How to get the best mentors

We learn powerful lessons from our own experiences. Of course, we can watch others do things or read them in books, but learning from experience sticks with our memory much harder.

At different points of our learning journey, we recognise mentors helping us grow by sharing their own experience. We value their expertise, and we use their time to share their lived stories and inspire our future doings. It is fantastic to absorb all the valuable learnings and the mistakes of someone else and make it a bit our own, but more often than not, mentorship is not the first choice. I owe plenty of my successes in my career thanks to the mentors I had, and today I want to share with you a little tribute to their work. If you are in doubt if mentorship can solve your problems, this article is for you. If you are not sure if you should get a mentor, you will find the inspirations to get closer to your answer in this story.

Here are my personal top five tips to secure an outstanding mentorship and why I believe mentors helped me walk the most insightful paths I have ever seen.

Get the right mentor for you

Choosing the right mentor is a hard job. After all, mentorship is about human connection, and we want to be 100% sure that we go out and ask the best person of all. In truth, you don’t need gurus to put the mentorship cape on for you. You don’t need gurus at all. The right mentor for you is somebody that lived an experience you want to learn on. The right mentor for you might have been unsuccessful at that. They might have failed repeatedly. The right mentor will be able to share the stories and help you see around your blind spots. Don’t discriminate against your mentor based on the illusion of being “the absolute best”.

Don’t discriminate against your mentor based on seniority, either. Despite experience being rich in mentors with a long history in a given knowledge, you should ask yourself this question: do you need it? Or would a much-inexperienced person help better share what happened to them as it would have happened to you?

Above everything, make sure you know what you need out of your mentorship. Being able to spell out the exact thing you need to learn is the starting point of any mentorship. A mentor can offer fantastic help to bring you from point A to point B but will eventually fail in helping you if your destination keeps changing or is too far to reach. So always ask for help, knowing what help you need.

It’s not only about you

I have learned something quite later, only after having been a mentee a few times myself. Only when I started mentoring other close friends myself. When we look for mentors, we look inside and focus on what we need. We focus on what can we get from the mentorship. We often fail to see that mentorship is instead an exchange, and we, mentees, mentors are receiving great learnings from connecting with us. I have seen the best mentors meeting me with a spark of curiosity about my progress, eager to hear how I approached my difficulties. The best mentors are the ones that understand mentorship is a two-way conversation when sharing experience becomes an opportunity to improve themselves. Mentors indeed learn how to teach others and let others better prepare for what life has to offer. However, they also know to enhance through others, giving mentorship a whole more powerful meaning. Ask your mentors: what is it in for them?

Stick to a schedule

It may sound dogmatic, but having a regular cadence of meetings with your mentor, makes the top three of my tips and for a good reason. In my experience, skipping sessions and also skipping important follow-ups is of the top reasons why mentorships fade away, never end and die unsuccessfully.

Be diligent and respect the time you and your mentor put aside to make this connection a reality. Then, use it and a forcing function to practice what your mentor suggests and what you learned.

You don’t need only one, but many more

You may need to improve on more than one thing at a time. Consider having more than one mentor and make the topic of your learning very concise. Mentors are not life coaches. You need someone that can help you lift quickly and become knowledgeable. You need someone to help you with a specific topic. If you need help in more than one area, do consider the possibility of asking for more mentors.

Put into practice or get out

Last but not least, I wanted to reinforce what will make your learnings 100% yours: practice. Always put in practice what you learned in your meetings with your mentor. Do share back your feedback on how did it go. Improve, get better, iterate. If you are not willing to step outside of your comfort boundaries and action your learnings, you fill the glass of mentorship only at the half. Practice does not only help you better remember what to do. It helps to make such learnings yours by applying them your way. It also helps as a step forward in your mentorship as you will discuss, retrospect and comment about such events with your mentor.

If you are lucky enough to have the help of mentors, give back the gift of your time. Give back the gift of putting into practice the lessons you shared with your mentor. Practising is the ultimate secret recipe for a successful mentorship and key to unlocking the human relationship you have just started to create with your mentor: from learning to amazement.

Simone