I recently joined Amelia Ransom on her DEI AF podcast for a conversation about mentoring, sponsorship, learning, AI, and what it really takes to grow.

Amelia has a gift for putting big ideas into memorable language. Three things she said during our conversation have stayed with me.

1. “Don’t be a learning thief.”

I loved Amelia’s phrase “learning thief.”

It describes what happens when mentors enter a relationship assuming all the learning is supposed to flow in one direction: I’m the experienced person. I’m here to teach you.

My take: Great mentoring is reciprocal.

A mentor may bring experience, context, and perspective, but the mentee brings knowledge, experiences, and ways of seeing the world the mentor doesn’t have.

Come to mentoring prepared to contribute—but also prepared to learn.

Otherwise, you may be leaving half the value of the relationship on the table.

2. “What do you need to know to be true about me to advocate for me when I’m not in the room?”

Amelia shared a question she asked her COO:

“What do you need to know to be true about me to advocate for me when I’m not in the room?”

That is such a powerful sponsorship question.

It moves beyond, What should I work on? or even What do you think of me? It asks a senior leader to name what they would need to know, observe, or believe before putting their own credibility behind you.

Amelia then talked about taking that information back to her mentor and working on those things—if they rang true for her.

My take: This is exactly why no single developmental relationship can do everything.

A sponsor can advocate for you.  They can tell you what they would need to see in order to advocate for you.

A mentor can help you reflect on that feedback, decide what is relevant, build the capability, and think through how to demonstrate it authentically.

Different people play different roles in our growth.

That is the power of a learning ecosystem: not relying on one person to provide everything you need, but intentionally building a network of relationships that provide different kinds of perspective, challenge, support, and access.

3. “AI can transfer knowledge, but it can’t give you nuance.”

Later in our conversation, Amelia offered a series of observations about AI that stopped me in my tracks:

“I’m not afraid of AI. I’m afraid of us.”

“AI can tell you what it said, but not what it is saying.”

And:

“AI can transfer knowledge, but it can’t give you nuance.”

My take:

There is no shortcut to human connection.

AI can give us information. It can transfer knowledge. It can summarize, synthesize, and help us see patterns.

But nuance lives in relationship.

It lives in the trust that makes it possible to say the thing that is hard to say – or as Amelia puts it “to say the quiet things out loud.”

That kind of learning requires human connection.

There is no shortcut to it.

This is why I don’t believe AI makes developmental relationships less important.

It makes them more important.

AI scales information.

Relationships scale wisdom.

As access to knowledge becomes easier, our ability to interpret it, question it, contextualize it, and exercise sound judgment becomes even more valuable.

And we develop those capacities with—and through—other people.

The thread connecting all these observations is this:

Don’t just receive learning. Participate in it.

Take charge of your own learning.  Be willing to learn from the people you mentor. Ask what others need to know to advocate for you.   Be both mentor and mentee, sponsor and protégé. Build a network of relationships that helps you reflect, stretch, interpret, and act.

Growth isn’t simply about accumulating more information.

It is about becoming better at making meaning from it—and surrounding yourself with the people who help you do that.

That is what a true learning ecosystem makes possible.

You can watch my full conversation with Amelia Ransom on DEI AF here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V1vSmNKOf8

For more information and resources, visit:  www.centerformentoring.com or www.lisazfain.com

For 17 years, we lived in Chicago.

I built a career there. I started a family there. I raised babies there. I learned how to be an adult there, in the blunt, beautiful, exhausting way adulthood often teaches us: long hours, longer commutes, too much to carry, not quite enough money in the bank, and a calendar that looked full but somehow did not feel sustaining.

My marriage was strong. My work was satisfying. Our life was good in many ways.

And still, I was lonely.

Not lonely in the dramatic, abandoned-on-a-mountaintop sense. I had people around me. We had great neighbors. We had couple friends we liked and saw now and then. I had work colleagues, fellow parents, people I genuinely enjoyed.

But I did not have the kind of deep female friendship I ached for. I missed the easy camaraderie I had known with my college friends, the shorthand, the kinship, the sense of being known without having to explain the whole backstory every time. Those friends were scattered around the country, and I found myself longing for something I could not seem to build where I was.

I remember hearing the advice that if you want to have friends, you have to be a good friend. So, I tried.

I volunteered. I joined parent committees. I showed up in religious and civic spaces. I invited work colleagues to lunch. I looked for ways to offer generosity and kindness, hoping that if I kept extending myself, something would take root.

One moment from that time has stuck with me:

At a charity silent auction, I bid on – and won – a party for 20 at a denim bar. At the time, this was a new and lively concept: a place where you could go, get fitted for a great pair of jeans, have a little fun, maybe drink something bubbly, and leave feeling slightly more fabulous than when you walked in.

I thought it would be a perfect way to gather a group of women.

So, I invited women I knew and liked. I bought refreshments. I watched the responses come in through Evite. About 10 women said yes.

The night of the party, I set everything up and waited.

At the appointed hour, no one came.

Forty-five minutes passed.

Finally, one person walked in.

We laughed a little, tried on jeans, made our purchases and called it a night.

Then I went home and cried.

I did not cry because I felt embarrassed, though I did. I did not cry because people were cruel, because they were not. People are busy. They forget. They have sick kids and deadlines and traffic and lives with their own invisible weather systems.

I cried because the empty room told me something I already feared was true: I had not built the kind of relationships my soul needed.

For years, I thought about that night as a painful, slightly humiliating story about friendship.

But over time, I understood it differently.

The problem was not simply that I needed more friends. The problem was that I was looking for friendship as if it were one thing. One magical circle. One group that would offer belonging, fun, honesty, encouragement, accountability, perspective, challenge, and care.

What I really needed was not one perfect community.

I needed an ecosystem.

That realization became even clearer after I moved to Seattle, a city famous for the so-called Seattle Freeze. I braced myself for distance. Instead, in a relatively short period of time, I found myself surrounded by a richer, more nourishing web of relationships than I had experienced in all my years in Chicago.

Part of that was timing. Part of it was openness. Part of it was luck.

But part of it was that I had changed.

I was no longer waiting for friendship or support to appear fully formed. I had become more intentional about seeking different relationships for different purposes.

At the same time, I hired a coach. I joined a mastermind of women entrepreneurs. I built relationships that were not centered on our children or our spouses or our proximity, but on mutual curiosity, shared growth, and the willingness to tell each other the truth.

And slowly, I began to see the pattern.

Some relationships helped me feel known.

Some helped me think bigger.

Some challenged the stories I was telling myself.

Some opened doors.

Some reminded me to rest.

Some helped me sharpen my ideas.

Some held up a mirror.

Some held my hand.

None of these relationships had to be everything. Together, they became enough.

What This Taught Me About Mentoring

That insight changed how I think about mentoring, leadership, and growth too.

For years, we have treated mentoring as if it requires finding one wise person who will guide us. The mentor. The sage. The person with the answers. But that model is too narrow for the complexity of real life and real work.

No one person can be our challenger, sponsor, connector, truth-teller, strategist, encourager, role model, and safe harbor.

And when we expect one person to do all of that, we often end up disappointed. Or we do not ask at all, because the ask feels too big.

But when we begin to think in terms of a developmental network, everything changes.

The Power of a Developmental Network

A developmental network is the constellation of people who help us grow. It may include mentors, peers, sponsors, coaches, colleagues, friends, former bosses, clients, teachers, and people who see something in us before we fully see it ourselves.

It is not about collecting contacts or even about networking in the transactional sense.

It is about building the relationships that help us become more courageous, more discerning, more useful, and more fully ourselves.

That is the heart of my message now.

Growth does not happen in isolation. Better judgment does not develop in a vacuum. Impact does not come from rugged individualism, no matter how much our culture romanticizes it.

We grow through relationship.

We make better decisions when we have people who help us see what we cannot see alone.

We become braver when we have people who remind us of who we are becoming.

We create more impact when we stop waiting to be chosen, rescued, or discovered, and instead begin to design the network that helps us contribute at a higher level.

Looking back, I have compassion for the woman standing in that denim bar with her refreshments and her hopeful little Evite list.

She was not needy or foolish or failing.

She was seeking.

Hungry for the relationships that would help her feel more rooted, more supported, more alive.

I still believe in generosity. I still believe in being a good friend. But I no longer believe that support is something we should leave to chance.

We must be more intentional than that.

We can ask: Who helps me think? Who helps me tell the truth? Who helps me grow? Who helps me remember what matters? Who opens doors? Who challenges me with care? Who do I support in return?

This is not about being a joiner.

It is about being a seeker.

A learner.

A connector.

Most of all, it’s about being a designer of the relationships that make a bigger life, and a bigger contribution, possible.

 

For more information and resources, visit:  www.centerformentoring.com or www.lisazfain.com