I used to get a good number of mentorship requests at Amazon. Sometimes they were fairly high-level requests: “Could you be my mentor, and we could meet regularly?”
If I don’t know you, that type of generic request sounds like a lot of work for me.
First, you’re not constraining the topic (which in my experience means you’ll sit down and say, “Ok, how do we do this.” - exhausting for me).
Second, it’s a huge ask! We barely know each other, and I’m going to commit to an unending series of meetings with you?
So I would frequently tell people with these types of requests that I’m fully booked, and I need to decline. It was significantly easier for me to decline this, because it’s a huge ask from them.
Requests that actually worked were specific and small. Something like: “I have two questions, one about hiring and one about a career issue I have. Could I get 30 minutes on your calendar? I’ll send an invite for an open slot if that’s ok.”
I rarely turned these down. Why? Because it’s a small ask. Heck, it’d be petty to say no. Plus, it’s easy. They have two set topics, 30 minutes. I can certainly sit with someone and talk about 2 topics. Oh, and they said they’d schedule it, so it’s not something else on my plate.
If you want to work with someone, getting to “yes” is super easy. You reduce friction, and don’t swing for the fences in the first discussion.
Once you have that easy 30-minutes that is almost impossible to turn down, a follow up appointment is easy. “Hey, could I schedule one more of these in a few weeks? Just 30 minutes, and I’ll bring my questions?”
Again, so easy. And more than once I found myself in a regular mentorship meeting because they made it so easy (which made it much harder for me to not mentor them.)
This “make it easy to say yes, and hard to say no” is a very general rule you should use regularly. Want something from a busy person? (which is just about everyone important). Your job is to find a way to make saying yes easy.
To learn more about how to break down big career needs into requests people can actually act on, read on.