What do you think is the #1 reason people give for not being in a mentoring relationship?
If you said, “I’m too busy.” you are spot on. With work deadlines, home commitments, kids’ extracurricular events, community sign-ups, how can you find the time?
Here’s one thing to Stop Doing and one thing to Start Doing to make mentoring easy for you, save you time, and make it feel like a desirable investment, not a “have to do.”
To start the New Year off well, here are FIVE TIPS that will get you ready to “get mentored”…and successfully!
Before you approach a potential mentor, learn about them. What makes them strong as a mentor and leader? Who have they mentored well previously? Speak to one of their mentees to learn about their experience. A mentor will be impressed that you have done your due diligence on where they shine.
In my corporate life, I begged for the chance to mentor millennials.
Why?
Because they were cool.
Not only was the group I worked with hip and up on everything tech and social, they also shaped their workplaces by mentoring each other. Sometimes it wasn’t even called “peer mentoring” by their management. It was just something they did.
When I was sixteen, I was beyond ecstatic to inherit my parents’ fairly uncool, many-miled, pea-green colored, ’71 Oldsmobile Cutlass. There was nothing “happening” about the mechanical beast, but it represented something far more than the sum of its well-worn parts.
It stood for LIFE “my own way.” I couldn’t wait to drive off in it, and take on my own road, at my own speed.
Millennials, do you ever feel like that?
It’s very cool when the woman who gives you lifelong wise words is the woman who gave you life. Oh, the things my mom said that I swore would never take leave from my lips!
But guess what, her voice then, and now, is in my head and, thank the good Lord, I occasionally utter her pearls of wisdom to my own kids.
As teenagers, they palpably cringe at my outpouring of womanly wisdom and check the calendar daily as to how long until college begins; but mark my words, they’ll remember the gems that flowed down, uninvited but precious as gold, from Grandma to Mom to them.
