I recently stumbled upon Rainn Wilson’s Soul Boom podcast. I knew Rainn Wilson (actor who played Dwight Schrute on the show The Office) had written a book (affiliate) pondering various life questions – why are we here, why do we die, what’s a soul and why does it matter, mental health, spirituality, and on and on – but I hadn’t really explored anything about it further.

This Soul Boom podcast came up in my YouTube Shorts feed and it was with guest, Jeff Kober, who is also an actor, but more recently spends a lot of his time teaching mindfulness and spirituality meditation (affiliate) practices to others.

I’m sharing this because I think, at least, this particular episode is really worthwhile for people to check out. Especially, if you ever struggle with anxiety and self-destructive physical/mental habits, no matter how small you might think those destructive habits may be.

What I really like about this episode is this idea that over one’s lifetime the success of your journey is less about what you’ve accomplished externally in the world or the career success you’ve achieved – less about what you do – and more about what you’ve become. How far have you come as an individual – a self-realized individual who can be with, and learn from, their own insecurities and weaknesses to be wiser, more accepting and, in general, more loving to themselves and others.

I don’t take that to mean focus on your weaknesses to help strengthen them. There is always some level of that in play, but I take it to mean be balanced by embracing your strengths wholeheartedly while also acknowledging your weaknesses, fears and anxieties to accept them and understand how they are teachers and provide opportunities.

This can allow you to, as an individual, be more at peace with yourself and where you are presently to better embrace whatever is to come next and those who come along with it.

One thing I like to do to accept my anxiety and use it to my advantage, or at least minimize its paralyzing effect on me, is to verbally name your anxiety as it’s occurring. In other words, label the anxiety – “I’m anxious about X,” or, “When X happens I get nervous about Y.”  If you can identify your anxiety a bit, its power is diminished. It won’t totally go away, but it often takes the edge off to allow you to muster up your abilities to deal with it a little bit better. Writing down what you’re anxious about also often helps.

Being a fully remote worker doesn't always make it easy to find and identify an internal mentors at your employer organization. When you go to an office and see various groups of people from yours, and other functional areas, you can engage in spontaneous hallway conversations that lead to deeper work connections and even mentorship. It's certainly not impossible to do when you're remote, but there is less spontaneity about how it develops.

I have found though that I have access to some of the best mentors available via books. 

(Sigh) 

I get it. Books was not the professional hack you might have been after. However, staying motivated by curiosity and always wanting to improve is the best way to get creative about finding mentors and extracting their lessons for your own growth.  Books are one way to do that. I've shared this before, but I keep a running list of several of the books I've read on my website for others to find and potentially add to their list of mentors.

Side note:  I just recently picked up Scott Galloway's, The Algebra of Wealth - A Simple Formula for Financial Security (affiliate). I'm halfway through. He offers some direct tough love about the subject of becoming financially secure and determining what that looks like for you, but what's been interesting to me is the list of books he references within his own work are many of the titles on my recommended reading list.  

Action You Can Take To Engage in Mentorship:
If you're interested in gaining knowledge and improving through mentorship but feel like you don't have a lot of access to mentors, here's a multi-pronged approach you can use...

1. Start reading books, regularly...like...always
2. Network across LinkedIn to connect with and have Zoom intro chats with as many professionals in and around your field as you can fit in each week. Be sure to ask them about what has made them successful in their role (a little bit of a mentorship moment)
3. Introduce people you meet in your Zoom intro chats to others in your network where it makes sense (this is just good networking and encourages others to introduce their contacts to you - lead by example).
4. If you get the chance, in your networking conversations, share some of what you have learned from others and the books you've read -- the more you reiterate the lessons you've learned the more you deepen your comprehension of those lessons.

The Result:
You're proactively finding mentorship for yourself, growing your network to gain a diversity of ideas from others, and participating in a larger (though remote) professional community that provides potentially greater resources than what you can obtain solo and siloed.

For those of us in a rut. Those of us laid off. Those of us just wondering if what we do professionally even matters...it does...

I read the newsletter of Jason Feifer (author of book Build for Tomorrow), and it highlights that even the most seemingly menial work is noble. When what you do affects even one person in a positive way or just helps out slightly, it has meaning and is worthwhile.

It's important to be in service of something greater, directly to other individuals, to yourself, and it's almost always a compounding effort of work built on top of what has come before you through others' efforts.

Your piece of the progression is important if for no other reason than the fact that no one else can do it the way you do in the exact time and space that you need to accomplish the work to benefit someone else at the exact moment and in the precise way that they experience your work.