several years of coaching because as a coach that is my role. When I’m in a session with you, it’s not to tell you what to do or my opinions. It’s to help you feel empowered to figure out what’s best for you by showing you your brain, the way you’re thinking about it and how that’s impacting your experience. Because the best tool you can have, the best skill you can have is learning how to not need anyone else’s approval or sign off to go after your goals, learning how to listen and trust yourself.
And I think that’s one of the best ways to create a life, a career that you truly want to live because no one else has to live it but you. So just some food for thought, if you are a mentor, how you can shift your mentorship to change the narrative around someone else having the answers and help your mentees feel more empowered to figure out the answers for themselves.
And for those of you who are seeking mentors or have mentors, I’m offering you a perspective of prioritizing, learning how to trust yourself, create confidence and be empowered more often than you’re seeking the advice, the opinions, the direction from other people. I’d love to know your thoughts about all of this, even if they differ from mine, I’d love for you to share it. I think this is an evolving thing I’m always thinking about and I’m so curious about what you all think of this episode because I know it’s so contradictory to what we talk about as far as mentorship in public health.
Last thing before we go. Last week on the podcast I shared the next couple of weeks, I’ll be reading out some of the reviews you all have written on the podcast as a thank you for taking out your time to rate and review. Because it helps the podcast so much. It helps us grow, reach more people, so I appreciate it so much.
So this week the review is from SF Master 1968 and they say, “Marissa offers amazing ideas, guidance, examples to help you live a better and more intentionally rested life. Do not doubt you need this. I’m just back from a vacation and what I have learned from her helped make that vacation very satisfying and returning to work way more calm and collected. I’m super excited for all she is bringing to the work, proud to be a long time booster and super fan.”
So thank you so much for your view and taking time out. And with that you all, I’ll let you go for the week. I hope you have a great week. And I’ll talk to you next week. Bye everyone.
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
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