How Do I Take Action on My Mentor's Advice?

Here's a hard truth I had to learn the slow way: advice doesn't grow you. Acting on advice grows you. You can have the sharpest mentor in the world, take the best notes anybody's ever taken, nod along until your neck hurts — and change absolutely nothing about your life. The gap between "that's good advice" and "I actually did it" is where most people quietly stall out. So let's talk about how to cross that gap on purpose, one small, doable step at a time.

Let me start with a confession, because I've been the guy who collected advice like some people collect refrigerator magnets. Early in my career I'd walk out of a good conversation feeling ten feet tall, sure I was about to turn everything around. Then Monday would show up, the phone would ring, the day would eat me alive, and that brilliant advice would sit in my notebook doing nothing. I wasn't lazy. I started working at 17, owned a home and was a dad by 23 — I knew how to grind. What I didn't know yet was that hard work and taking action aren't the same thing. You can be busy all day and never touch the one thing your mentor told you to change.

So if you've ever left a mentoring session fired up and then done nothing with it, welcome to the club. It doesn't mean you're weak or ungrateful. It means you're human. The good news is that turning advice into action is a skill, and like any skill, you can get better at it. Here's what actually works.

Why Good Advice So Often Goes Nowhere

Before we fix it, it helps to understand why advice gets stuck in the first place. It's usually not because the advice was bad. It's because of what happens in your head right after you hear it.

The biggest culprit is size. A mentor says something like "you need to be more visible to leadership," and your brain hears "rebuild your entire personality by Friday." That feels huge and scary, so you freeze. Big advice, taken as one giant leap, is almost impossible to act on. It's not a step — it's a cliff, and nobody jumps off a cliff on a Tuesday.

The second culprit is fuzziness. "Be more confident" is true and completely useless as an instruction. You can't do "be more confident." You can only do specific things — raise your hand first in the next meeting, send the email you've been avoiding, ask the one question you're scared to ask. If the advice is still a vague idea in your head, it will never become an action in your week.

The third culprit is the quietest one: no deadline. "I'll get to that" sounds harmless, but "someday" is just a polite way of saying "never." Advice without a date attached floats off into the fog. The fix for all three of these is the same, and it's smaller and simpler than you'd think.

Start With One Small Step, Not the Whole Plan

Here's the move that changed everything for me: stop trying to do the advice. Start trying to do the first small piece of the advice.

When your mentor gives you something, don't ask yourself "how do I pull this whole thing off?" Ask "what's the smallest step I could take in the next 48 hours?" Shrink it until it's almost embarrassingly easy. If the advice is "build relationships across other departments," the small step isn't a networking campaign. It's grabbing coffee with one person by Thursday. That's it. One coffee. Your brain won't fight a coffee.

I learned this on the factory floor, of all places. In reliability work — I'm a CPMM, and I've spent decades keeping equipment running at places like Coca-Cola, Estée Lauder, AmerisourceBergen, and now Oerlikon — you almost never fix a big problem in one heroic swing. You find the one bearing, the one loose bolt, the one small root cause, and you handle that. Then the next one. Growth works exactly the same way. You don't overhaul yourself. You tighten one bolt at a time, and one day you look up and the whole machine runs differently.

And here's the part nobody tells you: the first small step does more than move the ball. It changes how you feel. Action is the cure for the nervousness that was freezing you. You don't think your way into confidence — you act your way into it. One completed step, however tiny, tells your brain "we do the things we say we'll do now." That's a powerful little message to send yourself, and it compounds fast.

Close the Loop: Report Back to Your Mentor

Now here's a step most people skip, and it's the one that separates the folks who grow from the folks who just have nice chats: go back and tell your mentor what you did.

When you report back — "you told me to have that hard conversation, so I did, and here's what happened" — three good things happen at once. First, you create accountability, and accountability is rocket fuel. Knowing you'll have to report keeps you honest between meetings. Second, you give your mentor something real to work with. Advice they gave in the dark becomes advice they can now sharpen, because they can see how it actually landed in your life. Third — and don't underestimate this — you show respect. Nothing makes a mentor want to keep pouring into you like seeing their words turn into your action.

I'll be honest about the flip side, too. Reporting back also forces you to actually do the thing, because there are few feelings worse than sitting across from someone who invested in you and having to admit you did nothing with it. That little bit of healthy pressure? Use it. It's not shame — it's a promise you made out loud, and out-loud promises get kept.

A mentor is not a vending machine where you drop in a question and walk off with an answer. It's a loop. You take the advice, you act, you come back with what you learned, and the whole thing spins forward. Break the loop and the relationship stalls. Keep the loop turning and you'll be amazed how fast you move.

What to Do When You're Not Sure the Advice Is Right

Let's deal with the honest objection: what if you're not sure the advice is even right for you? Do you have to blindly do everything a mentor says?

No. A good mentor doesn't want a robot. But there's a right way and a wrong way to handle doubt. The wrong way is to quietly decide they're wrong and do nothing — that's just using "I wasn't sure" as a nicer word for "I chickened out." The right way is to take the doubt back to them out loud. Say, "Here's my hesitation about this — help me see what I'm missing." Half the time they'll show you an angle you couldn't see, and your doubt melts. The other half, they'll say "good instinct, let's adjust." Either way, you're moving, and you're moving together.

As a DISC consultant, I spend a lot of time reminding people that we're all wired differently. A piece of advice that fits your mentor's natural style might need a little tailoring to fit yours. That's not a reason to toss it — it's a reason to adapt it. Keep the principle, adjust the delivery. If your mentor says "be more assertive in meetings" and that feels like putting on someone else's coat, the answer isn't to skip it. It's to find your version of assertive, the one that still sounds like you. The action still happens. It just happens in your voice.

The one thing you don't get to do is nothing. Doubt is fine. Questions are great. Adapting is smart. But sitting on good advice because acting on it feels uncomfortable — that's the trap. Discomfort isn't a stop sign. Most of the time, it's the exact feeling of growth starting.

Why Taking Action Is the Whole Point

This all connects to the very first of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth: the Law of Intentionality. It says growth doesn't just happen. You don't drift into a better life by accident. You have to choose it, on purpose, over and over — and nowhere is that more true than with the advice you receive.

Think about it. Every piece of mentor advice sitting in a notebook is potential growth that never got chosen. It's not that the growth wasn't available — it was right there. It just needed a decision and a step to become real. That's the whole game. Intentional people take the advice and do something with it this week. Everybody else keeps meaning to. The difference between those two groups, ten years down the road, is enormous, and it's built entirely out of small actions taken on purpose.

I didn't always live this way. For years I was reactive — I let the loudest problem of the day decide what I worked on. The turn came when I got intentional about my own growth: reading on purpose, getting coached on purpose, acting on what I heard on purpose. That shift is exactly why I eventually wrote Leadership Between the Lines and built the LBL-10 workshop, and why at 63 I'm still learning like there's a test tomorrow. None of that came from collecting good advice. All of it came from acting on it, one intentional step at a time.

Reflection Questions

Before your next mentoring conversation — or before you close the notebook on your last one — sit with these:

1. What's one piece of advice I've been sitting on that I never turned into action?
2. What's the smallest possible first step I could take on it in the next 48 hours?
3. What date and time will I actually do it — not "soon," but when?
4. When and how will I report back to my mentor about what happened?
5. If I've been doubting some advice, have I taken that doubt back to them, or just quietly avoided it?

The Bottom Line

So how do you take action on your mentor's advice? You make it small, you make it specific, you give it a date, and you do it before you feel ready. Then you close the loop and go tell your mentor what happened, because that's what keeps the whole relationship moving and keeps you honest in between. Advice isn't the finish line. It's the starting gun.

I wasted more good advice than I'd like to admit by treating it like a trophy instead of a tool. The mentors who changed my life didn't just hand me wisdom — they expected me to go do something with it and come back. Once I started actually doing that, my growth stopped being an accident and started being a decision. That's the shift. You already have advice worth acting on. The only question left is whether you'll take one small step this week or add it to the pile of things you meant to do.

Take the step. It's smaller than you think, and it's the whole point.

This ties back to The Law of Intentionality — one of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth.