This week, I’ll share some insights into mentoring. What is it, who can be a mentor or a mentee, and how does it all work?
What is mentoring?
Putting it simply, mentoring is about helping someone who may be at the start of their journey, and helping them to achieve their dreams and kick goals, which you do by sharing your expertise and experience.
What makes a great mentor is somebody who is willing to help and provide guidance, while still being open to learning from their own mentors. It’s possible for you to be both a mentor and a mentee at the same time, or even a co-mentor, where you and someone who’s at a similar stage as you, will mentor each other.
A true mentor is someone who has reached a certain level of success in their life or their career, who wants to share that knowledge to help others.
Advisors, consultants and coaches can be great mentors, but a great mentor doesn’t really have to be any of those things. Just because you’re a coach doesn’t make you a mentor.
How do you find a great mentor?
Finding a great mentor is basically finding a person who’s already succeeding at the thing you want to do. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people you admire who you would like to have as your mentor. Follow their social media feeds and reach out to them. They might not all get back to you but some will and you could end up with a great mentor.
We tend to look for mentors when we have a particular goal we want to achieve but we’re not quite sure how to get there.
A mentor can provide new perspective that can make a difference to a mentee’s life. They should be able to recommend tasks, provide resources if necessary, and help you to actually develop steps of action you can take to get you closer to your goal. Great mentoring is about helping the mentee to do things correctly, and making sure they feel confident when doing them.
For example, if a mentor is helping a mentee to become better at networking, they might help facilitate conversations, or they might accompany you to networking events and encourage you to observe them networking.
Make sure you are both on the same page when it comes to goals and what you want to achieve.
How does mentoring work?
The right mentor for you should be really good at understanding and articulating your goals, but before they can do that, YOU need to know what your goals are. You need to be able to communicate clearly, be authentic and learn to express what you really want.
Don’t be afraid to talk openly about your expectations and aspirations, and don’t be afraid or embarrassed to share some audacious goals.
For more info on mentoring, head to Loz Life lozlife.com
