Why I Never Built a Team of Mentors

I never believed in having a team of mentors or being in big masterminds. In this episode, I’ll explain how I chose mentors, when they helped me the most, and why, at some point, learning shifts from being taught to learning through experience.

[0:20]
I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The ListBuilding Lifestyle. The podcast is for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire, at www.igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

[1:07]
I don’t think I was ever able to put a team of mentors, I still don’t have a team of mentors.

I don’t thrive on the concept of a team. I’m more introverted like that, I don’t like a lot of people around me. I like maybe a couple.

But what I prefer really is to have a deep and meaningful relationship with a few or with one. So, a team of mentors doesn’t quite make sense to me. I don’t thrive in masterminds, I don’t like to be in a room with 30 other people, it’s not my favorite thing to do.

But having one mentor with whom I can be critically honest, with whom I don’t have to hold back, with whom I can be absolutely no filter, that is very powerful for me.

And over the years, I went from one mentor to another. And usually, it would take me through that progression in a way where I would feel like I learned everything I could learn with this mentor. I’m now ready to move on to the next.

Now, this is not to say that every mentor I ever picked was a great mentor, that’s actually not true. Sometimes, I would quickly learn that my mentor is actually not very advanced, let’s put it this way, where I surpassed them a long time ago, and I need to move on to learn from somebody who’s ahead of me.

But of course, that’s also a challenge with mentors. Lots of mentors are basically people who are kind of good at the thing that they’re trying to teach, right? But they’re not so good as to them doing it just for themselves and just doing that, but rather, they’re good enough to be able to teach it. So, kind of like if somebody goes to art school, but they don’t become a great artist, they then go and they teach art.

So, there are exceptions to the rule, of course. There are some people who are just absolutely amazing at what they do, and they also have masterminds, like the likes of, say, Russell Brunson, or Tony Robbins, or that sort of caliber of people. But most so-called mentors are actually not world-class, let’s put it this way.

[3:39]
So, initially, what I would do is, I wouldn’t go for mentoring, I would go for resources, and I would read someone’s book, watch someone’s course. A course is a great way to estimate if you should work with that person at a higher level or a more personal level.

Because, for the most part, if you watch someone’s course, that’s pretty much all they can teach you. There are very few people who are so wise and so deep in their knowledge and understanding of the craft that just by being in their presence alone is going to help you become better at it.

So, that is why it’s important before getting a mentor, first and foremost, what you want to do is you want to go through their course to read their book.

And then, once you’ve done that, if after reading their book, you now have the appetite to go deeper into what they teach, not so much to learn new things. I want you to make a distinction here.

If I’m reading a book about, say, email marketing, and I finished that book, if I have a desire to go learn more email marketing techniques, then that author made me just more excited about email marketing, but not necessarily about themselves teaching it to me.

But if I’m reading, let’s say, I’ll give an example. So, Ben Settle is a great example of somebody who’s not only great at the craft of email marketing, but also is a great teacher of it. So, when I read any of Ben Settle’s stuff, I not only want to go deeper into the craft, I actually want to go deeper into my understanding of what he teaches.

So, any time I came across somebody who could teach me a subject matter or a topic in a way that made me want to go deeper into that subject, that’s when I would, I wanted to go and become their student.

So, I’ll give you one example of when that happened. So, back on the Warrior Forum, one time, I came across this really incredible PDF report, and that PDF report broke down sales copy.

So, it basically had two long-form sales pages, and then the author would circle things around, point an arrow to the side, and would write, this statement taps into the prospect’s fear of losing money.

Or it’s like, this sentence is powerful because it implies scarcity. This is, and so it would like literally break down the copy. So, it’ll give me the reason why the author wrote what the author wrote and what the author was trying to do.

And I felt like I learned a lot from just reading that PDF report. So, naturally, I said, you know what, I would really love to engage with that person who broke this down, because they clearly understand copying ways that they can teach it in a great fashion, in the fashion that I understand, in a fashion that I find entertaining and exciting.

So, I reached out to them. This person was Ross Bowery. He was a copywriter, freelance copywriter, who basically published this report, breaking down his own sales copy just for the word form, just to give back to the community.

I don’t think he was actually looking for any students. I do think he was looking for work, meaning I do think he kind of hoped that this would showcase his knowledge. And I think it was a great strategy by him, because it was a great value demonstration.

So, instead of telling people, look, I’m an amazing copywriter, he actually showed it by breaking down copy. And I think that’s brilliant. And many famous copywriters did that same thing, by the way. That was a pretty, pretty established tactic, but it’s still very powerful.

So, I reached out to him on the word form and I said, “hey, do you do coaching? Do you take on students? Do you have a course, something?” And then he ended up becoming my first copywriting mentor.

I ended up paying him a lot of money. I think I ended up paying him about 30 or so thousand dollars for coaching over the span of the following, like, two years or so.

But he really, like, get on the call with me one-on-one, watch me write copy, make me rewrite copy, give me homework assignments. It was like a proper education, one-on-one.

And even though it was very, very expensive, I still think it was very much worth it. And as a result, I learned how to write copy, at least decent copy. This was before AI, of course, right? Because there was no help in that sense. And, I got good enough to be making, you know, substantial amounts of money.

Later, I brought him to write other copy for me as a, actually as a freelancer, to write for me on a ref share basis. And I remember at one point that was sending him between five and fifteen thousand dollars every month. So it was a good relationship, I think, for everyone.

So that was an example of how, I would find a mentor. But once I believed that, okay, I’ve learned what I needed to learn and I’m ready to move on, I would go and look for another mentor.

And it became like an automated habit. And I followed that habit for a good 10 years or so. And after the 10-year mark, I re-evaluated things. And I realized that I no longer need a mentor so much.

Because I’ve learned, I mean, I’ve learned 90% of what a business owner and a marketer can learn. Like there was no more any novelty for me as far as new discoveries. And now it became a matter of state control.

[10:05]

So, I don’t think very many people talk about it. I heard Tony Robbins talk about this one time where he mentioned that state control is the biggest secret to success, meaning that if you can control your own state, you can control yourself and thus you can control your response to pretty much everything around you.

So, if you feel down and you know how to change your state to feeling excited and energized and motivated, right, you kind of solve procrastination.

So, state control became an issue because it became harder for me to be excited about everything because I’ve seen it all now.

It became harder for me to deal with challenges because the challenges were bigger. There were bigger risks. I mean, the challenges I was dealing with when I was making, I don’t know, 10 grand a month versus the challenges I started dealing with when I went to making $100,000 a month, different challenges.

So, not to mention as I grew older, I took more responsibilities. I started making investments. I got a mortgage, bought a house in Canada and whatever.

So, life became a little bit more complex than life in my mid-20s where I had no real obligations. I mean, I had a wife and a kid, but I really built my life in such a way where I could walk away from everything if I so chose to.

Anyway, I would then start looking for not so much mentors, but rather somebody who can help me control my state or teach me how to control my state.

And that’s when I got into more of a psychological or even psychiatric work where I started clearing a lot of trauma from childhood, and unpacking my relationship with my father, my relationship with my mother, with my brother. It was like all kinds of stuff like that, all sorts of stuff that I carried through the years from the past because that created different patterns.

So, the further I went, the less I relied on mentors. That’s what I’m trying to say. At some point I was like, “okay, I can pretty much teach this stuff myself”. So getting another mentor made no sense.

[12:27]
Now, this is not to say that I stopped reading or stopped learning. I didn’t, but I just switched from a state of, “okay, I need a mentor to show me the ropes and to show me what to do”, to I switched states to “I don’t need a mentor, I just need to try this and see what happens”. “I need to go through this experience and learn”.

So, I became more confident, had a little bit more self-belief and recognized that it’s one thing when you’re reading about something or a teacher is teaching you about something versus going through it yourself.

Throwing yourself into an experience and going through it, making some mistakes, having wins, having losses, getting a few bruises, that teaches you a lot.

And throughout my entire experience as a student with different mentors, I think what made me a great student was my ability to just take what they gave me and go implement it and see what happens, right? If they told me to do something, I would just go and do it. I would just take it at face value and just go do it.

And oftentimes, I would hit a point in my relationship with my mentors where they would tell me something like, “Igor, you’re either like the most consistent student I’ve ever had or the most dedicated student I’ve ever had, or you’re a machine or something like that”. And they always meant the same thing.

They meant that whatever was discussed, whatever the lesson that was discussed, I would go and I would actually do it in the real world, come back and have feedback for them about how it worked, which is an experience all coaches want, but almost no coaches get.

Because most students who work with coaches really use their coaches as therapists, really, where they just talk about their problems, but they don’t necessarily go after the solutions, or are very good at implementing the solution.

[14:40]
Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle. Get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to claim your free copy of my best-selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list buildings starting from scratch, plus I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package!