Mentoring Mentality

Experience is the best teacher in life! Yeah, but life is too short to experience everything in first person! So, fortunates are the ones who get right mentors. These mentors have the ability to positively impact our lives – They guide, motivate, direct, suggest, enlighten, correct, criticize, comment and most importantly share their experiences! The extreme case: they become our living role models. But getting the ‘right’ mentor is not that easy – He or She needs to (a) Understand you (your personality, ambition, likes & dislikes etc) (b) Understand (and have good experience & insights in) the environment / field in which you would like to be mentored (c) Have good people skills & a genuine willingness to help without selfish motives (d) Time (e) Have a reasonably long term association with you (i.e. doesn’t make sense to have different mentors every other month!)

I set my mind to think on “Apart from satisfying those hard-to-meet conditions, how can we get the right mentor?” Few tips I could think of:

• Be open and “listen” to what people have to say for me, be it my workplace, home or any social groups
• Initiate talks with senior / elder people – Seek their advise, Listen to their experiences
• Choose people whom I have high regard for – Unless I respect him, it’s tough to follow what the mentor says
• Do the conversations with him make me think deeply? Do they change my perceptions or course of actions which ultimately yielded positive results?
• Am I able to connect with the person?

Oops, I had so many people helping and guiding me at different points in life, but what about life-long mentors? I couldn’t think of any one other than my sister. Hmmm, I guess I should take the initiative, as the Tamil proverb says “Crying child gets the milk”.

Couple of things before I close down: Seek mentors’ help, use their advice, but preserve your individuality and the ability to analyze & make a personal decision. Be willing to genuinely mentor and help others, since the world runs on the principle of GIGO (Good In Good Out / Garbage In Garbage Out)!