Barrett Williams (00:00.098)

A lot of guys don't have a mentor, not because they don't want one, but because no one told them where to look or how to ask. And for men and boys, that gap isn't neutral. By the clinical data, it's damaging. So in today's episode, we're going to answer what does mentorship actually look like? Why boys need to see it, not just hear it, and where to look and how to ask. Let's get started. So, what is mentorship actually? My first mentor was my third grade teacher, Mrs. Thompson. We were in class and our elementary school decided to start up a student government.

I wasn't a popular kid. My family had its problems, the neighborhood knew, the kids bullied me about it. So I don't know why in the third grade, when a popularity contest started, that I decided it was something I wanted. But I did. And so while all the kids were asked, Who do you want to represent you? Other kids nominated their friends, and I hesitated, raised my hand and nominated myself. And Miss Thompson looked at me with kindness in her eyes and said, Tim,

Don't take that away from me. I want to nominate you. Then she had us put our heads down on her desk and put her hands up when the name we wanted came up. I agonized over it little bit and nominated myself. I'm pretty sure she rigged that election. The bullying didn't stop, I wasn't any more popular, but she got me my start in student government. She was also that teacher that checked in for the next few years. Whenever I'd see her in the hallway, she'd give me a hug, ask how I was doing.

That small nudge, that expectation and seeing something in me that I didn't necessarily see in myself led to thirteen years in student government. I've been present in student government, I've ran successful campaigns, I've helped a lot of people and made campuses better. All because a teacher in the third grade saw something and expected something of me. Mrs. Thompson isn't unique in that idea. When someone in authority has a higher expectation of you, you perform. We've known that since the sixties and

Rosenthal and Jacobson came up with something called the Pegmillian effect. Might be saying that wrong. I've only read it in books. When that happens, it's because someone in authority says that you can do something and has an expectation that you do it well, and lo and behold, your performance improves. And we continue to get data on that. That hasn't stopped. Later on, Du Bois and a bunch of other folks in 2011 did a meta-analysis of 73 independent evaluations.

Barrett Williams (02:20.429)

Mentorship works best when there's structure, clear expectations, and regular contact. That's why teachers are so often our first mentors. They have ready access, their structure around them, and they have expectations. Mrs. Thompson was mine. And so what mentorship is, is someone with some skill and authority in a thing, something that you can recognize that they're good at. Someone who cares about you, but also has expectations of you. It's not enough to just have unconditional positive regard and somebody who

just likes you for who you are with no standards, there needs to be a standard and expectation and guidance. Without all those things, it's not mentorship. It's a caring person and it's a caring relationship. Those are valuable, but they're not the same thing. And that's important to look for. So when you're looking around for mentors, there needs to be a balance of them giving a shit about you, but also them seeing something in you and giving you expectations on how to get there. Without those things, mentorship isn't what's happening.

And watch for that. A lot of the online influencers and things like that that talk about this lay out expectations without care. And then a lot of times we send people to therapist who don't have expectations but endless care. A mentorship needs both. So question two, why do boys need to see it instead of just hear it? So the first time I remember this coming up with a mentor is when I moved out to Denver to live with John and Dee Dee. They were both PhDs and they saw something in me and decided to take me in so I could go to college.

My parents, they weren't dumb people or anything like that, but they weren't scholastic in any way. My mom walked graduation pregnant with me, and my dad dropped out in the ninth grade. They stopped being able to help me with my homework in the fourth grade, and we didn't really have books in the house. So it was a big deal that John and Dee Dee took me in, but I'd never experienced that kind of kindness before, and it really made me insecure. I didn't understand what my place was, I didn't understand what the expectations were, even though they told me that all I needed to do was go to school, I'd never lived like that.

I'd always done something, provided something, I'd been paying bills since I was fourteen. And so I was pretty insecure living with them at first. Felt like I had an opportunity to do something to be of service. Guy comes to the door, John answers it, and the guy gives John a story about how he's just getting out of jail, and it would really help him out if John could pay him to do some work around the house. Gutters, that kind of thing. John pretty quickly said, Yeah, absolutely, here's some money, thanks for doing that for me. God does the work, leaves.

Barrett Williams (04:43.66)

So far, no harm, no foul, but something about the guy didn't rub me right. I thought there was something off. Sure enough, a few days later the guy comes back, clearly drunk, and John gets to the door again, and the guy gives John a song and dance about how he needs more money for the work he did. John, without missing a beat, reaches into his wallet and hands him another twenty bucks. At this point, I'm furious. I'm nineteen and I'm worried that people are gonna think I'm taking advantage of John and Dee Dee and now I'm watching someone do it. And I don't think I clocked at that point.

that I was kind of projecting my worries about how I was seen onto this guy, but I was pissed. And all of a sudden it felt like I had something to do for the household. So John isn't going to protect the house. I will. So sure enough, some days go by and the guy comes back. This time I get to the door and I chase him off. I I yell at him, tell him if he ever shows back up, I'm gonna beat his ass, call the cops. And he takes off. Now I'm nineteen. There's almost no way that I could have backed up any of the things I threatened the guy with.

But you'd figure I'd feel something positive about that, that like I was protective of my household. I got this guy out of the way. I made it so that John wouldn't get taken advantage of again. Instead, I just felt nothing. I felt really empty. I just scared this guy who was clearly struggling. And in that emptiness, a resentment started to bubble up. A resentment at John. Anger at him for being taken advantage of and allowing it to happen. With the guys I grew up with, that's a big deal. You don't let people take advantage of you. You hold what's yours.

And you make sure that if you're helping people, you're not being taken advantage of. It's not that you can't help people, but being taken advantage of is horrible. So I just kept holding that and holding that, and then finally I couldn't hold it anymore. And I finally went to John. And I was John, like, what the hell are you doing? You knew that guy was taking advantage of you, and you gave him money anyway. What the hell? John's really quiet. And he's he's walks through the world with this quiet confidence of a guy. No bluster no violence projected into the world. I'm just kind of a sweet, intelligent man moving through the world. And so unsurprisingly, when he's thoughtful about it, he says, Well, one, I don't know if that guy was taking advantage of me or not. Two, twenty bucks isn't a lot of money to me. And the guy clearly needed it. I'd rather lose twenty bucks and help a guy out than worry about if somebody's taking advantage of me for that. And it blew me away. I'd never thought about it like that. I'd never thought that if you have a certain level of security.

Barrett Williams (07:11.855)

in your money, in yourself, in the world, that it's okay to help people at the risk of being taken advantage of. That never occurred to me. And it wouldn't have occurred to me if I hadn't seen John do it. It's not that I didn't have good men in my life before. My father was a great guy, love him dearly, taught me a lot, but this was a different kind of manhood that I hadn't seen before. And it stuck with me. And it's a large part of how I dictate my financial success now.

Sometimes being the guy that can take the hit and risk helping more people than not for the few that are going to take advantage, it's not a bad day. John taught me that. So that relationship with John isn't unique. It's pretty well studied. It's called observational learning. It's behavior acquired from watching. Yeah, you need to do things to get mastery, but first you need to know that they exist in the world and watch them. And particularly if you're watching them from someone who looks like you or somebody you can relate to, the more you believe you can do something. Bandura came up with this idea.

It's a big part of why we are missing mentorship now. With all these parasocial relationships like the one you and I are developing right now, you're not watching me do something, you're watching me talk about something. You're not seeing me in the world, you're seeing me in this world. And it's basically a cotton candy version of watching somebody do something. You're not watching me do anything. You're hearing me describe how to. That's valuable education content. But a lot of this online content.

doesn't frame it as education, they frame it as this is how to live your life, you do it like me, and you'll win big. It's not that easy. There needs to be some back and forth. There needs to be room for you to ask questions. There needs to be room for you to see somebody lose something to gain something. And that doesn't happen here. That's why boys need to be around it. That's why men need mentors. We need to be around people doing the thing, seeing them do it, to realize that it's something that you can do. So that's important.

And question three, how to make the ask. So when I got out of the Air Force and got into grad school, I started up the most successful mentorship program in Colorado for veterans transitioning into college. We took a small program with a few people helping a few people to two dozen mentors helping out over a thousand students over the course of my time there. The way we did it was by mentorship. And what we would do is we would take someone that was a junior and pair them up with a freshman. Sounds simple, right? But back then

Barrett Williams (09:36.048)

There really weren't people doing that outside of very explicit categories. And when you think of mentorship, you don't think of somebody just two steps ahead of you. You think of your yoda. If you're a clinician and you want to be a good clinician, you think of somebody like me, your professor, somebody who's been doing it a while, not a guy that's going into practicum while you're studying your books. When the reality is you need to talk to the guy going into practicum. He's probably got more understanding of how you're studying now than the professors do.

Professor's got a lot of knowledge and they're gonna help you. But seeing someone that you can relate to better do it goes a long way. What we found is it was hard to do because our program was a semester-based program. And all the data says that mentorship needs to last about a year. If it doesn't last a year and it's ended early, like arbitrarily, it can do damage. And so we couldn't do that. We couldn't put somebody together for the whole first year. We had too many people coming through, and that's not how we were measuring our numbers.

So what ended up working wasn't finding like pairing a marine with a marine or a combat vet with a combat vet. Didn't matter what branch of service they were, it didn't matter what kind of work they did when they were in. It mattered if we could pair their major. Can I get you with a business major that's a little bit ahead of you? Sure, they were a medic and you were a clerk. Doesn't matter. They're going to where you're going and you need to see how to get there. And that peer relationship was important. They could tell the things that I couldn't in their program.

They could tell them things that they could hear better from then than from a professor, like what to do when a civilian student asks you if you've killed somebody, or says that everybody in the military is a murderer. Yeah, that happened a good bit. Also, how to find the kids in your program that felt like kids to you being five years older than them, who were good at it, who you were going to need through your program, who you were going to learn from because they know college better than you. Those were the things that they could tell them that nobody else could. And that's what needs to happen.

There's this idea in mentorship that we want that yoda, right? We want that person that's the wise guy on the hill that can tell you everything. That guy doesn't really exist. And we've got good data behind that. These folks back in 2001, Higgins and Cram, came up with something called the developmental network theory. This is for businesses, so it's not as simple as this out in the world for everything, but it's something that we can extrapolate on and build from. They argued that within corporate structure, if you only have one mentor, that that tends to go pretty badly.

Barrett Williams (12:00.067)

It puts a lot of pressure on a single relationship and it makes it pretty brittle. It's also a lot to ask somebody to be a mentor for everything in someone's life. What they recommended was having at least three. Somebody to guide you through the skill of what your work was, somebody to help you navigate the system of the company, and somebody to help you navigate your work life balance and self help. That's just for being a good employee and having a career. Life's more complicated than that. There is no one person in my life who

That I go to for everything. I love John to death. I'm not going to him to figure out how to take a punch. John doesn't know. But I'm also not going to my sergeant who's got two black belts to talk about how to work a nonprofit. John knows that. It's important to lower the pressure of what a mentor is and where to find him. You don't need someone that's wise on the hill. You don't need someone that's good at everything and mastering whatever it is you're trying to learn. You just need somebody a few steps ahead of you.

That's willing to talk to you and show up for you. So that's first. You gotta get around people doing the thing that you're trying to learn. You can't do this from home. Cold calling people off of LinkedIn can work a little bit, but you need to be out where the work is happening because it's gonna do a few things. It's gonna let you observe and see who actually knows what they're doing. And it's gonna give you more opportunities to make small asks. You don't walk up to somebody and just say, Will you be my mentor?

That's big ask. It's a year over a year-long relationship, sometimes a lifelong relationship. That's a hard ask out of nothing. Instead, what you're gonna do is you're gonna make a small ask. Hey, I see you're really good at that. I'm trying to learn it. can I pick your brain for a little while? Can I get you a coffee? Can I ask you some questions? Some people are gonna say no, a lot of them are gonna say yes to that. And you're gonna have to do this more than once. You don't plant one seed in a whole field and expect it to feed yourself. You're gonna ask a few people

in a few lanes of how to do different things. And what you'll find is over time, the vibe will be good. You'll click with some of them, you'll see they consistently show up for you and have space for you. And that you want to talk to them more, that you want to in touch get in touch and have some structure around what you're doing. And then over time, mentorship builds. This is easier in environments where that can be formalized. So whether that's a service organization, right? So like your Masons

Barrett Williams (14:27.833)

Your church organizations, nonprofit stuff, something where you're just showing up to be good at something. Whether that's like a maker's space where you want to go learn a skill and there's a guy that knows that skill and is certified on how to teach it, get to know that guy. Maybe he's gonna help you be a better woodworker or whatever it is you're working on. Maybe it's university and school. Teachers are our original model for mentorship. Sometimes college is a great place to find one. Doesn't matter what it is you're trying to do. It matters that you're where it's happening and you're making a few ask of a few people.

I know that you probably want an easier answer than that. That you want a straight line to fix this. The loneliness epidemic and the mentorship problem isn't simple. And anybody who says it is is kind of an asshole and is probably trying to sell you something. The only way to get through this is to lower your bar for what you're asking for and let someone build the expectation with you and ask enough different people that are just a bit further ahead of you. And don't be wrong, man, if you get that super wizened old Yoda in your life, fantastic.

But I don't have one. Most people don't. We've got a few people that are a little further ahead of us, sometimes a lot further, like my my professional mentors got thirty years in the work on me, but I met him because he was a professor. Get out where people are doing things and start with the small ask of I'm trying to get better at this. Can you help me? And then see where it goes from there. Keep engaging, keep being open to the possibility, and engage with a few different people.

And over time, a few of them will bubble up and be what you need. So we're gonna go back to Miss Thompson to close this out. She stayed in touch with me as I went through school. Little hugs, little check-ins, right? Not nothing disruptive. She didn't come into my class or anything, but when she saw me in the hall, she check on me. And I always really loved that. Her care for me, the attention she was giving me when a lot of people didn't. And then one day she came up to me incredibly excited because she was teaching her third graders about dinosaurs. And she knew I was into dinosaurs.

And asked me if I would come and do a guest lecture on dinosaurs for her third grade class. I said yes. It's Miss Thompson. Of course I said yes. She asked me to do something. This woman has given me a lot. What I don't think she understood is I liked dinosaurs like a fifth grader does. I didn't read any books. I didn't know anything about them really. I had dinosaur toys and I thought they looked cool. So sure enough, when it's time for me to go and teach her third graders about dinosaurs.

Barrett Williams (16:57.823)

They knew more than me. I was this kid that was older than them, and I'm sitting there with Miss Thompson and she's trying her best to cover for me. And as I'm going through my dinosaur toys and naming them, the kids can correct me on the names that I don't know. And I was young, I was fifth grade. I didn't know how to tell Miss Thompson that wasn't something I could do. She believed in me, so I thought I could, and then found out I couldn't. And the disappointed look on her face sticks with me.

She wasn't mean about it. She wasn't shitty. She didn't stop checking on me in the hallways after that. But I disappointed her. I failed in expectations she set. And I never want to feel that way again. And so here we are, 46, been doing public speaking for over 30 years. And I'm better prepared for almost every presentation I do because I never want to feel the way it felt when Miss Thompson looked at me with disappointment. Again.

She didn't bite my head off. She didn't tell me I was a failure. She still checked on me in the hallways after that until she left the school.

There's gotta be room for that failure and real skin in the game with that mentor that you care what they think about you and that they can show a little disappointment and keep showing up. That's the consistency you're looking for. A lot of people that are in these environments will tell you they'll be with you as long as you're successful. Look for the people that'll be there when you're not. We learn through failure. Our biggest lessons come through failure. And a good mentor will hold you through some of that.

They won't coddle you. They won't tell you and blow smoke that you did well. They'll tell you when you screw up. But then they'll still be there and tell you how to do better. Look for that. And I hope you find it. If you're struggling with what to do with this and it's feeling pretty complicated, I put together a worksheet to help you guys out. It's in the show notes and it's free to anybody who needs it. Just click on it and it's an HTML doc. It's it opens up on your phone and it doesn't save or anything like that, but it'll help guide you through the process. I hope it helps.

Barrett Williams (19:04.218)

This has been Tim Winnicke with American Masculinity. Thanks for listening.