Hey everyone, welcome to this quick cast. Today I want to talk about something that's not often said out loud, but I think it's very powerful when we are on our mentee calls and our goal is to deliver results, and that is that as business mentors, our role is not to be liked, is to help our clients get results, and that sometimes means having tough, honest conversations, just like in our business, our role is not to be liked by everyone, by our clients, but to make the best decisions that serve our business and our team

and as business mentors, we wear a very specific hat. We are there to guide, challenge and help our clients succeed, but our value isn't measured in how much people like like us. It's measured by the results that we help them achieve. And in fact, there is this dialog I always have running in the back of my mind when I'm on mentee calls and I'm about to say something challenging or direct, and it goes something like this, my role here isn't to be their friend or to sugar coat things, to hold them accountable to their goals and deliver results. If they want a friend, that's fine, but mentorship, that's a different thing, and I think that it's also like important to nurture our relationships outside of our businesses and outside of our roles as mentors, so that we don't have this craving to be liked in every aspect of our life, because it's unrealistic.

So I think that one last thing that I want to give you this week is the difference between being kind and being nice. Being nice often looks like telling people what they want to hear. It feels good in the moment, but it doesn't move the needle. And being kind, on the other hand, means telling people what they need to hear, even if it's uncomfortable, it means framing back, framing back what I told you, framing feedback in a way that's constructive, but it's not sugar coated. It's direct. Think of it as think of being kind versus being nice. This way being kind is about serving their growth, not their ego.

So how do we actually navigate those situations when we need to have hard conversations? Or how do I do it first I check in with myself and remind myself my role here is to help them grow, even if it feels uncomfortable and it's okay to feel uncomfortable. It's a normal human emotion.

It's okay to have the urge of being liked, also very human. And then I just tell myself, how human of me to want to be liked, but I still want to do the right thing for the role that I'm here to do and to execute. Then I try to approach the conversation with empathy but clarity. I acknowledge their effort or progress, but then pivot, pivot to the heart through its so.

So for example, I see that you are working hard on delivering these client classes, but these current strategies isn't getting closer to your goal. I had a similar conversation with a gym from the UK that weren't growing because they didn't want to let go of group coaching. They were charging very little money for it, and they were complaining that they don't have the time energy resources to offer more PT, more semi private training, and then we had to have this conversation of, why are they basing their decisions based on fear, not on what they said they wanted to do? And the hard word is that they're sticking to the wrong thing. And so this way, I hope at least I show them that I care about them, but I'm also focused on what they said that they want to achieve.

And so results matter more than being liked.

And it doesn't mean that we can't build great relationships with our clients, but it's important to remember that the safety of being liked or making friends is something we save for other roles in our life, like our family, our personal relationships or our social circle, and in mentorship, our role is to be the guide people need, not the friend they want, because the truth...