Mentorship is a personal developmental relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person. The mentor may be older or younger, but have a certain area of expertise. It is a learning and development partnership between someone with vast experience and someone who wants to learn
Wikipedia
This week celebrates passing of the longest night of the year and celebration of light. So I decided to dedicate this post to people who bring light into our lives. We are eternally grateful to our parents and grandparents for giving us lives, to our kids for making us smile, to some of our teachers who saw the best in us, to good doctors that take care of our wellbeing. There is a standard list of people whose influence on our life we value and celebrate. There are also countless other people who influenced our lives in a good way, and we do not really know how to call them. Let us call them mentors.
For me, mentors are these regular people whom we encounter everywhere and who help us learn something new: a new skill, something new about myself or other people, a different and strangely productive way of thinking.
Mentors are not wise old people who teach youngsters near a campfire. Everyone can be a mentor. It is only natural that each of us knows something better than some of his peers, after all we are differently gifted, learn and like different things and pursue different goals. So each of us can at the same time search for someone to mentor us and mentor some other people things we know better than them.
The relationship between mentor and apprentice sounds very modern and very archaic at the same time. This very personal and warm relationship often includes prolonged face-to-face meeting and passing of informal knowledge, even the culture of specific area of expertise, sometimes the non-verbal part is more important than the verbal message. Good mentors can spot special events or “teaching moments” when we are open to the harder lessons and use them in a way that lets us grow. Mentorship can be found at the basis of human communication, knowledge and experience. It is also changing constantly as we develop new ways of communication, new types of technology and new sorts of experience.
A 1995 study of mentoring techniques most commonly used in business found that the five most commonly used techniques among mentors were :
- Accompanying: making a commitment in a caring way, which involves taking part in the learning process side-by-side with the learner.
- Sowing: mentors are often confronted with the difficulty of preparing the learner before he or she is ready to change. Sowing is necessary when you know that what you say may not be understood or even acceptable to learners at first but will make sense and have value to the mentee when the situation requires it.
- Catalyzing: when change reaches a critical level of pressure, learning can escalate. Here the mentor chooses to plunge the learner right into change, provoking a different way of thinking, a change in identity or a re-ordering of values.
- Showing: this is making something understandable, or using your own example to demonstrate a skill or activity. You show what you are talking about, you show by your own behavior.
- Harvesting: here the mentor focuses on “picking the ripe fruit”: it is usually used to create awareness of what was learned by experience and to draw conclusions. The key questions here are: “What have you learned?”, “How useful is it?”.
Wikipedia states two conditions for mentorship “mentor with certain expertise” and “apprentice willing to learn”. It is not reasonable to mentor someone unless you have reasonable knowledge and experience in your areas of expertise, be it work or hobby of counseling. It is not reasonable to mentor someone who does not want to learn. Mentorship is not something we gift upon others, but something an apprentice needs to seek for. You can seach for opportunities and drop hints, but the actual actions should be carried by apprentice under careful watch of the mentor. There is an old wisdom saying that the best way to learn something is to teach it:
Docendo discimus, (Latin “by teaching, we learn”). Seneca the Younger (c. 4 BC – 65 AD)
While the role of he mentor is subtle and supportive, the apprentice needs to be very active and focused. If you want to learn something new and benefit from support of a benevolent mentor you do need to search for the mentor actively. Mentors can often be found at meetup and events, they will calmly answer all of your questions and ask for nothing in return, you will see other people magnetically attracted to them in their natural environment, and when they talk about the subject they will infect you with their passion and knowledge. Once you meet such a person, you should look for the guidance, pass small tests intended to see if you are serious and prepare to be amazed.
Here you can read more about mentorship. If you are looking for a mentor or want to become a mentor for other superlearners please write me to [email protected] and I will see what can be arranged.
