I read a lot on the internett and have a lot of RSS about mentoring, a lot of things is a repeat from others, but some of it is new thoughts.
In december 2013 I received an email from Michael Hyatt and he is an interesting original thinker about leadership, and he was explaining about finding a mentor. Not only in writing but also in a podcast.
I am a huge fan of other peoples opinion and therefor I want to post it here, not the whole article, but highlights.
He starts the post like this: To be brutally honest, your chances of finding a mentor are slim and none.
I don´t agree of that, but he raise an interesting point in the next. When he says that the problem is the narrow definition of mentorship.
He the comes with four levels of mentoring:
- Virtual Mentoring: Read blogs and books, listen to podcasts, and take online courses.
- Group Mentoring: Go to live conferences, join membership sites, or participate in group coaching.
- Peer Mentoring: Find like-minded peers and be intentional about forming friendships with them. You can also join a mastermind groups.
- Personal Mentoring: Invest in a coach or find a volunteer mentor.
Further I love his last sentences in the blogpost:
Even if you eventually find a mentor (according to the traditional definition), you’re cheating yourself by not doing what you can now to learn and grow.
Instead of focusing on what you don’t have—a one-on-one, traditional mentoring relationship—focus on what you do have: more opportunities than ever before in history to learn and grow. If you simply expand your definition, you will find mentoring opportunities everywhere.
I could´t said it in a better way. Go and read the blogpost here
Michael Hyatt is the author of Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World (Thomas Nelson). It is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller. Recently, Forbes magazine named me one of the Top 50 Social Media Influencers of 2013.