Mentoring (1) benefits the mentor, too!

The video above and others that will follow demonstrate some of the mentoring points that I have had to learn, relearn, and organize over the past few years. As John Bradshaw said, “A teacher is always teaching what he needs to learn the most.”

I hold mentoring as a value, as it is the social conduit for knowledge, wisdom, and vicarious experience through which (typically) the younger and less experienced advance via interpersional interaction with someone older and more experienced. Without this “continuum concept”, individuals and entire societies are constantly starting from zero and have to literally recreate the wheel in every aspect of their lives in order to become effective and balanced adults.

I started looking for mentors in my early 20s because I could see that the limitations of my family and my environment (Houston Texas) were going to leave me dumb and limited unless I made my own psychosocial jailbreak; this is why I moved to Portland Oregon and then Seattle Washington not only for better schools but also for a more dynamic social environment (eg, men’s groups). I’ve listed many of my mentors in the Preface of my books and will list some of them here with short descriptions:

1. My father—a mixed bag of good and bad but at least he taught me a few things and—probably most importantly—helped me to start learning from other mentors even if vicariously through audiocassettes by Earl Nightengale, Denis Waitley, etc.

2. Henry Rollins—as I have mentioned previously, his book One from None was a huge wake-up for me and was a definative turning point in my late teenage years; I actually got to shake his hand at one of his events in Houston c.1991

3. Charles Novak MS DC and Mark Logan (merchant marine and eventual DC)—helped me stay at least partially grounded during a time of major relocation and transition in my life.

4. All of the men in my various men’s groups in Portland, Seattle, Houston, and Fort Worth—with the exception of Ron who was both good and bad but gave me some good advice, most of these men had trained with the Mankind Project¹, an organization that really helped me grow and mature for the 14 years that I was with them. Of high importance is the vicarious mentoring provided by Robert Bly (Iron John, Sibling Society), James Hillman, John Lee, and Michael Meade (who I met at a lecture in Seattle) via their books and lectures on men´s work.

5. My mentors in clinical medicine and functional medicine, especially Robert Richard DO, Gilbert Manso MD, Patrick Donnovan ND, Jeffrey Bland PhD, Alan Gaby MD. When I was organizing the 2013 International Conference on Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine, I clearly and specifically asked Loren Cordain (famous nutrition scholar and author of The Paleo Diet) to mentor me on how to create a successful conference that was a win-win for everyone involved; what he taught me proved to be supremely valuable.

6. One of my girlfriends (Holly H) and my wife Paola—taught me many important things about life and relationships.

7. My most important vicarious mentors via their books and lectures have been Friedrich Nietzsche, Nathaniel Branden, and John Bradshaw.

8. If music can serve as mentoring, then I have to credit Jorge Strunz and Ardeshir Farah²—their music communicates clarity, order, discipline and spontiniety³ and has certainly helped to form my brain connections and refine my thinking.

9. My psychotherapists Ed Swaya (Seattle Washington) and Kathryn Foster (Fort Worth Texas)…

Mentoring benefits the mentee and the mentor

Over the past few years, I have been mentoring my brother-in-law and a few other young men on how to organize their lives in general and how to start and grow their businesses; as a result, I have had to organize my thoughts but also re-learn my own lessons from my own life and occasionally stretch and reach for wisdom that I either did not know that I had or that I had to study further in order to have more complete ideas.

The video above and others that follow demonstrate some of the mentoring points that I have had to learn, relearn, and organize over the past few years. As John Bradshaw said, “A teacher is always teaching what he needs to learn the most.”

1. https://mankindproject.org

2. https://www.strunzandfarah.com

3.