The Ghost of Mentorship Past

#Books are a massive part of my life. Books have been my primary source of #enjoyment and #education, from being a little kid and going on adventures with Matthias the mouse from Redwall to reading An Army at Dawn to learn more about the Allied campaign in North Africa.

Yet, after seeing a post on LinkedIn this past week, I realized that I have been forgetting or minimizing some of the biggest #mentors in my life – characters and real people from the books I’ve read!

Why is this realization important to me? Books have been #mentoring and #developing me my entire life, and that is a huge concept for me. That means someone took the time and effort to write down their story, their lessons learned, and their #mistakes so that I could learn from them and potentially be better off. Or it means that someone took the time to craft a story and weave lessons into the story so I could learn while being entertained. It means that people cared enough to #mentor me through their labors.

As an #introvert, #socializing to the point a mentor-mentee #relationship can naturally develop is often exhausting. Time spent needing to decompress and recharge social batteries can be interpreted as disinterest, and the process begins all over again. Or, sometimes, life presents situations where a mentor is impossible to find in the wild – but books are always there waiting to fill that gap and offer their lessons to me.

One of my favorite parts from the Ted Lasso series is how Ted begins to mentor Roy Kent on multiple fronts by giving him a book, A Wrinkle In Time. As we’re told, it’s about the struggle with the burden of leadership – which Roy faced as captain of the football team facing relegation (demotion) and used those lessons to become a better captain and person.

I’ve had a previous boss who used a book club to help expose us to different ideas, scenarios, and applications of leadership, military intelligence, and various other aspects of being a US Army officer. ?

While other mediums (videos, lectures, and face-to-face) are helpful, we rarely use books or articles to help others or ourselves learn outside of an academic setting because it feels too daunting. However, these methods can provide us with centuries of advice and life lessons that other mediums cannot. As leaders, managers, coaches, and human beings, it is imperative that we engage in being mentored by books.

As we go throughout our day or week, here are some questions to reflect on:

What book has mentored you in your life? What was the most impactful lesson from it?

How can you bring reading to your team to cultivate a book mentorship program?

What book would you share with someone if you could have unlimited copies?