If you want to succeed in this world, you need to find a mentor. A mentor will help you identify your goals, stay focused, and fulfill your potential. He/she will also act as a sounding board when you're going through the decision making process.

I have a mentor who's helping me grow into my new role as a marketer. He's a very respected name in the inbound marketing world, and he usually charges a lot of money for his time - so I don't want to waste it.  Whenever I have a question for him, I want to make sure that I get as much value from him as possible without taking up too much of his time.

I recently had an exchange with my mentor where he only had about 10 minutes to give me advice regarding a decision I had made. Those 10 minutes were incredibly valuable, and I didn't want to waste a single one. But I didn't just want to ask him what he thought about my decision, I wanted his input about my whole decision making process - something that might take more than 10 minutes for me to explain and him to answer.

So instead of writing out a lengthy email or talking through it all over the phone (things that would take too much time), I documented my thought process using Clarify.

I simply took pictures of the entire process I went through when I made my decision, allowing him to see everything that I did - the data I used, where I got the data, and how I used the data to make my decision. He was able to quickly glance through my workflow and provided great feedback about my decision making process - not just the final decision.

Using Clarify is the next best thing to him standing over my shoulder watching me go through the process - there's just something about using pictures that  makes explaining things so much simpler.

A good mentor won't tell you what to do - his/her job is to draw the answers out of you. It's more of a "teach me to fish" rather than a "give me a fish" relationship. And if your mentor is going to draw those answers from you, it often takes you explaining what you want to do,  how you plan to do it, and why you plan to do it that way.

So next time you're explaining your decision making process, help them help you, by using Clarify to communicate exactly what you've decided to do and why you decided to do it.