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If you’ve been reading my latest articles about how to define what is that you want to do next in the workplace and applied the 4 steps: making space for yourself, identifying your strengths, uncovering your core values and started to designing your career aspirations plan (CAP), at this stage you should feel inspired and empowered to go further. Congratulations for that because it’s a whole journey that you just completed!

 

However, when you look back to all the insights you collected, you may feel overwhelmed and insecure of certain points and how to glue all this together. Here's where a mentor can be a game changer for you.

I personally benefited hugely from my mentors; that’s the reason why I advocate for mentoring. I learned that you can do things on your own, however talking through your thoughts and ideas with a good mentor will take you a lot further with more clarity. Isn’t this extraordinary? … I believe it is.

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Let me help you first understand what a mentor is:

 

A mentor is a person who inspires you on something, anything in fact. Age, gender or status matter the least. Your mentor is this person with whom you feel simply yourself, where you need no acting, no faking or pretending. This person makes you feel by default comfortable and at ease, to share your craziest ideas and thoughts. Your mentor is someone who actively listens and is willing to give of his or her time to you with nothing in return.

Your mentor will never judge you but will simply guide you by asking enlightening and disruptive questions which will catapult your thinking process. Think about it this way, your mentor is the soil and your ideas are baby plants, a great mentor will know how to fertilize the soil for you to help you grow your baby plants and nurture them.

 

1) How can you find a mentor?

Based on my own experience, here’re a few simple tips I recommend:

 

  • Leverage your work place:

At work, we are surrounded by numerous brilliant people, all you need to do is to observe and be genuinely curious. If you did spot a colleague in another department or business unit for example, with whom you always feel great and inspired any time you come across each other. Try to spend some extra time with this person and check if you share some common values, be curious about his or her work, career and personality. If you feel the inspiration keeps just getting higher every time, this can be a sign that this person could be a great mentor candidate. Once you feel comfortable enough, then find a timeslot with that person and ask him or her to mentor you, explain why you feel great and at ease with him or her and what inspires you the most in that person. In 99% of the cases, people will always feel honored to be asked to become a mentor, because this means you highly look-up to this person and you fully trust him or her. So, all you need to do is to ask!

Also, instead of pinning your hopes on one perfect person, keep in mind that you can have several mentors! As long as you are clear on what you admire about them.

 

  • Use your connections & network:

Share with colleagues or friends if they have someone in mind who has some affinity with mentoring and especially around professional career for instance. You will be surprised to learn how many people you will be advised to meet. The magic will then start operating - asking for such help will expansively open-up a wider network for you which you would never access in normal times. This will also push you to get out of your comfort zone by making the effort to meet a person you never met before. And to get genuinely curious about his or her domains of interests and career path, also to share about your aspirations even if it's all still working progress. It’s such a humbling yet powerful journey to connect to others and share mutual experiences, and this is what you need when you are in the process of preparing the next job move. You need fresh perspectives, inspiration and support. A good mentor will honor all these three.

 

  • Family and relatives:

Your loved ones can also be a great source of mentoring if you pick up the right person. Although I recommend this option, I need to remind you that you may want to avoid relatives who will lack rationality to guide you. A relative will have so much love and affection for you, however that same person could be judgmental based on different biases, he or she may fail to disrupt you positively and truly get you out of your comfort zone. Whereas at this stage, what you're most probably looking for is some disruptive thinking to help you gain that extra courage and leave comfort behind, to reach your full potential.

 

2) How to prepare and run a meeting with your mentor:

 

Once your mentor is identified, meeting with your mentor is the easiest part. Here are few tips to guide you on this process:

 

  • Set up regular timeslots:

A common mistake that people tend to make is to give back the responsibility of the mentoring process to the mentor. Remember, your mentor is here to help but is not obliged, neither responsible or accountable about it. It’s your duty and responsibility to smooth the process and make it all easy for your mentor to spend that quality time with you. Ensure you find a slot where your mentor is available. Set up the right tools or means to meet virtually or find a nice place shall you have the chance to meet in person. Either way, make it regular, simple and stay flexible in case your mentor happens to have a calendar conflict. Remember, this person is doing a big favor for you and not the other way around.

Another quick tip here, during the very first session, spend some conscious time getting to know each other as people not only as professionals, this will remove awkwardness and humanize the discussion.

 

  • Come prepared for each session and have a small agenda:

You are the requestor for mentoring, you therefore need to put the effort to come prepared with a clear topic to discuss or brainstorm. At each session you set-up, don’t expect your mentor to improvise the session for you. If you show up unprepared, this actually may send a wrong signal to your mentor, that you care the least and you simply expect your mentor to do the work for you. Also, document and bring the progress to your mentor session after session, this will boost you even more in your thinking process and will also give a positive sign to your mentor that your talks have been valuable. Thanks to that, your mentor will be inclined to give you even more attention as he or she sees that great progress.

In fact, this is where the mentoring process reaches its full potential, it’s where both the mentor and the mentee feel to benefit positively from each other, the planned talk becomes not a chore but a source of pleasure where time flies by for both parties.

 

  • Keep your sessions short:

30mn to 45mn maximum is way enough. Remember, a mentor is not a coach, he or she is not there to teach you specific things and coach you in the most annoying detail on any subject matter. Your mentor is there mostly to let you vocalize out your ideas, share experience and to ask you some key questions which will help you mature your ideas, fine tune your findings and structure your mind. Your mentor will enable you to reiterate the thinking process until you find clarity, so that you feel more confident on the way forward. You therefore need to find the right balance between covering your agenda while keeping it short and disruptive.

Lastly, after each session, reflect about how the session went and take note of anything you'd like to enhance or change for the upcoming meeting. Ensure you add such points to your agenda. Here again, your mentor will only appreciate your engagement and will respect any constructive feedback.

 

3) How to benefit from your mentor in this career journey:

 

Going back to the 9 steps process to owning your career path, let’s suppose you now found not only one mentor but maybe two or more. All you need to do at this stage, is to talk your mentor(s) through your career aspirations plan (still in construction phase). Share and explain your dreams and the career vision you have for yourself - Articulate to your mentor(s) how all this seems to fit with your top values and strengths.

Seek your mentors' guidance - each of your mentors will feed you with diverse, rich insights and experiences, they will help you mature your ideas, structure your mind and gain confidence in your choices. Your mentor(s) will simply empower you to reach that level where you can finally articulate what is that you want to do next, with clarity and confidence. Their guidance will move you away from any space of feeling weak needing to justify yourself to a space where you readily share your aspirations with passion and conviction.

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Once you reach that level of clarity from your CAP, you'll then become ready and even more motivated for the next step - to design your ideal dream job. So, stay tuned for my next article, as I'll help you to also design your ideal job. I'll teach you exactly the steps I followed after I got lost for a good while as I was following the conventional path - focusing on "job titles". This unconventional method I designed turned out exceptionally helpful as it allowed me to land the dream job I have wanted since then.

As usual, you can do some extra reading & watching in the sources below: