Week 19 · Lesson 1
Mentorship and Peer Accountability
Week 19 of 23 · Mentorship and Peer Accountability
Who has ever told you the truth when it cost them something?
Not somebody who told you off. Somebody who told you something true knowing you might not talk to them after.
Some people can name one. A lot cannot, and that is not because nobody cared. It is because telling somebody the truth is expensive and most people cannot afford it.
Key ConceptWhoever Shows Up Is Who Shapes You
People talk about role models like it is about who is impressive. It is not. It is about who is consistently there.
The person who shaped you most is the person who was around the most, and that is true whether that person was good for you or not.
Which cuts both ways. It means whatever has been consistent in your life has already been shaping you. And it means the fastest way to change is not information. It is proximity to somebody different, over time, on purpose.
You do not become like who you admire. You become like who you are around.
Journal Question
Who has been the most consistent person in your life? Write their name and write what you picked up from them, good and bad, without editing it.
Teaching PointWhat to Actually Look For
You do not need somebody who has it all. You need somebody who is three or four years further down the road you are trying to walk, close enough to remember what it felt like where you are.
If somebody needs your loyalty, your labor, your name, or your story for something of theirs, that is not mentorship. Real ones want nothing back and it makes them hard to trust at first.
Test them with something small and true. Watch what their face does. If they look at you different afterward, that is your answer and it is better to find out over something small.
Everybody is available in week one. Six months in, with nothing exciting happening and you not doing that well, who is still picking up.
Activity
Write one name of somebody who could be this for you. If you cannot think of anybody, write that plainly. Then write the one thing you would ask them if you knew they would not judge you for it.
Teaching PointThe Other Half Nobody Mentions
Everybody wants a mentor. Almost nobody wants to be accountable, and those are the same thing from two sides.
Accountability is not somebody checking on you. It is you telling somebody the truth before they ask, including the part that makes you look bad.
Which means you have to give somebody permission to say something to you and not hold it against them. That permission is the whole thing, and most people never give it to anybody, and then wonder why nobody ever stopped them.
Spiritual Takeaway
Somebody vouched for the man everybody was still scared of
After Saul was knocked off his horse and changed, he tried to join the people he had been hunting. And they did not believe him. Of course they did not. This is the man who had watched their friends get killed and approved of it.
Then one man named Barnabas took him and brought him to the leaders himself and told them what happened to him. He put his own name on a man everybody else thought was a threat.
That is what got Saul in the door. Not his conversion by itself. Somebody with credibility standing next to him.
Years later Barnabas did it again for a young man named Mark who had quit in the middle of a trip and walked home. Paul said absolutely not, we are not taking him again. Barnabas took him anyway, and they split over it. And at the very end of his life, Paul wrote and asked for Mark, and said he is useful to me.
Somebody has to be willing to vouch for a person who does not look like a good bet yet, and be wrong about it sometimes.
Paul told Timothy to take what he had heard and pass it to reliable people who could teach others. Four generations of men in one sentence, all through relationship. Each one teach one, and that phrase is older than anybody using it now.
Tell one person one true thing about how you are actually doing, before they ask. That is the whole assignment, and it is harder than it sounds.
Take it one week at a time.
Defining Narratives · Week 19 Lesson