The Art of Mentorship

The L3 Alliance is the women’s group for the Wells International Foundation. We believe that mentoring is one of the premier ways successful women can give back to the world. It is a fundamental part of the legacy that we encourage our members and like-minded women to build. We are featuring stories about women and mentoring in the article series called Mentoring Matters.

Today's Mentoring Matters article features April M. Frazier, a documentary and lifestyle photographer from Houston, TX. After an extensive 15-year career in the oil & gas industry, she established a photography business through which she provides services ranging from family portraits to corporate events.? Her most prized and ongoing work involves capturing the landscape of her ancestral roots in Texas and combining it with familial artifacts to create a genealogical visual of her family’s enslaved migration from Africa to Jamaica and on to several areas in the United States.

When I think of what mentorship is or what it does, I think of the act of one encouraging or inspiring another to do something. Mentors have lived experiences to share, and they communicate these experiences in a way that can directly or indirectly influence the behavior of the mentee. They are the nurturers pulling the mentee forward personally and professionally by providing an array of brushes with which the mentee can paint a future with much broader strokes. This exchange activates positive change and progression, and hopefully, a successful mentoring relationship. This describes my view of mentorship over my lifetime and speaks to the way I tend to these relationships with others.

I also think of the non-traditional mentoring relationships I’ve enjoyed with Family, as I hold a wealth of influential encounters with my aunts. I am blessed to have about 12 of them, and each, through their individual lived experiences, has collectively imparted wisdom at certain points in my life. I dare say this wisdom is inherent, as I believe it innately connects me across the lines of kinship through time to all the remarkable women that came before me.

My aunts point to the very meaning of being a headstrong woman. Observation of them being their authentic selves has given me confidence to make even broader steps in my professional walk and entrepreneurial pursuits. They encouraged my photography and history interests and are always present at my presentations and exhibition openings.

Before enjoying my current career as an artist, I worked in the oil and gas industry for about fifteen years in various information technology roles. I also spent ten months as an expat in Germany learning SAP (System Applications and Products). During that time, I crisscrossed Europe practicing different languages and was exposed to rich histories and culture that I had read about in books back home. From viewing ancient mythological architecture in Athens, Greece, to walking the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland drinking scotch on a cold, wet night, to setting eyes on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, I experienced things that I did not imagine to be tangible to me as a young girl.

To make those career advancement opportunities possible, I needed help to see a bigger picture than the position and department I had worked in for several years.

Two black women in the company were key at a time when I felt my career was a bit stagnant. I observed their perseverance and unwavering confidence in their respective work, and they inspired me to take a leap in applying for a global-facing role. They were also supportive in my pursuit of an advanced degree, even when my current manager told me that I didn’t need an MBA to do my job and that I should apply for a lower tier program. I graduated from Rice University’s MBA program in 2011 and began a professional photography career around the same time.

Transitioning out of corporate America and its culture was a natural next step and was the result of a desire over fifteen years to get closer to the community than my office on the 50th floor of the ivory tower would allow. Creating photographic art that shares history has been the unconventional vehicle to reach that community.

On the balance sheet of life, I’ve gained much more in the column of intrinsic value in the last ten years through work alongside nonprofit organizations to expose youth and adults to photography. I’ve finally found a career path that is assuring and allows me to be me – authentically – without conforming to anyone else’s standards. I encourage you, the reader of this article, to be observant of the people around you and seek out the ones that push you to think. Look for someone who challenges the concept of “It has to be one or the other, black or white” and presents the novel idea of, “Why not both?”