With Purpose Success, part 68

Then I met Maggie. We attended many of the same conferences, worked together, and often spoke from the same dais. She was a phenom known as "America's wrinkled radical." She was in her seventies, but she was beautiful, brilliant, and outrageous. She was in the media all the time at protests and sit-ins. She was on Saturday Night Live. She was a force, and she believed that what the aging field needed was a Paul Revere to ride in and sound the warning about how an aging population would change society. This rider would have to be young, she believed, so that young people might pay attention. 

Maggie thought I just might be that person. She encouraged me to aspire to the role of social revolutionary. I'm not sure I'll ever live up to her hopes for me, but the thought of being influential, a change agent in my area of expertise, has been my personal North Star for decades. It's what got me thinking about the enormous social, political, and economic impact of aging-related issues and making the field my life's purpose. It's probably the reason I'm writing this-my sixteenth-book. It's partly because of Maggie. She made me think big. She told me I could. She believed in me. 

The Coach Next Door

Mentors come in all shapes and sizes. Some like my parents are there for a lifetime; others-like Eugene Kleiner, for me-for just a day. Some are aligned with charitable groups like Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America (www.bgca.org); others are simply a friend, relative, neighbor, teacher, or employer with time, insights, wisdom, and guidance to share. Informal mentoring is by far the most common dynamic. But formal youth-oriented programs are rapidly expanding at schools and through national organizations like America's 

Promise-The Alliance for Youth (www.americaspromise.org), Save the 

Children (www.savethechildren.org), and Mentoring USA (www.mentoring.org). Meanwhile, executive-to-protege coaching programs are proliferating in the world's largest corporations, bringing even more visibility and momentum to the concept. 

Rey Carr is a Canadian who latched onto the mentoring movement early, and since 1975 has built his life around coaching others and helping others find coaches in every aspect of life. His firm Peer Resources (www.peer.ca) is the ultimate guide to understanding the movement and getting involved-whether you're seeking to be a mentor or looking to find one among your peers or superiors at work, school, or in the community. Carr's mission is to provide training, educational resources, and consultation to any person or organization that wants to establish or strengthen peer support, peer mediation, peer referral, peer education, peer coaching, and mentor programs in schools, universities, communities, and corporations. 

A scholar with numerous degrees, including a doctorate in philosophy, Carr loves horses, chocolate, cycling, and Mexican food. He believes strongly in the value of humor and laughter-and the value of coaching at all levels. "When you look at the most successful companies, they are the most likely to have a mentor program, and when you look at the least successful companies, they are least likely to have one," says Carr. 

Likewise, he says that student mentors provide invaluable service to other students by helping with a variety of things that they've learned through their own experiences. One big one is transition.