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The 4 Things Every 'God-Tier' Mentor Has in Common
- Written by NelsonQuest
- November 26, 2022
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A good mentor, coach or more broadly speaking ‘teachert can literally be the difference between whether we fail to learn something or whether we develop an intense passion for it. Over the past few years in particular I’ve learned from hundreds of different teachers as I’ve sought to reach mastery levels within business, personal development, spirituality, salsa, boxing, overall health and nutrition, and that’s just naming a few things. Good teachers are rare… legendary teachers are like unicorns… and bad teachers, well, bad teachers are everywhere: classrooms, books, social media, YouTube, and here’s the thing: learning from a bad teacher could irrevocably damage our lives. Some of them may just drain our bank accounts without imparting any real value, while others can actually lead us off of our paths entirely, where we can spend months, years, possibly, even our entire lives having never discovered our true essence or potential.
Nowhere is this more true than within the self-improvement industry, where most mentors, coaches and again, broadly speaking, teachers, literally don’t know the first thing about true personal development, what they do know is how to promote the same toxic positivity and momentary motivation strategies that only end up creating a false sense of improvement, which is why when you look at the broad population of people who are trying to improve themselves most of them are just like zombies all repeating the same things but with no actual Improvement to show. For all of their supposed efforts this is the illusion of improvement and it originates in bad teachers. In this video I’ll show you the four qualities that all legendary teachers have in common, so that you can separate the good from the bad to cultivate true learning and passion in everything that you do and maybe one day even become a legendary teacher yourself. Let’s begin.
Number one: they've already excelled at what they're teaching.
The most dangerous teachers are the ones who teach entirely from textbooks or from what they’ve read or seen online, because these teachers exist only within the world of theory. Trust me when I tell you that the reality of something is very different than the idea of it. You can’t be a good millionaire mindset coach if you haven’t already earned a million dollars, you can’t be a good business coach if you haven’t ever built a successful business, you can’t be a good Fitness coach if you yourself aren’t in great shape, so while bad teachers in these areas may have read tons of books or even have college degrees they’re missing the key ingredient which is how to actually translate that knowledge into reality. When we read, the best that we can hope for is to memorize, to truly learn something is to take it from the world of theory into successfully manifest it within reality.
To know the path is not to walk the path, to walk the path is to know the path. Unfortunately many people choose to teach as a way to seek validation for being good at something without actually being good at that thing, and if this sounds like you, please don’t feel bad. When I first started my personal development journey I would post all sorts of motivational quotes on all my social networks, I would give my friends advice on how to be successful that they never asked me for because I was trying to externally validate the idea that I was successful instead of just doing the difficult work required to actually become successful. Good teachers have already done the thing that we’re seeking to learn and the higher their level the more they’re able to see with clarity what lesser teachers are simply unable to see.
Number two: they love to teach.
For the longest time I hated dancing salsa. I knew that I wanted to learn how to dance but lacing up my Salsa shoes felt like a death sentence. Most of my teachers hated teaching, I imagine because they mostly taught the same steps over and over to the sandal wearing foreigners who smell like sweaty cow. Most of these teachers only taught me how to memorize steps, which is not only boring but it doesn’t make you a better dancer. I wasn’t seeing any progress from which to feel motivated and so I struggled to take classes with any sort of consistency… but then I found teachers like Daniela and Maira, who not only love salsa but also love teaching, they celebrated every little Improvement that I made, while also giving me enough room to safely fail and try again over and over and over.
They taught me how to move my body with the music, how to express myself through movement, which was the result I was pursuing in the first place, and in doing so they helped me to love the journey of salsa, which is the most important thing when it comes to not giving up something that anyone can force themselves to do something for a brief period of time in the pursuit of a specific result, but unless we love the actual journey of the thing it’s not likely that we’ll ever make it to see the destination and this is why it is so critical that we learn from people who love what they’re teaching, because their love of process is contagious through them we can vicariously develop a similar love of process, even if we haven’t yet tasted the sweet reward of what’s waiting for us at the finish line.
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Number three: they push us to be uncomfortable.
Most teachers will just talk and talk and talk as if their words are somehow translating into knowledge. They try to make the experience of learning easy, providing answers instead of using questions to provoke critical thinking. Learning should be uncomfortable, here’s why: we only learn through application, when we are taught by a teacher, teaches a book or a video and then we apply those teachings we’re always going to feel uncomfortable initially, since we have no experience doing that thing, then over time, the more that we apply those teachings, the more comfortable we begin to feel because we become good at those things, but unless we want to remain at the same level we need to continually push ourselves to apply new information to try out new techniques to once again be uncomfortable. To repeat this process over and over is to move towards mastery and a good teacher will thus teach us in a way where they’re constantly pushing us to always exist within the uncomfortable frontiers of our limits.
Number four: they help us discover our Unique style.
Early on, a teacher who is still learning who we are, will teach us their style, which is perfectly fine and normal. This is actually just one of the many ways that our teacher can begin to observe our tendencies, predispositions and our overall essence, but as we develop the job of the teacher is to help us find our own unique path our own unique style, instead of always just imposing themselves on us. Now, there are nuances here in boxing, in salsa, for example there are certain fundamentals that we need to first learn how to rotate the body, to generate power in our punches, how to maintain our gaze on a fixed position to properly execute a spin, but when it comes to style which has a lot less to do with fundamentals and a lot more to do with how our essence translates into our actions.
A bad teacher will demand that we do these things according to their style, while a good teacher will help us to discover our own unique style. Now, style is not specific to physical activities like salsa and boxing, it is universal, it is a manifestation of our essence with whatever thing that we’re doing. Within business and self-development there are, of course, fundamentals as well. We should learn how to love the process, we should learn how to seek discomfort as we move towards mastering, but a good teacher will help us to establish these fundamentals in everything that we do, as a platform that we can then use to reach our potential, while a bad teacher will try to guide our growth even after that platform has been established.
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