LIFE as a Mentorship Opportunity
One thing that is offered to all of my employees is a year long mentorship program designed to guide them in their personal lives outside of work. As would be expected, the first month of the year is all about visioning. One problem that we really seek to straighten out, however, is that most people don’t recognize the crucial role decision making plays in the visioning process.
Here is the lesson we covered last week in our mentorship group - maybe you can implement it with your own mentees.
Everyone came together and we played the actual board game, LIFE. If you have never played the game, it is about 100 spaces worth of approximate real life events that include getting a job, getting married, having kids, buying houses, going on vacations, etc, all of which culminates in retirement. The object of the game? The player with the most money at the end of the game wins.
Previously I qualified the ‘life events’ notated on the game board as approximate real life events. There are some spaces on the board that make absolutely no sense what so ever. For example, the player who ended up winning the game happened to land on a space that said he “found $500K worth of buried treasure”. Because who just happens to find $500k in treasure driving around in life?? So, yes… approximate indeed.
The player who came in second played a masterful game of budgeting and responsible spending when he could and also won one of the $25 gift cards up for grabs. At the end of the game, we analyzed all of the decisions from the people who played. Below are some take-aways from their decisions:
· Only the people who went to college in real life decided to “attend college” in the game. People who had already made the decision in real life that college wasn’t necessary also made the same decision. The person who came in first made the decision a quarter of the way through that he needed to go back to school to get a better career.
· In this newer edition of LIFE, there is a function called Spin to Win. This was added somewhere along the way since we were kids and used to play the game. All along the board path there are Spin to Win spaces that allow each player to essentially gamble money on a number in order to increase their wealth should the spinner land on their chosen number. One of the players who otherwise would have stood a great chance at winning the game, lost most of their wealth in gambling.
· The first two people who ‘reached retirement’ and thus finished the game, finished four whole turns ahead of the rest of the players. These two players chose the most direct route each time they were given an option to deviate from the ‘normal path of life’. Granted, they also spun several higher numbers, but it just goes to show that some people cruise through life not enjoying each space they pass.
There were many more examples and object lessons that could be shared but I wanted to share these specifically with you as I found them the most amusing. I also just wanted to pass along a great mentorship idea for you to play with your own employees. You see, the biggest lesson we can teach our employees is that their decisions will shape their lives. So before you go and get mad at someone who is further along and/or has more success than you, stop and ask yourself, “What decisions did they make in life that led them to that amount of success?” Then challenge them to analyze their personal, current decisions to see how changing just a few of them has the power to greatly impact their own lives.
If you are reading this and want to take it for your own group, feel free to reach out to me either through DM or the comments section. I would be happy to share the augmented rules that we put in place and the lesson plan that goes along with it.
Enjoy,
