I was a senior executive protection agent for a while, a private contractor. It's a very egotistical, high-stakes industry, and the more time I spent in it the more I kept coming back to how much of it actually ran on emotion. The more I dug into that, the more it pulled me in.

That sent me down a long road, and recently I started a company called ValiCor US. It's an emotional intelligence company aimed at every part of the infrastructure industry, from defense to aviation to mental health. We built an engine called HEAT, Human Emotional Analysis Technology, plus the HEAT Academy, which teaches the levels of emotional intelligence and how to read the micro-expressions of emotion. I also sit on a couple of boards and do advisory work, but my real calling is this: our society is pretty numbed out. We think, but we don't feel. The technology helps you objectify what you're actually feeling, so you can ask yourself, am I angry today, why am I sad today, instead of just sitting in it.

Almost all my mentees come asking about strategic partnerships, but the thing I lean on hardest is active listening. That was something I was genuinely poor at earlier in my life, and mentoring has made me a far better active listener, not just in business but in my personal life too. I still run emotional intelligence training, I use HEAT on myself almost every day, so I'm constantly working the same muscle.

What I do is listen closely enough to pick out what doesn't seem to be working, then put the point to them so they challenge themselves on it, rather than me charging in and saying no, no, no. It's a delicate dance. I had a mentee running a yoga retreat who came in with a strategy around working with hotels, and instead of telling him what to do, I walked him back to his real strengths and what he might not be doing right. By the end he was saying, John, this was an amazing call. The shift you see in thirty minutes isn't just their strategy adapting, it's the person.

A lot of us try to compare ourselves to everybody. I want to be Jeff Bezos, I want millions of dollars, and you have to truly ask yourself why. Is it genuinely what you want, or is it a craving, or AI playing into your emotions, or old conditioning telling you you're not good enough? I went through that myself. I told myself I wanted to be an attorney because my parents were attorneys, and then I realized I didn't. I wanted to run a company and do emotional intelligence, because of the traumas I'd lived through. The more you sit with that discomfort, the more authentic and whole you become.

Travel is part of how I keep that honest. It has humbled me: I've driven across the country and seen Europe, and it makes you realize the world is big and you're not the only one. That same instinct, doing what makes you uncomfortable and asking why, is what makes you a better, more humble mentor.

The good ones are the people who are actually at the point of being ready to listen. You can't make somebody change unless they want to, so if you come in convinced you're right and everyone else is wrong, none of this works and you're wasting both of our time. Come in willing to spend some time looking at yourself, not just talking about the business, because that's where the real shift happens.

For anyone thinking about mentoring, the bar is active listening and a genuine curiosity about people's ideas. If you can sit with someone, listen closely enough to dissect what's really going on, and then deliver hard feedback in a way that doesn't strike the wrong chord, you'll do well. I got it wrong a couple of times early on, came in too hard, and you get better at the balance. But it has to come from genuinely caring about the person across from you, not your ego.