“Do you want to be mediocre or great?” she said. I was 14 years old and standing at the barre in the middle of ballet class. Everything came easy to me. Dancing was natural movement for me and my young body did not have to work hard to manage to do basic things like stretch and jump and turn and such. Movement was fluid. But because of that I had not yet learned to sweat and push for more and struggle. Home life was a struggle but dance was not. Still there would come a time when I needed to learn to reach down deep and pull more out of myself.

So, I looked her in the eyes with all the intensity I could muster up and said simply, “Great.”

“Okay good.” she said, “Then you are going to learn how to sweat and you are going to hate me!” She was right, about both! She was a once famous ballerina from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. She was my teacher. She was also my second mother. Sadly it became a love/hate relationship as she stunned me one day when I was 19 years old with a confession of how utterly jealous she had been of me for several years causing her abuse and the bullying that went way beyond the boundaries of coaching, or pushing for success and accountability. I forgave her because of her obvious remorse and courage to own up to it all with me. However the damage was extreme. It left me with a lot of inner work to do. But it also left me with a passion to help others in a more positive productive kind of mentoring relationship. I guess that would be the silver lining from that cloud.

I believe we move forward in life and in our work whatever it may be because there is someone there to teach, mentor, support and/or push against. One must have some support, encouragement and/or love from someone! Too much of the negative can become a destructive force instead of just a springboard to success and achievement. I did indeed have a little too much of the negative with out and out bullying, and it led to some extraordinarily difficult times, injuries, a destructive self image and ultimately less success than I might have enjoyed in a profession with a very limited time frame, then if I had been with a great mentor who had the right attitude. But I learned some incredible lessons from the obstacles and my fight to win out over them, heal myself and somehow carve out a career for myself in spite of it all.

Here is what I ultimately believe, mentors help move us forward, give us a different perspective of what we are doing and what possibilities we have to do it better. They help us to become accountable to our own dreams and goals. They help us to remain humble enough to keep our mind open and push the envelope to be able to achieve more. However it is important to find a mentor or a personal coach who truly believes in you and hopes for you to succeed. There must never be competition between mentor and student or protegee. That is counter-productive as I learned.

I have had great mentors in the years that followed that other experience and I have mentored several others throughout the years as well. It is a special relationship. It can have the power to make or break a person. My feeling about each person I have ever worked with as a mentor, whether I was paid or was just helping a friend, was that I took them into my heart and their success mattered as much as my own did to me. That and their trust and mutual respect were the key elements of the relationship.

So I want to encourage everyone to seek a mentor for the things in life that you want to achieve so that you have someone in your corner that will stretch you and hold you accountable and be your cheerleader at those times when the world seems to be crowding in and exposing your weaknesses and failures. You may have to be the one who does the work but your mentor or your personal coach will help you stay in the game and find your belief in yourself again. But seek this person out carefully and get to know them a bit first. You can always leave a toxic relationship. Just know the difference between pushing you to be the best you can be and holding you back with veiled passive aggressive attitudes. But with the right person, you can take the lid off your limitations and FLY!