Mentors and sponsors, particularly in the early stages of my career, were invaluable to me because they encouraged me to raise my hand and take opportunities to build my capabilities.
Of all the things that can have an effect on your future, I believe personal growth is the greatest. We can talk about sales growth, profit growth, asset growth, but all of this probably will not happen without personal growth.
My personal narrative - I was lucky early on in my career to have some really strong mentors. I didn't realize it at the time, but that's what really built me up.
People need to be in charge of their development plan. They need to seek out their sponsors and their mentors and be very strategic.
Don't wait for someone to tap you on the shoulder. Make your goals known and proactively develop relationships with those that can help get you there either in the form of mentors or sponsors.
I always wish I'd had more mentors, better mentors, wiser mentors, people who were proper professional working musicians to guide me as I was coming up.
We don't have any kind of sponsors. The players invest themselves. They need money. They need resources... That's why, in sports and teams, they have sponsors - in soccer, in the NFL. Everyone has sponsors who invest and help to pay daily expenses.
I've been fortunate in life to benefit from family, educators, work colleagues, and a set of mentors and sponsors, all of whom did not hesitate to offer and support me with every opportunity to achieve what I set out to do.
You can't become a CEO without working hard and delivering results, but that will only take you so far. Building and leveraging strong relationships with mentors and sponsors will take you the rest of the way.
I have experienced a tremendous amount of personal and professional growth, and I feel incredibly lucky that I'm able to make a career out of doing the things that I love.
Through Twitter, I've got a writing career and a directing career, as well as hundreds of other beneficial things that have happened to me. I love it.
My personal style at this point in my life is more audio; it's more driven on less visual and more musicality. But because of my upbringing, my fabulous mentors and teachers that I've had throughout my dance journey or career, I also possess a style that is of the past. It was just a matter of me reaching back.
Search for role models you can look up to and people who take an interest in your career. But here's an important warning: you don't have to have mentors who look like you. Had I been waiting for a black, female Soviet specialist mentor, I would still be waiting. Most of my mentors have been old white men, because they were the ones who dominated my field.
If you are a driver of a team and have a certain set of sponsors, who is the target market for those sponsors? But, of course, it is also a question of nationality.
I had no support, no opportunity, no sponsors backing me for most of my career.
People say, "John, what's your personal growth?" And ask "How do you grow?" And I tell them. I thought, "Why do I keep telling them, why don't I just write a book on what I call personal growth?" And that's what this [Today Matters] book is.