Ep. 266: The Mentor

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the indoubt podcast, where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week, we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Isaac Dagneau:

Hey, welcome to indoubt. My name is Isaac, one of the hosts of indoubt. I’m also pastor at North Valley Baptist Church in Mission, British Columbia, Canada. On the show with us today is executive mentor, author, and speaker, and as I was just talking to him, father, grandfather, Dr. Carson Pue. Thanks so much for being here with us, Carson.

Carson Pue:

That was great, Isaac. I’m really happy to be with you.

Isaac Dagneau:

Now, you did tell me that you wanted me to call you Reverend Dr. Carson Pue, that’s what you said. That’s correct, right? Not quite?

Carson Pue:

Actually, yeah, or His Holiness, that would work, too.

Isaac Dagneau:

Okay, good. I like that. That’s awesome. Carson, for those that maybe don’t know who you are, could you just give us a snapshot of your life? Help us understand who you are, where you’ve come from, how Jesus plays a role in that, where you’re at now, just that whole package.

Carson Pue:

Well, I come from a family that originally immigrated from Ireland to Canada and my Irish roots go pretty deep because of that and throughout even my children. I grew up, our family immigrated to Brandon, Manitoba. For some of your listeners, you might have to go to a map or Google it to find out where that is, but it’s in Southern Manitoba a hundred kilometers from the US border and it’s small. When I was growing up there, the population was about 32,000 people, and so I grew up there.

Carson Pue:

After high school, really felt called to go into business, and so I actually did follow that pathway, became a businessman. Actually, was pretty good at it. But while I was there, I was married now, and I was a follower of Jesus, and so not only do I want to have a career that I’m doing, but I also want to follow doing what Jesus wants me to do. My wife and I got very involved in youth work and started a significant youth ministry in a town of 32,000 people there. I found that I would look forward to the weekend because that was going to be youth group time. My father once took me out for coffee and he said, “Carson, you’re a successful businessman, but you get more excited out of leading the youth group on Friday night than you do your whole week at work,” and he challenged me and he just said, “I wonder if you’re in the wrong profession?” That was quite unnerving for me. I think the Holy Spirit used that to go, “Yeah, he’s speaking truth to you. Listen. Listen to him.”

Carson Pue:

I ended up, my brother and I were partners together in the business. We sold the business and I decided to retool myself for a Christian ministry. I had a few variants that happened there where I tried to go back into business again, but God kept drawing me back into serving Him. One of the problems I had, Isaac, was that when I felt that God was calling me into Christian service, the only model I had was that of a local pastor. Forgive me, all those who know me, but I hadn’t met a local pastor that I wanted to model my life after, and so I began a search for what it was, and I ended up actually training to become a pastor. I pastored in churches in Calgary and here in Vancouver and kind of loved that in one sense, but I realized that I had other gifts that weren’t being expressed in that arena.

Carson Pue:

When I was pastoring at First Baptist Church Vancouver, we had this one summer where Dr. Leighton Ford came. He was on sabbatical and he was in Vancouver for six weeks and now Leighton Ford, to your listeners, is the brother-in-law to Billy Graham. Leighton Ford was the vice president of the Billy Graham Association. He was doing Crusades across Canada and Britain and Australia, the Commonwealth stream. Leighton is at our church and after he had been there for a little while, he wrote me a letter that was just like that God had given him X-ray eyes to look into Carson and he affirmed my giftedness in some areas, but he pointed out some things and he says, “Unless you get some help with these, you’re going to reach a ceiling in terms of how God can use you,” and he offered to mentor me.

Carson Pue:

Honestly, I don’t think I’d really heard the term used then. This is going back a long time and it was… I entered into a mentoring relationship with Leighton Ford and it continues to this day. He and I are good friends. We talk every week or every other week. He’s soon to be 90 years of age and he has invested himself in the development of younger leaders. I joke with him now because everybody’s a younger leader, he can talk to anybody, so he inspired me in this area of the love of mentoring and I have focused the last 25 years of my life to mentoring others. That’s what I do, so my whole day is spent now, my whole week is spent doing executive mentoring with Christian leaders in the business world, in Christian ministry. I do some church pastors and I’m helping them to grow, to become more Christ-like as a leader, and I love it. It’s energizing for me.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s so good. Thank you for sharing that. That’s so great. Quadrant Leadership is the business, so tell us a little bit about that, how that works.

Carson Pue:

Yeah, Quadrant is the business platform that I created that I can do this kind of work from and I do my speaking, my writing, and my executive coaching and mentoring from Quadrant. It was a business. Part of my personal story is that my wife, Brenda, of just shy of 40 years, was diagnosed with cancer and died just over five-and-a-half years ago, and when Brenda was diagnosed, I was pastoring again, this is my second term of going back to first Baptist Vancouver, and they had originally just given her 150 days to live. She lived 588 days, so that was amazing. When the doctor told her that she only had a maximum of 150 days to live, that no one with her type of cancer had lived longer than 150 days, Brenda looked at her and said, “You don’t number my days.”

Isaac Dagneau:

Praise God.

Carson Pue:

I stepped down from my role, sadly, because I loved my role at the church, but I told the church that I had made a commitment prior to my commitment to come there and that was to love my wife in sickness and in health and I needed to do that now, so I stayed with Brenda and we lived those 588 days. Well, 150 days comes, and then my son, John, threw this barbecue, we had a celebration party because Mom had passed the absolute most she was, and she was doing quite well then, and then it went on. Then when we got to a year, Brenda said to me, “We’re going to need some revenue coming in.” I hadn’t been working for a year, and so together, she and I formed Quadrant Leadership to create a platform. That’s the story.

Carson Pue:

It’s Quadrant because I’m a sailor and quadrant is an old navigational tool used by ancient mariners where they would point one part of it at the North Star, or the Southern Cross, if they’re in the Southern Hemisphere, and then they would take a measurement, and then they would sail for another half hour or an hour. Then they would take another measurement and you do this in a series of things and it would finally indicate your latitude that you were at and so I used that as an image in working with leaders to say, “We’re going to keep focused on Jesus and we’re going to take measurements of you of how you’re coming along so that you finally know your identity and your location of where you are.” Thanks for asking.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s so good. Yeah, no, I think that’s great. You mentioned mentorship, right? Leighton Ford, you mentioned mentorship, so we’re going to dig into that with the short time that we have, which means we can’t dig too deep because we only have so much time, but the word “mentorship,” lots of our listeners might know it, they’ve heard of it, but just help us understand mentorship at a basic level.

Carson Pue:

Yep. Well, you know what? It’s actually confusing for people and for young adults, I think they’ve heard mentorship at school and everything, and it gets exemplified in different ways, but when I think of mentorship as a Christian, I think about it as holistic discipleship. I think of it as somebody coming alongside and walking with you in life to help you with all of your life, with every aspect of your life, and to do that through being there in the good, the bad, et cetera.

Carson Pue:

I come from this Irish family and there’s an Irish phrase or a Gaelic word called “anamchara.” “Anamchara” means “soul friend.” This word was brought to North America about, I think, 15 years ago. A book was written about it and everything. But when I read the book, I was kind of going, “Yeah, you didn’t quite get it right, because in Ireland, anamchara, it is a soul friend, I think we all resonate with that, but in Ireland, picture a soul friend who’s got his arm around you and when you blow it, that soul friend is going to kick you in the rear end so hard it’ll hurt, so it’s somebody who loves you and cares for you, but is also not shy from calling you back in if you go astray.

Isaac Dagneau:

Right. Right, right. No, that’s great. That’s so good. I’m wondering, what are some key themes that you focus on when we think about mentoring? I know you’ve already talked about the fact that eyes on Jesus, but what are some of the things that like build into mentorship like that?

Carson Pue:

Yeah, sure. I have a book. I’m not shamelessly promoting it right now.

Isaac Dagneau:

I’ll do that.

Carson Pue:

I wrote a book called Mentoring Leaders and in it, I have a structure, it’s actually kind of a quadrant, but it’s a structure for how I see the mentoring process flowing. It begins with you’re helping the person come to a real clear identity of who they are, and particularly, who they are as a child of God, so receiving your identity as being a child of God and your gifts and skills and et cetera.

Carson Pue:

The second phase is to help them with asking, “Is there anything you need to be released from, that you need freedom from?” Because we have things in our past and everything that a good mentor can just help you get over that and leave it behind and allow Christ to heal that and to move on.

Carson Pue:

The third phase is that of visioneering. This is when you start to dream about what might God be calling you to because he does have a call on your life, and so helping them to do that. Before I leave that, Isaac, I want to say that one of the mistakes that is made by people who are trying to mentor, especially young adults, is they want to jump to the visioneering part without doing the hard work on identity and releasing. If you do that, you can actually, it’s almost harmful to a young adult because you start to build these dreams and visions with them, but they don’t have the character to get them there, so I was started on the inside.

Carson Pue:

The next phase is that of executing. You have a vision, how do you actually actualize it, and what are some steps that you need to take to do that?

Carson Pue:

Then the final phase, if you’re with somebody this long, is the phase of sustaining. Now, you’re doing what God called you to do with laser-like focus. How do you sustain yourself in continuing to do that? I use that as my guide to walk us through. Then there’s a whole bunch of aspects that come up in the context of that.

Isaac Dagneau:

Sure. Oh, I’m sure. Carson, doing mentorship in North America or teaching mentorship, we are in a cold-climate culture. We’re a very independent people. We like our space and compared to a southern climate, a hot climate that is very much hospitable, communally-oriented, have you found that mentorship is sometimes hard for people in North America because people like to be private? Or I don’t know, maybe it’s an escape for them to actually enjoy some more communal. I don’t know. Can you speak into that?

Carson Pue:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you’re bringing up a good point. I wouldn’t have thought of the climate part, but I think there’s a couple of things impacting mentoring today. One is a cultural shift where everybody thinks that, “I’m an individual. I can think whatever I want. I can do whatever I want, and therefore, why do I need help with anything?” However, I don’t think that’s a whole lot of people think like that, but the really sharp young leaders that I’m encountering that are Gen Z leaders, like the ones I lived with out on Keats Island at Barnabas, we called them “Barnabas stewards,” they were stewarding their life. These are sharp people that I’ve got a great hope for for the future. They wanted mentorship. That’s why they came there. They wanted another adult who’s just further down the road to help guide them on their path, and so I think that there’s still a hunger among young adults for it, but there’s the confusion of how mentorship is defined and everything, I think it’s just confusing for them.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, yeah. Talk to us a little bit about this eight-month time with these Gen Zedders and what you learned from them and what you learned about mentoring.

Carson Pue:

Oh, I learned more from them than I think that they gained from me. I love that generation, actually. I don’t think I would have said that earlier, but some of the things that I learned, one of them that’s kind of sad, the level of biblical illiteracy shocked me. This shows my age. I’m 65 and I’m going back and I’m going, “Boy, when I was their age, I actually knew my Bible quite well,” and these are people coming from Christian homes, so I struggled with that. We ended up actually having to change the curriculum flow of the mentoring time to include much more Bible study, New Testament survey, survey of the gospels, that kind of stuff, too, because that’s truth that will never leave people, and also equipping them to know how to use the Bible to get help.

Carson Pue:

My colleague, Gretchen England, spent a lot of time with these stewards helping them figure out, how do you use the Bible? Because we can pick it up. Even listeners can go, you can pick up a Bible, but how do I use it to help me in my day-to-day life? So, we did a lot of that. We also, I learned a lot about how we need to help them to have a time of personal devotion of just pausing and learning to listen to God and learning to watch for Him in every aspect of their lives. This is like a whole other program.

Isaac Dagneau:

Okay. Well, that’s good. That’s good. Speaking of that, more of that biblical side, when you think about mentorship, how does the gospel play a role in mentorship? How does it make it, not just a secular thing, but make it really biblical? Because you say it’s like holistic discipleship, so how does mentorship and gospel work together?

Carson Pue:

Well, we use the gospels to look at Jesus and how He interacted with His disciples. What was Jesus doing? He was mentoring them all the time, and so we would look at what we did and one of the stewards, Sam Moffett, he’s from Alberta, he and I are working on a project where we’ve gone through the Scriptures and we’ve looked at every single time that Jesus brought His disciples together or was speaking to them one-on-one and we’re trying to identify what was it the Jesus was doing in each of those things. I think there’s another book coming out on that.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, I think so.

Carson Pue:

But I think it’s really positive. The other thing I would say about the gospels is that it’s really important in our mentoring of Christians, or mentoring as a Christian, for me to help young adults understand the grace of God and that the work that Jesus did on the cross forgave us of our sins. He’s done that already and we need to stop trying to work, it’s kind of trying to work out getting rid of our ongoing sinfulness by, “If I get up at 4:00 in the morning and do my devotions, then certainly, I’ll be closer to God through that,” and so I wanted the stewards to know and anybody that I mentored that there’s nothing that you have done or ever will do that would cause God to love you any less than He does right now, so you don’t have to keep trying for God’s love. That’s a really critical thing, because if we can get that, it changes how you live.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, that’s so good. I’m just thinking, too, that perhaps a non-Christian leader in the business world maybe has a mentor, and I mean, I’m sure there’s lots of good things that they can tell them, but one thing is just, “Keep going. Strive harder, strive harder,” whereas the difference, the upside-down approach here is that we can rest in Jesus’ work and strive from the rest already, which would be so freeing. So freeing.

Carson Pue:

Yes. Yes, for sure. You’ve said that really well.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s good. At this point, then, as we finish, what would be a few things you could say about our next step to actually finding a mentor and being mentored and growing in that way?

Carson Pue:

Yeah. Oh, sure. I can give you some, I think, very helpful tips on that. First of all, there’s a lot of baby boomers. I’m a baby boomer. A lot of baby boomers are getting approached by young adults and often the leading question is, “I’m wondering if you would mentor me,” so I want to say wrong question. Don’t start there because baby boomers, like 90% of them have not been mentored, so they actually don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not been brought up at school with them or anything.

Carson Pue:

I would encourage you that if you’d like to have a mentor, to first of all, be very prayerful about why you want a mentor. Get it clear in your head of where you could use some help. Then look around in your immediate community, your sphere of influence, for a person that is if you’re a young adult, I would recommend somebody that’s 15 years or older than you are. That comes out of just experience. I think that they’re far enough down the road that they’re not going to be trying to pretend they’re you and they just have a bit more experience, but they’re not so far down the road that they can’t relate to you.

Carson Pue:

You go to them and you say, “Hey, would you ever consider just having a coffee with me?” and almost all of them will say, “Yeah, I’d love to do that,” and then it’s while you’re having coffee, they’re probably going to be the ones to say, “What motivated you to ask for coffee?” and then you get to say, “Well, you know what? I’m really wondering about my future and wondering about what I should do with my career,” et cetera, and then at the end of that coffee, you go, “Would you consider having another coffee with me?” and what you’ve done is you’ve actually started mentoring, but you haven’t scared them yet. Then later on, you can tell them. That’s my key go-to in terms of how do you actually get a mentor, but on the other side, I tell baby boomers, “If a young adult comes to you and says, I’d like you to be my mentor, ask them why,” and most young adults can’t tell you. I feel like if you can’t tell a person why, then you’re not quite ready yet.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah. That’s so good. Maybe as the last question, because I think you hit something there, that question of why, how can you coach young people to answer that question for themselves?

Carson Pue:

These are so good. I wish we had like three hours.

Isaac Dagneau:

I know.

Carson Pue:

This takes reflection. What do we have very little of in the lives of young adults these days is reflective time, so I would say, if I challenge you to say, “Isaac, I want you to tell me why you want a mentor,” I hope that it sends you away to sit on a mountain ledge or to sit by the ocean or to get away and to actually come before God and to open yourself up to where you would like to grow in your life. Also don’t, over-complicate it and don’t overthink it because you can deal with one thing at a time, so I would like to grow in this area. Then we go through asking somebody out for coffee.

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, yeah. That’s so good and then the organic mentorship happens and they don’t even know they’re mentoring. There you go.

Carson Pue:

Exactly.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s the way to do it. I love it.

Carson Pue:

Then you drop it on them. Then you drop it on them and say, “Haha, you’re my mentor.”

Isaac Dagneau:

Yeah, for the last year. Oh, that’s great.

Carson Pue:

Yeah.

Isaac Dagneau:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Carson. Where can listeners, if they want to hear more about Quadrant or some, you mentioned your Mentoring Leaders book. Where can they learn more about you?

Carson Pue:

If you just google my name, there’s a bunch of different things and there’s some places where I’ve been talking about mentoring more on YouTube and my books will come up on there, so yeah, I would just invite you. Quadrant Leadership, you can google that, too. Yeah, I’d love to hear from anybody if you’ve got more questions.

Isaac Dagneau:

Oh, that’s great, Carson. Yeah, and for our listeners, I’ll put all the links to various places where you can find his books and website and everything on our episode podcast page. Anyways, that’s great. Carson, thank you again. We’d love to have you back on the show again soon.

Carson Pue:

Love to do it, Isaac. Okay, great talking with you.

Isaac Dagneau:

That was speaker, author, and executive mentor at Quadrant Leadership, Dr. Carson Pue. Now, although there are certainly differences, I couldn’t help but see the basic connection that Christian mentoring is discipling in a sense. When you are engaged in Christian mentoring, you are engaged in discipling and this helps focus the purpose of Christian mentoring. It’s not merely about growing to be a better person or leading better. Rather, it’s about learning how to best glorify God through your unique life. It will obviously include practices and behaviors that help one live better and lead well, but the point of it all is focused and centered on Jesus and seeing Him praised through one’s life and work. Well, we hope you join us next week for another episode where we talk about life and faith with a biblical perspective. We’ll see you then.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more, subscribe on iTunes or Spotify, or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Isaac Dagneau:

Hey, this is Isaac, one of the hosts of indoubt, a ministry of Good News Global Media. Is it possible that being a Christian young person could be any more complicated than it is today? How do we make right choices and decisions when so many opinions around us seem contrary to what it means to live for Christ? At indoubt, we hope to help make sense, biblical sense of those difficult choices, decisions, and the complexity of faith, life, and culture in 2021. Join us every week for another challenging conversation and our response as God’s people. For everything indoubt, visit indoubt.com. If you’d like to help us continue to offer this program, you can make a gift of any amount at indoubt.com or by calling 1-844-663-2424.