Using one or more mentors

One mentor can help you, but maybee you should try more mentors who can broaden your perspective and grant access to new opportunities. Building your mentoring network by personal relationship and recommendations.
Identify the people you need help from to be successful in your current job and everyone who might help you advance your career. Use your current mentors to provide introductions and to fill you in on people’s backgrounds, interests, and current projects. With that information, you can make meaningful connections by offering relevant expertise or ideas, or finding other ways to assist you in your path.
This will maybe be one of your best investments of time.

How to screw up a mentorship!

In my experience people are afraid to screw up the mentorship even when I always tell them that it is actually difficult to do so. If you think mentoring is mysterious and difficult, it will be. There are no rules, except to always stay in full-attention listening mode. Sometime you teach, sometimes you mentor and sometimes just talk or spend time together.

About the only time to screw the mentorship up is

  1. Don´t meet often
  2. When you meet, don´t listen
  3. Don´t keep your promises

That will do it!

Any additional thing you may do, even the clumsiest effort that keeps your mentee´s best interests squarely in focus will spell sucess. If you are in a mentoring program there will always be a coordinator who will help you if you feel that you need it.

Feedback – Yes or No?

I had a good discussion with a coach from Erickson College (http://erickson.edu/) and we disagree on something which is very important for me. Feedback…

At Erickson College they learn that as a coach you should never give feedback – because it will lead the coach to do the same next time.

For me this is so very wrong for what I am thinking and doing as a mentor. I have feedback as one of the five tools to use as a mentor. But of course you have to be careful and discuss more about the feedback and what to bring further.

For my friend, the Erickson College coach, that wasn´t any better, but he understood what I meant . And that is a reminder that there are different methods and possibilities.

And as a mentor or coach is it important to think this trough, and find out what you would do and what suits you as a mentor or coach. There is nothing wrong about feedback, the mentee or coach is the main person her not the tool. Remember that…

The next tip is about relationship

The last tip for now is:

Mentoring is a unique relationship.
It is like other relationships, yet unlike other relationships.
It is personal and professional.
It is at once intimate, caring even loving yet dispassionate, calm and neutral.
It creates a safe space for both the mentor and the one mentored to open themselves to discovery.

Did you know it brings status to be a mentor?

For my third tip it is come to the mentor and status, read more here…

Mentoring brings with it a certain status and respect.
Mentors are recognized as wise men and women, with knowledge and experience worth sharing.
Whether they know it or not, choose to use it or not, mentors are mavens who have influence,
link into networks and can leverage knowledge.
This, however, is not the secret that enriches the lives of those who mentor or are mentored.

Maybe you didn´t know this either…

For the next tip from things you maybe know about mentoring is number two here:

Certainly, mentoring calls upon interpersonal skills and communication styles that are highly valued in today’s leaders.
Mentoring a professional colleague can be stimulating and energising. It challenges you to reflect and discuss new perspectives and ideas.
So mentoring offers an opportunity for mentors to develop attributes that will benefit them professionally.
However, I believe that mentors can gain as much, if not more than those that are mentored,
from the relationship and the reward is much greater than personal satisfaction or a career advantage.

What you may not know about mentoring

If you are reading about mentoring for the first time it´s some information which is good to have. I will bring you some of them for the next week. And by the way, good luck with the mentoring work.

Mentors generally volunteer for their role for all the right reasons.
Many high achieving professionals like to «give something back».
Contributing to the development of others through mentoring is an honored tradition.
Yet, there is a well-kept secret about mentoring 
that may come as a shock to some
or be no surprise at all for others when they discover it.

My dream mentor

I post a question on www.linkedin.com in a group for the entrepreneurs, because I want them to talk about «How should your dream mentor be»?

And if you should find a mentor for yourself, how would that mentor be?

A lot of people had applied and I just want to share some with you.

Here is one: «Someone who wants to see me succeed and is willing to hold me accountable to my growth and success. Someone who is reliable and available to communicate with me when times are difficult. An inspiration. Patient. Consistent. Committed. One who connects me to the appropriate contacts».

I will put out more in weeks to come…watch out…

The Modern Face of Mentoring

How Young Entrepreneurs are inspiring their predecessors and peers

This was an article in www.successmagazine.com and written by Amy Anderson.

The meaning of mentorship has changed. No longer does the concept of master and apprentice rule the mentorship road. Unless you want to be a cobbler or a carpenter, it’s likely that the traditional roles will be a lot fuzzier than they used to be. “We tend to think of a traditional mentor as someone who is older and therefore more experienced than we are,” says Tory Johnson, best-selling author and founder and CEO of Women for Hire. But today, mentorship reaches beyond age or education, embodying the simple idea of one person with experience passing on what he or she has learned to someone with less experience.

Of course, if each person has valuable experience, knowledge can be exchanged, not just funneled down in a one-way flow. Think of it this way: Who has more experience with managing personal finance—you or your teenager? Obviously it’s the one who can actually remember how to balance a checkbook. (What’s a checkbook?)

But who has more experience with social media, streaming content and link sharing? Yep, the younger “digital natives” of this techno-savvy world, who have many in older generations beat because they grew up speaking the language of fast bits of information, multiple platforms and webs of digital socializing. This technological fluency means they read differently, see ads differently and make purchasing decisions differently.

 

Read the rest of this article here: http://www.successmagazine.com/article?articleId=1526&taxonomyId=21#

Comic strip

 

As Issac Newton said,

«If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.»
– and while you don’t need to be a giant to pass on your wisdom and experience,
what you can achieve in helping develop another person is gigantic in its effect.