What to do before hiring a mentor

When starting a new career, like graphic design, or trying to get to the next level in your career, there's nothing like talking to someone who has already traveled the path you're about to travel. Learning from someone who has "been there, done that" is going to make your life far easier.

Sometimes, you can get that information for free from someone. Other times you might actually hire someone for mentoring sessions. I hired someone a few years back and it was money well-spent.

I've also offered mentoring sessions, but I try to talk people out of it first. Here's why...

What I've found is that beginning graphic designers often don't do what they know they should do. Or they're simply looking for someone to encourage them or give them a kick in the rear-end. But do you really need to pay someone to do that for you or could you do it yourself?

Let me give you an example that I run into often:

Beginning Designer: "I need some help... I'm not finding any clients. What should I do?"

Me: "How many calls did you make to potential clients yesterday or how many letters did you send out?"

BD: "Uhh, none."

Me: "OK... how about the day before?"

BD: "Well, part of the problem is I'm not sure who I should be contacting."

Me: "What did you do yesterday to figure out who you should be contacting?"

BD: "Well..."

Now here's a really quick answer to this particular problem. You need to do an inventory of what you're able to offer as a designer. Maybe you love doing brochures. Who needs brochures? Well, anyone who puts their brochures in a brochure rack at your local airport needs them along with quite a lot of businesses in your local area. But you're not going to know who needs you until you call these folks, let them know what you do, then see if there's a need now or maybe in the future.

You do not need a mentor for that insight. It's Business 101: Knowing what you do well and then leaving no stone unturned finding the people who need what you offer.

The other big issue is motivation. People want a mentor to help motivate them. I've got some bad news: If you need someone else to motivate you to push forward in a new career, you're in trouble.

You have to ask yourself: If I need someone else to motivate me or help push me along, is this something I really want to do? Or am I just in love with the idea?

I don't want this to sound too harsh, but some folks are expecting a little too much hand-holding when a little bit more individual effort on their part could propel them forward.

My theory is that a lot of us (and I do include myself in this) got used to being told what to do as employees. Someone told us what hours we'd work, what we'd do during those hours, how much we'd be paid, how much vacation we could have, etc.

Now, as freelancers, we're completely on our own to map out everything. But we've sort of lost that ability to think things through on our own when it comes to business because we had so many years of those decisions being made by someone else.

It's not that we're stupid... we've just gotten a little soft in areas. So as you're moving forward, don't get overwhelmed by all the decisions that may be in front of you. Just break it down into manageable pieces and start with the most basic thing you can do right now to move forward. Don't make it more complicated than it has to be... quite a bit of this is simply going to be common sense.

Once you've got all the common sense issues out of the way and you know you've done everything you can possibly do on your own, go ahead and get a mentor if you feel you need one. Mentors can help you refine some of your ideas and tell you what has and hasn't worked for them.

It's at that point where you're really getting the most out of a mentor relationship and the push you need to get to the next level of your career.

Adobe's Share My Screen feature

Slowly but surely, I'm working Adobe CS4 into my workflow. I think I've mentioned before that for CS3 users, I don't necessarily view CS4 as a "must have" upgrade. Certainly there are lots of useful new features, but if your finances are tight, I wouldn't break the bank to get it.

That said, there are some new things in CS4 that designers will find valuable. One such feature is Share My Screen. This works in conjunction with Adobe's ConnectNow feature which you can read all about here.

In a nutshell, you can go into a CS4 application, such as InDesign, and choose File | Share My Screen. This connects you to the ConnectNow site and provides you with a URL to give to other people so, via their browser, they can see what's on your screen.

I did a quick test on my own, sharing my main monitor while watching what was happening in a browser window on my second monitor. (And I was happily surprised to see the ConnectNow app was aware I had two monitors and asked me which one I wanted to share.)

The whole thing was pretty slick. Whatever I was doing on my main monitor was showing up in the browser window.

There are actually a number of services for screen sharing, so it's not like Adobe has come up with an original idea. But for us designers who spend most of our time in Adobe products, being able to launch this feature straight from the CS4 apps is convenient (and free, at least at this moment).

And while I didn't confirm this myself, from what I read on one of Adobe's blogs, the URL that ConnectNow provides to you to give to other people is always the same based on your Adobe account name. (And Adobe accounts are free.)

I probably don't need to tell you how you could use this feature, but what the heck... you're here now, right?

There have been times where I've been creating a simple website for a client and it gets to be a mild pain making changes, then uploading them for the client to see in a browser. Or zipping the files to e-mail so they could see the complete site offline. Far easier to share out your screen and collaborate with client live if time is tight.

Or maybe you're wanting input from a number of people at once. There's nothing worse than getting conflicting feedback from everyone involved and having to somehow incorporate everyone's vision into the design. Perhaps it would be easier to get everyone together online and let them agree on changes while you incorporate them right there on the spot as they're watching. If everyone thinks blue would be a better color than green, you could change it and they could all decide for themselves right on the spot.

Heck, even sharing out your screen with another designer can be useful if you're trying to show them something that would take far too long to explain in an e-mail.

Again, it's not that there's anything new going on here with screen sharing. It's just nice that the feature is so easy to use within the programs I'm already using every day.