A mentor is someone who motivates you to grow your skills, make better decisions, and gain new perspectives on your life and career. As a mentee, your mentor will leverage their experience to offer you guidance on your career or life, now and within the future.
Rather than learning through trial and error, a mentor may be a person you’ll look to for direction and a task model to imitate.
If you’re a mentee, you’ll desire to open up about all of your challenges and failures. Mentorship might seem intimidating at the outset, but an efficient mentor will have you feeling right at home in no time. You would feel as though you were talking to your best friend, venting, and unloading the weights of life with the help of a trustworthy, confidential human.
Being a mentor is all about offering your best, and is a crucial development, and learning experience. Teaching others is the best way for you to learn. The same way, mentors become more competent as leaders and communicators, as they guide and help rising stars.
A mentor’s role within the lifetime of a mentee is offering him/her, realistic and unbiased advice that will enhance their success. Irrespective of the industry, mentorship will definitely help you through a majority of the highs and lows of your career.
What is the best takeaway from having a mentor? Well, presumably, since they are professionals who have traversed through identical experiences as yours, or individuals specialising in these areas, they could offer you another point of view to think about.
An excellent mentor helps you emerge out of your comfort zone, which is when actual growth commences, personally and professionally. Because the adage goes, “If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.”
So, why you would like a mentor? A mentor may be someone who has the knowledge or experience you seek. He can help in your current role, or advice you with future opportunities. It might be anyone whom you admire for the work they’re doing, or the way they balance their life, or the position they hold.
Following are a number of the foremost critical roles a mentor plays in one’s life:
Adviser / Counsellor
The role requires them to encourage self-development in mentee, by helping them to believe and reflect on their practice. A mentor could also offer their advice and support here to the mentee, regarding their social contacts and developing the same, their career, and building networks. As a mentor, an individual should assess and consider the mentee’s capabilities and limitations.
Role Model
A mentor assumes the role of the ideal, or an illustration to be followed, in the mentee’s life. He or she provides them with a clear image for imitation, demonstrating qualities and skills to emulate. The role of a positive model is very significant and can’t be overestimated.
Coach
A mentor is additionally a teacher, in that they not only provide their mentee with constructive feedback to assist them improve, but also promote a versatile approach to accepting feedback.
Problem Solver
Helping the mentee in critically analysing and solving problems, a mentor also helps in developing skills, like critical thinking, deciding, and problem-solving skills.
Teacher
While playing the role of an educator, they share their experience and knowledge with the mentee. A mentor identifies the mentee’s individual needs and elegance, and accordingly provides an encouraging learning environment to maximize outcome.
Supporter
A mentor becomes the support system for their mentee, offering them professional and moral support, as and when necessary. This permits the mentee to grow ideally.
Guide
A mentor is additionally, a guide for his or her mentee. They introduce you to power groups and contacts which will assist your growth.
So, the effective implementation of mentorship is challenging. To be a successful mentor, one should be ready to, and willing to value the mentee as an individual, maintain confidentiality, listen to what’s being said, and observe how it’s being said. Rather than merely giving directions, focus on the mentee’s development, and resist the urge to supply a clone, develop mutual trust and respect, help the mentee solve his/her problems. As an individual, regardless of where you’re in your personal life or your career, the guidance of a mentor is priceless.
Mentors play an instrumental role in developing leadership skills in the mentee, as well as in making them become recognized for their communication skills. Mentors will be renowned for being advisors who are open to helping others. Communication is a very determinant factor when it comes to mentorship.
Albert Einstein once said that, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” Likewise, if you’ve ever had to explain something to somebody, you probably noticed that you had to think it through and clean up your explanation to make it easy for another person to understand. It’s the same case here.
The ultimatum? A mentoring relationship serves as a beneficial takeaway, for both the mentor, as well as the mentee.
