The Mentorship Edge: Building Meaningful Connections In A Disconnected World

Today, I'm talking with Dr. Deborah Heiser, a renowned psychologist, speaker, and author of The Mentorship Edge, to explore the critical yet misunderstood role of mentorship in today’s society. 

Together, we unpack how mentorship extends beyond professional titles and corporate settings, delving into its deeper presence in everyday life — from family car rides to lifelong friendships and lateral relationships.

Dr. Heiser reveals the five essential ingredients of true mentorship, distinguishing it from coaching, advising, or job-driven guidance. We break down common myths around mentorship, especially in structured environments like the military, where mentorship is often assigned rather than inspired. Through real-life anecdotes and powerful insights, the conversation emphasizes that mentorship thrives on intrinsic motivation, mutual respect, trust, and meaningful connection.

The discussion also navigates the influence of technology, social media, and virtual platforms in shaping modern mentorship. From influencers to YouTubers, today's youth are forming deep parasocial connections that may mimic mentorship but lack essential ingredients. So, we get into how podcasting, storytelling, and shared values contribute to generational impact, allowing us to mentor people we may never meet — even beyond the grave. 

https://deborahheiser.com/

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Transcript

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Couple of Nukes. As always, I'm your host, Mr. Whiskey, and if you're new. Or even if you've been listening for a while, you may not know, but one of my main goals is, you know, it's all revolving around mentorship. I actually have a couple goals. One of them is to create a third party or military ran, uh, mentorship program for the military.

I felt like it was really lacking when I went through and I saw some attempts at it, uh, but just not done well, and it can really make or break someone's experience in the military. Same for civilian side. One of my goals is to continue speaking at high schools about mental health addiction prevention, you know, suicide prevention and all of that.

And. That falls under mentorship as well. You know, making sure that we have, not just our youth, having their parents as their mentors, but having other individuals who think a little differently and who have resources that their parents don't, who can help present, you know, education and resources to them throughout their life.

So today we're gonna be focusing on mentorship, how it has shifted over the years, over the generations, what we're seeing for the future. And all the roles that technology plays. With that, we are here with a mentorship expert featured on several main, uh, media and social media news outlets, magazines, a whole bunch of podcasts, an expert, an author, a speaker, Dr.

Deborah Heiser. So great to have you here today. Thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here.  Yeah. So let's, let's start with, of course, you know, growing up your experience with mentorship. If at any, you know, point you had mentors or not, and what role that played in you eventually becoming the mentorship expert, I. 

So I have always had mentors. Most of us, uh, well really everyone has had a mentor. Most of us just don't know we've had a mentor, um, because really it, it, the term mentorship got sort of hijacked by corporate America and it's associated just with a job. Yeah. But really mentorship is everywhere. And my first one that I can really remember so clearly is my grandfather.

And he, I was five and he would drive me around and he had a gigantic Cadillac and it was in the 1970s. So they were big cars back then. Right. Nice. And um.  So we would drive around Des Moines, Iowa, which is where I lived at the time, and he would say, you see that lady over there? See that woman, her name's Marian.

She's had a hard life and she raised her two kids and, but you know, she's really put a lot of effort in and she's a good lady and whatever. And then he'd say, see that guy over there on the bench? His wife just gave him a hard time today. Uh, he didn't take in the dry cleaning and, you know, all this stuff and he'd make up these stories and I didn't know they were made up at the time, but I'm sure they all were.

Um, but the point that he was telling me, and he would tell me this, every Saturday on this car ride, everyone has a story. I. You can pass by a thousand people and everyone has a complex story that's inside of them. You can never just say, I know that person, or just pass a person by without realizing that they have a story.

Well, I'm a psychologist now, so that clearly was something that was embedded because I look at a person and I'm like, what's their story? I wanna know their story. And most of us don't realize that mentorship is always around us.  That we take things in from people and we don't think of that as mentorship.

We're just taking it in. And so if you were to think back to your childhood, I'm sure you had somebody that really made an impression on you in some way, and that may have led you to do something yourself.  You know, it's interesting, I've never thought of it because I've always been a intellectually curious person as well as social.

So I'm the same way where when I meet people I have no problem having a conversation and, and learning all this. But there are people who they couldn't care less about someone's story, you know? But, um, I've never even really thought about that 'cause I've always been someone who, who does care. And it probably played a role into what I do now, hosting a podcast and, and guesting, but. 

You know, we talk about how we all have mentors in our life and you know, there's another way of looking at too, which is we're all mentors voluntarily and involuntarily, and it's important to know, I think it's so important we talk about integrity and character versus reputation on these shows and. That plays into the fact that you can be mentoring people without knowing, you know, we talk about you're taking everything in.

I, I've heard people say that children are like sponges, you know, information wise. They just absorb everything, you know, and what's interesting is it's not just us, but also fictional characters, you know, that they see on television and books. Uh, also celebrities and, and politicians and social media influencers.

Actually, I, I'd argue that there.  Less mentors, one-on-one, you know, on that more professional level with our children, but they have more mentors than ever before because they have, they're grown up. Some, some of these children now are born, you know, almost holding a phone, so to speak. You know, they're on the iPad, whether it's Bluey and it's an Australian dog, or whether it's a real person they're watching on television or a social media influencer, either, you know, it's influencing all of their decisions, what they buy, where they go to eat, what they, where.

So. Let's kind of pivot to that technology aspect, uh, the, the good and the bad and how, you know, as parents, we need to balance that when it comes to mentorship.  So you're right. You know, this is a modern form, form of mentorship. You know, what you're doing right now is a modern form of mentorship. We didn't have technology at our fingertips before.

The ability to connect with people. So if I go back to the definition of what mentorship really is, because a lot of people are unsure about it or they use it very loosely, right? Mentorship has like five ingredients to it.  And it, the confusing part is that, you know, you, I always like to make brownies, right?

But if I leave sugar out, it's gonna look like brownies, but it won't taste like brownies. Mm-hmm. So you need all of the ingredients in it. So a lot of times it could look like mentorship, but it's not quite, so first you need somebody who is feeling generative like, I wanna give back. You're doing that with your podcast, right?

Right. You're saying, I have some information. I'd like to give that back. Now everybody who's listening who says, wow, I love what Mr. Whiskey has to say. Is  your mentee. Right? Right. Who feels connected to you? Um, the, so we, we need somebody to catch our information. So I could say to you, Hey, I wanna tell you all about pickleball.

And you could be like, I don't wanna learn anything about pickleball. Well, that's not a match. Right, right. Um, is that good or bad? No. It's just not a match. Mm-hmm. We also need to be intrinsically motivated. So if you're getting paid, you're not a mentor.  That's a big deal because a lot of places, you know, where people work are, they're getting paid.

That's a motivator for them. So that's not mentoring. That could be coaching, guiding advisor, something else. I'm not demeaning it, it's just not mentorship.  Um, if you are mentoring, you also need to have a meaningful connection. So  you need to like the person, if you're matched up with somebody who you are given as a mentor and they, you don't like 'em, or you may like them, but you're, you're just kind of meh about 'em, that's really not mentoring.

So if you're saying, oh, I gotta kind of think of something to talk about with my mentor, um, or the mentor is saying, oh yeah, here's comes, you know, Mr. Boring mentee, that's not mentorship. You also need to trust the person.  So if I said, oh my goodness, I think Mr. Whiskey's gonna steal my idea and go start his own company with what I tell him, and then I'll be out.

You know my big idea. Right? Or you said, Hey, I don't trust telling  me or some mentor something because they're gonna judge me for not knowing something. If I'm at work, maybe they won't give me a performance evaluation. That's good. Maybe they will just keep that in the back of their mind and they won't think as highly of me.

I.  Finally, you need to have a goal.  So you need all of those things, which is really, if we think about it in mentorship all the time, but we have to have that. So sometimes the places where we don't see it is the workplace where there might be trust, there might not be, you know, a trust, trust issue. There might be a meaningful connection issue, or there might be an intrinsic motivating issue.

Hmm. So, um. If you take that anywhere else, it could look like that. So when you talked about, you know, what should we do as parents, I think we should first realize that mentorship is everywhere. That it's all around us. Um, but I don't know that getting on a phone is mentorship. I think that's, uh, an influence, but it may not be a mentor 'cause you could take that away.

And does that person really feel meaningfully connected to that? So if a person is really meaningfully connected to you and your podcast, then yes. But if it's just something you're passing time with and a lot of people are just passing time with TikTok or whatever else is out there, um, then I don't know that I would categorize that at all as mentorship.

It has to be that there's some kind of a, it's a weaker form of mentorship, but that person who's been considered the mentee, the one taking in the information has to feel meaningfully connected. Um, which you can with a podcast. Um. So I would say this, that if you're a parent, be aware of the opportunity to be a mentor like my grandfather was.

To me, those words of wisdom, because what you say it does penetrate kids. We, you know, our kids are sponges and so you have an opportunity. To take what is important to you and get that into that little sponge, and that's your mentorship opportunity. And most of us don't realize that we have that incredible gift right at our fingertips. 

You know, it's interesting because I know a lot of the younger generations who are growing up on their phone, especially watching a lot of YouTube, you know, they have a meaningful connection with the host. Like they feel like they're best friends or family, but the host.  And I'm not trying to say hosts don't care about their audiences.

Of course they do, but do they get that one-on-one connection as much? No. I mean, it's just like a classroom. You know? There's one teacher.  And let's say 30 students, the students have a deeper relationship to the teacher. 'cause there's only one teacher compared to one teacher to 30 students. Same with this YouTube show.

I mean, there could be a YouTuber who has 500 people commenting every episode and, and he's not gonna get back to that. But I do think there's that level of trust and meaningful connection where, because we've seen it, we've seen it where YouTubers say, Hey, invest in this stock. And everyone who trusts and has a connection with them invest in that stock.

Or they say, Hey. We're gonna go do this thing or do this event. Uh, so I think there, there is a strong pull for that.  Because part of meaningful connection building is time is an element in it. Uh, not always, right? The military shows that you can form strong bonds in a shorter amount of time, uh, through certain circumstances, but when you're grown up watching the same YouTuber, following them for years.

Same with, um, celebrities, you know, or musicians you know, that you've been following since you were a child. You know, when they say something, you know, you're like, Hey, that's, that's that. But what you mentioned all those aspects of mentorship when you were going over them. That's where I, I, I felt the disconnect with the military because how it works is it's not someone saying, Hey, I really wanna, you know, train these new sailors or soldiers.

Right? There are, there is that. But the mentorship program that at least I saw in my ship was, Hey, you're, you're petty officer. So and so, we know you already have your job and you're doing this and this and that. We just assigned you five new sailors. We want you to mentor them and you're lacking that. Um, a lot of times you're like, I don't have time for this.

I don't want to do this. I'm not a, I don't have the personality mentorship, you know, or, you know, the sailors don't connect. So I think that's part of the issue is that.  We need a, whether it's a military position or a third party civilian position, where you have people who have that personality and that mindset to be a mentor who have no incentive from the military or no obligation, they're, they're doing it because they want to see the sailors and soldiers get better, whether that's their mental health, whether that's reaching certain career goals within the military.

That's the issue I saw you just mentioned it. You know, you talk about the workplaces, that the incentives and the alignment isn't there.  It's a, it's a job title, it's not a,  you know, something that they wanna do. It's not a role they want to play. And so I think that's part of the issue.  Yeah, so that's a lot of places.

So is that a mentor? No, it's a job description that you might be a guide, an advisor. Right. You could be a coach. Um, but the intrinsic motivating thing is like this, and I like to describe it like this because it allows people to feel like, okay, well maybe I'm at work and I do feel intrinsically motivated, but here's the difference.

If I said to you, Hey, would you like to go volunteer time at a soup kitchen giving food and beverage to hungry, thirsty people? You might say yes. Right? And that would make you feel good. If I said, Hey, hey, wait, I know you're on your way there. Instead, turn left and go to the coffee shop and go volunteer your time there, giving out food and beverage to hungry, thirsty people at the cash register.

Well, you're not gonna wanna volunteer your time to do that. Everybody else is getting paid. So if you are des, you know, designated as a mentor, those two things feel different. If you're at a soup kitchen and you're giving out, you feel good, right? Like that's a nice feeling. You are not gonna feel good if you are working for free at a coffee shop, giving out food and beverages, right?

So that's feels in the workplace. So that is that mentorship. No it is not. People call it that, but it's not mentorship. So I like to say it has to have all of those ingredients because otherwise, you know, I've seen in the workplace it falls apart. They'll say we have this mentorship program and it's really not that effective.

And it's because one of those things is missing generally. And one of the big ones is, um, that people are getting paid and it becomes part of their job description. That's a burden on the employee. Mm-hmm. And that's a burden on the person to feel like now they have.  That person feels like a burden. They don't feel like a mentee.

Then they have to figure out, well, what do I have to tell them? That's why people will say, now, be an inspiring mentor. Well, that's an even, even bigger burden. What do I have to tap? Dance, right? Like, what do I have to here? So  having the correct definition, definition of mentorship is very important because it really makes it clear and easy to see which programs will work well or which ones won't work at all.

Because if you're being paid,  that makes it so that both the mentor and the mentee feel kind of in an obligated place. If you don't trust the person, that's a no-go immediately. Right. And if you don't feel meaningfully connected in some way, the one way is that weaker, you know, virtual version. Right?

Right. Um, but the, the strongest is when you, if you're having two people connecting in person, which happens oftentimes in the workplace or in the military, right. You have to actually like that person. You have to actually care about that person. Um, and if you don't, you are not gonna care if that person meets their goals,  you know, or if they are receiving your information.

'cause you know for sure.  A lot of times it's a checkbox like, Hey, do we meet once a week at least, or do we meet every Friday? Or you know, whatever it is. Yeah. It's a fill in that checkbox. Yeah. We don't even have to talk, just, we just have to look like we talked about something, you know? Mm-hmm. I have to write something down.

I think it's very interesting, you know, we've kind of gone over some myth busting with what is and what isn't mentorship, but let's go into why is this even important? Why does mentorship matter? I mean. There was plenty people saying, Hey, I didn't have a mentor and I turned out fine. You know, just let kids grow up and, and do what they do.

Let parents be parents. I mean, so you're someone who has specialized in mentorship, like I said, appeared on several news outlets talking about this, and you wrote a book, which we'll get into. So obviously you recognize it as something important. Why should we recognize it as something important?  Well, first of all, I'm gonna say those people who say they haven't had a mentor, they have, they just didn't know it.

That's a concern to me because when you don't know you've had something good like my grandfather telling me those things, I could've thought I just rode on the car with my grandpa. Right? But when I realized, wow, he taught me something profound on those rides, it makes me feel closer to him. He is not alive anymore, but I have my grandpa on my shoulder, so we're developmentally built to want to give back. 

The reason for that is once we hit midlife, especially, we've already accumulated a lot of information.  We wanna make sure that we're not just checking boxes in our life, right? Everybody has a box to check. Gotta get through school, you know, if you're in the military guy, but wherever I'm going, gotta buy a car, gotta get a house, you know, or whatever.

We, I can go on and on with check boxes. Once you read a c, reach a certain level, you say, all right, I did a lot of that stuff. Are there more boxes? Is my life just a series of checking boxes  around midlife? We start to say, I wanna make sure that my, my life has meaning. The way that we have meaning is we say, this is important to me.

It could be a value. It could be your culture, it could be your religion, it could be anything like that or something that's work related. But the most important things to us are our culture, values, use religion. Those things have been passed down for centuries, which is mentorship. Um. So we wanna do that because it makes us feel like we mattered in the world.

Like we weren't just here checking boxes. So we have this desire to do it, and when we can engage in it and know that we're engaging in it, it makes us feel like we had purpose, that we're relevant, that we matter, that people care about us. And it also calms us because if you hit midlife, people will say, uhoh, I'm halfway done. 

I have, you know what, and what's the end thing that we're looking forward to? Death that scares people. Right? It's like, woo-hoo. Can't wait to get to the end. Yeah.  Um, so we need to figure out what is it that we want to do And mentorship is that part where we get to say, I. I choose you to give this, which is so important to me, and you're gonna hold onto that and you're gonna carry that forward.

Now I feel comfortable that I did something that was of value in the world, and I could do that to as many people as I want, and that makes me feel even more comfortable. So that's really how it, um, plays out for us and why we're built to do it.  Yeah, so let's go into your book, the Mentorship Edge, and let's talk a little bit about that and you know, who should read that and what its purpose is. 

So the mentorship at Edge is really written so that people can understand the real definition of what it is, what it isn't. And I give a lot of examples in the book that are from real life, like, um, Charlie Kata, who's an astronaut, and he could have died in space. But his mentor saved him. Mm-hmm. I have military examples from Lieutenant, Lieutenant, um, Colonel General, uh, Lieutenant Colonel Jennifer Snow.

I have examples from grandma's. I have examples from people all across the gamut. Right.  I like to talk a lot about lateral mentoring because most of us think we have to go find somebody above us, and most of our profound mentorship happened laterally, and I talk about that in the book. Like the founding of the United States was by a bunch of guys who, none of them was the boss.

Right. They were all people of equal level, but they all had a different area of expertise. So they brought that together laterally from the same level to form the country. And that's exactly the same format that entrepreneurs have that techies have. And so we see this out there in the world, and we don't call it mentorship.

We're like, somebody help me. Somebody gave me a hand, somebody did this for me. But if I'm internalizing what that was.  I took that in and I hold that bit of it in me. That's mentorship. So  we see this in the military actually, where we see both hierarchical and lateral. So you're very familiar as most people are with the hierarchical aspect of, right, right.

Big military. Right. That's very hierarchical. But if there's a crisis, those walls come down and the navy starts talking to the army and everybody else start, the people start talking to each other, right? Because they're, we gotta fix this. Then as soon as that crisis is over that goes, those walls go back up and it's hierarchical again.

It's really quite interesting to see, because that's the most, um, visible way of seeing both lateral and mentor, uh, lateral and hierarchical mentoring happening.  At the same time. Right. One organization. It's, it's quite remarkable.  Yeah. And so would you, I mean, who should read it? You know, obviously, like we said, not everyone wants to be a mentor.

Obviously we're all mentors in some capacity, but would you say it's really for people who, like if you're gonna be an educator or a storyteller or a parent,  no, it's really for anyone, because most of us who doesn't wanna be helped along.  Right, and who doesn't wanna help somebody else?  So me, the reading the book helps anybody see how they have a role in somebody else's life.

You have mentored people and you didn't code it as that. You know what? You don't get the benefit of knowing that now. Right?  Knowing that, say my grandfather mentored me, I feel closer to him. If you were to say to yourself, oh, wow, I just mentored that person.  You feel closer to that person, you feel good.

You feel like, oh,  I, my footprint just got a little deeper.  So if we're engaging in regular everyday life and we're mentoring and being mentored and not realizing it, we're missing out. And also I. Most people think you have to have like a title to be a mentor and you don't. The biggest, most powerful mentors don't have titles.

They're our grandmas. They're our grandpas, they're right, the people in our families who are making sure that those family values and the culture continue, um, and that you have whatever it is that you have inside of you, you have the value that you said, Hey, I wanna make this podcast and get information out.

That's a good value and why wouldn't you wanna share that?  Why would you, you know, this is what we all have. We all carry some kind of value in us. It doesn't matter what your degree is, your rank, your level, or whatever. That's what we need to be connecting on. And if we do that more often, then we feel better.

And those with connections, we know that connections make us live physically, longer lives and emotionally happier lives. Because if you feel like right.  You have somebody in your corner that makes you feel psychologically happier, not even happier, just comfortable. Make you can relax. Yeah. Yeah. You don't have to be tense.

You know, these are the sorts of things that exist due to mentorship and the connections we make.  You know what, you know, you talked about the, it doesn't matter what degree you have, what title. I think it's so important because a lot of mentorship comes through lived experience. I mean, that's why your parents and grandparents are typically their, your first main mentors because they have lived through things.

You know, I, I mean, I could ask my neighbor, he's no expert on dating, but he's been through plenty of, uh, good and bad dates and he could give you some advice, you know, and I think  part of what we're saying here is.  Inevitably, you're gonna be a mentor to someone, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. So why not read this book and maximize your ability to do so?

You know, you're, you're gonna play this role so you might as well take advantage of it. To give the most, to receive the most, and to, you know, maximize the opportunity. And what's so interesting, you know, we've talked before on the show about like the conversation you and I are having right now, maybe mentoring.

Three, four generations from now, and you and I are both, you know, passed away by then. So it's interesting that we're like mentors beyond the grave. I always think that's interesting with the, the, yeah. Podcasting, the YouTube and even, even your book, you know, I mean, you and I could pass away and they could be, you know, reading your book Generations from now and, and you're mentoring people from beyond the grave.

So I think that's always such a little cool to think about.  I wanna tell you a tiny little story about somebody who got to feel that and, and he didn't have to die to feel it.  So, um, there's um, a guy named Bob Lefkowitz and he was the 2012 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.  And he was like, how did I become a Nobel Prize winner?

Like, I don't get it. Like what? What's special about me? Right? How did it happen?  And so what he did was he made himself what he calls a legacy tree, and it's just like an ancestry.com tree. You know how you could go in and you could look at all your relatives generations back? Well.  He made one and he put all the people that he knew of that were his mentors above him, all the people that were kind of beside him, and the couple of mentees that he knew that he had below him. 

And he published it in a journal and he went off to a conference and somebody came up to him and they, he said, Hey Bob, I'm six degrees Lefkowitz. And he was like, what are you talking about? And he said, well, that's funny. It's five people have worked between me and you.  Bob was like, tell me more. What are you working on?

And he told him what he's working on and it was stuff that Bob started working on and this guy, six degrees away from him, was using the same words and terminology that Bob had and has been, had been expanding his work six degrees out. It's not Don, it's a snowball that keeps going.  So we all have that in us, a legacy tree that we have of mentors.

We just don't realize that we have them as mentors. So if I were to make my legacy tree.  And have grandpa there, he didn't have to be in the grave to realize his, his, um, his reach with me. Right. I, uh, he could've noticed it and realized it all the way along. So if we're able to acknowledge that well before we're in our graves, we get to have a richer, more psychologically fulfilled life by having that knowing that we've helped and who has helped us, because when you know that people are there to help you.

It feels good. You're like, wow, that person cares about me. Because we don't help people we don't really care about at some level, right? So it makes us feel like people care about us and we care about others, and that whole spider web that exists of those connections end up being visible to us instead of, you know, sort of invisible and unable to say it. 

Yeah, that's, that's very interesting. I, I, I get that, you know, you can see it, and I think that's part of, one of the greatest and worst parts of being a mentor is you experience what they experience to some degree. Like when someone you were mentoring does great success, you, you feel that joy and when they fail you, you feel that as well.

You know, you kind of, like you talked about, it brings us closer and it, it does, you know, as a parent, a grandparent mentor, you.  When the people that you're trying to help raise and, and, and guide whether the same age, older, younger, you know what they go through and experience, you're a part of that and you feel that  you do.

But think about it in this way also. Like if a child falls off a bike, you could say, oh, they fail, they fell down, but you are there to pick them back up.  It's a different feeling than saying I'm there with you while you fail. Do you feel bad that they're crying 'cause they skinned their knee? Yeah. But you're like, come on, get back up, get back on that bike.

That's what a mentor feels. It's not quite going down to the depths in that way. 'cause you're there to sort of, let me pull you up, get back on that bike and let me help you move forward. Um, and so it's a little, it, it, there's more control in it. You're not free falling when you're a mentor with your mentee.

Right.  But no, I, I completely agree with that. And so  what is your main mission right now? Like we mentioned a couple of times, you've been on major news outlets, you've been to magazines, your podcast, guesting, you have your book, you do speaking. So what is the main goal? I mean, really it's, this is your way of mentoring as many individuals as possible, correct?

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I want to get the word out that. We really should be a much more connected society, understanding where we are connecting with others. Yeah. And how that impacts us and how it impacts them. Because I feel like we've become so much.  Involved is so much more involved in building our brand and feeling so much alone and sort of as an isolated person with a lot of other people out there.

And as soon as we connect and can feel that with others, we're gonna be a much.  Much more fulfilled society. And so my goal is to get it out there to everyone, that you just need to look left and look right, and you have a mentor or mentee standing right there, and that we can engage and make our lives much, much more meaningful. 

Yeah, and so we'll have your website and the description below for anyone who wants to see. Other mediums that you've been on to get the mentorship edge as well as just contact you if they need. And you know, what would be your final message? Obviously you're putting forward mentorship is, you know, it's not just about helping one individual, it's about helping many as well as the, the rippling effect is, is a society that is healthier and happier. 

I'd say connect, connect, connect. Get out and meet people and connect with them. Don't just look at them and walk by connect. Um, the other thing is when you do connect with somebody, think, ask yourself, can I help that person? Is there something I could do that would be useful to that person? And likewise, don't hesitate to ask someone else for help if you need it in whatever you're doing.