A mentor is a more experienced individual who counsels and guides a less experienced person (mentee). Mentoring is the process of leveraging extant material and human resources in order to grow and succeed in your personal and professional endeavours. Mentoring is an essential aspect of ensuring productivity and continuity in any area. We can break down the benefits of mentoring into some relatable areas.
Increased Confidence
Confidence is very important if you want to succeed in any work/field. For instance, sharing a business idea, helping a friend, teaching in a university, or many different things, confidence plays a significant role. Suppose your mentee is succeeding in business or career, it will boost your confident as you are also a part of his success. You will be much more satisfied to do more such things without any doubt, and this is because the person’s success reaffirms their abilities, resulting in a confidence boost.
Since mentoring is about constant interaction in an atmosphere of trust and relaxation, it becomes easy for the mentee to express ideas in other social gatherings. As a result of the level of confidence they exude, they boldly confront situations that do not favour them and the general public.
Develop your Skills
As said earlier, by mentoring, you take your skills to the next level. It improves the way they are with little more advance. Whether learning a new skill or polishing other people’s this way is the best way to improve your skills. Think you are helping a mentor where he/she asks you some advanced things that you don’t know. At this point, it enables you to improve by learning the things you don’t know and letting him know after you get it. Developing the current skills is nothing but being consistent about what we do. If you are very consistent with yourself, then success is not far from you.
The skills you are teaching can help you increase your communication skills, managing things, judging skills (giving feedback) and overall management ability. By this process, you will be improving your skills day by day to an advanced level. Life is a learning process, keep on learning, and there is no end to it since it is an infinite thing to do. The more you know, the more you earn from your skills.
Enrichment of network of friends and associates
Your mentor has what it takes to connect you to those who can contribute to your personal and career success. Since life is about contacts, links and networks, the more we get linked up with people, the likely we are to experience greater productivity. There are people we may never meet if not with the help of our mentors. They don’t just introduce mentees to people in a haphazard manner. They are meticulous in their choice of associates for their mentees.
An antidote to laziness
Good mentors put their mentees on their toes. Their presence is enough reason to succeed. If your mentor has invested so much in you, particularly in terms of capacity development, your mind is restructured to always think about pleasing them by your productivity and results. To avoid laziness and encourage productivity, mentors give their mentees targets, assignments and the kind of push that keeps them away from their comfort zone.
Feedback
Feedback is quite common in everything. When we deliver something, we will ensure how it is? This exciting feedback where you get either positives or negatives helps you improve yourself a step ahead. Everyone must want to know about them in terms of skills or services delivered by them. If we observe the real world, we mostly don’t get any negatives due to people’s person-to-person contact, making it easier for a positive response. Still, when we do mentorship, we can get genuine feedback from the mentees. Feedback makes mentorships special to increase the productivity in you and knowing where you stand.
Next time when you want genuine feedback from people about the things related to you, go to them, explain it, deliver the best you can, and wait for the response, which makes a massive change in reality that helps you a lot. From small to large, almost every company always keeps on asking for feedback because they want to improve and stand out among the competition.
We all need constructive criticism to succeed. With their candid feedback, mentors can help their mentees to discover loopholes in their decisions. They can also identify the strength and weaknesses of their mentees and then proffer ways of fortifying their strength and working on their weaknesses to eliminate them. While other individuals may not be faithful enough in their assessment of you, your mentor considers it a responsibility to be objective in their assessment of whatever you do.
Collaborative Learning
Most times, there is no filial relationship between mentors and their mentees. One of the unique features of mentoring is that it is a kind of relationship between two or more people with no prior interaction or relationship. In an organisation, therefore, mentoring helps build inter and intra-organizational personal relationships. When this happens, a collaborative learning domain is built and knowledge allocation among different units is strengthened.
Also Read: How to Study Smarter and not Harder
Improve your Resume
The experience and the knowledge you double up by mentoring can apply for any job role or develop your current position, which helps you build your career. Suppose if you apply for a job in the future, you will have an Interview. You will do very well in the interview since you have good mentoring skills, explaining and communicating abilities. These two are essential to get any job, and the bonus criteria are for applying for a management role in any industry. In the Resume, every section is important. When it comes to the skills or activities section, mentorship acts as the best option among anything since every company needs that. When your Resume is attractive, you will be filtered among the candidates who are very good indeed.
Management roles are pretty good when you have good mentorship skills, and adding mentorship skills to your CV takes your position to the front row in getting hired. Not only Management but also many other roles require these skills to achieve the role.
To bring up Hidden talent
Most of the people lack in explaining things. They are sensitive and nervous to explain to someone, but it can be achieved by practising consistently. Even when I was in my college, I never thought of explaining things to someone as I did not know I can do that, but later when my friend asked me to clarify during my exam days, I got the confidence that I can explain things. Still, later I started explaining more to my friends who are in need, and I became very confident and started participating in all the events from the management people, including the English Speaking Club.
In this way, I think many people are afraid or kind of nervous explaining, but even if you’re one among them, do not overthink. Just give it a shot, and you will not be disappointed. So as described, Mentoring is a hidden talent that everyone has, but it’s hard to bring out of them. One who brings out will be succeeded quickly due to more opportunities. If you’re in a position to hire people, your mentee might prove to be a future ideal hire.
Mentoring exposes you to different points of view
Life and career endeavours are not to be approached from a single point of view. It is important to consider varying perspectives and opinions when dealing with vital issues. Mentors help us consider the pros and cons of situations from divergent angles than we would have thought of if left alone. Since mentors have the benefit of hindsight, their advice and opinions go a long way in sharpening the foresight of a mentee, thereby helping the latter make good decisions.
The Final talk on Mentorship
Mentorship is essential for everyone to do extraordinary things. It helps you discover more about yourself and maintains confidence in yourself which is an add-on for your life. When you share, speak out about anything, maintain stable health, especially mental health, and find peace in yourself, self-confidence decreases anxiety and many other things. Those who receive mentoring are more promoted and will be given preference over those who do not do. We will get to know about our-selfs which is called self-awareness which helps you with your strengths and weaknesses.
Being consistent in his development of new ways of thinking improves his problem-solving skills in the real world. I think you’ve learned a few of the benefits of Mentoring skills and their use cases, and I hope you start if you have not started yet and will continue to an advanced level if you are a beginner. Now let me give you a simple task explaining mentorship to your friends in the way you are. You can make use of this blog while explaining if needed but make sure you do it. I wish you well for your future in whichever field you choose.