Mentorship in Life

Dean and Marcie Whalen believe in living full-time and mentoring others in their spare time. They firmly believe that life is for the living—that it’s meant to be lived, not worked—and that’s been the impetus for so many of their major decisions. The Whalens have come to recognize that most people have been socialized to have a bucket-carrying mentality. Each morning, bucket-carriers aim to fill up their buckets only to deplete them each night. Some carry multiple buckets and believe wholeheartedly that that’s the way to get ahead. At the end of the day, though, their buckets are all still dry and empty, and they have to get right back up and haul those buckets again in the hopes of filling them.

The Whalens found a way out of that bucket-carrying trap, thankfully. They were introduced to a series of successful individuals who had broken free of that exhausting cycle. They’d found a way to build a pipeline, a pipeline that allowed them to live their lives and to step into a situation where they no longer needed to work for an income—no more daily bucket carrying.

Thanks to that development in their own lives, Dean and Marcie have been able to dedicate themselves to mentoring individuals, couples, and families in life. When they coach these individuals, couples, and families, they always try to impart the idea that they, too, can learn how to build a pipeline and create a life they desire. Dean and Marcie understand that if people are not mentored in the bigger life decisions that they are making, it’s very likely they will accidentally make a decision that will undermine the longer term goal that they have set towards a better future than their current reality.

Dean and Marcie also espouse the idea that perception determines perspective, and having a different set of eyes and ears on major life decisions can have a hugely positive impact. They invest a lot of time into helping people understand who to seek counsel and feedback from. They’ve found that most people seek counsel from well-meaning people who have little to no fruit on the tree, figuratively.

Yet another truth they’ve stumbled upon while mentoring is that one of the greatest obstacles to discovery is the illusion of knowledge. Often the roadblock isn’t what we don’t know, but rather what we think we know that isn’t so. For this reason, Dean and Marcie have a number of people in their life that coach and mentor them, as they believe it’s very difficult to mentor someone if you yourself are not being poured into by someone who has acquired more wisdom than you and is ahead of you on the path.