What a Mentor Does For You

A mentor is more than a teacher, more than a coach.? When you have a true mentor, the influence of that person goes through your whole life.? A mentor shows you where you want to go.? He or she may also be a teacher, showing you how to get there; but the larger role, of showing you how to learn, makes the connection deeper.? Indeed, it is eternal in the sense that a mentor works with you to shape your vision of life and what you can contribute to it.? It’s not just your own life. A true mentor will encourage you to understand that you can make a real contribution to the world, nourishing your visionary process.

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For me, the influence of mentors was profound, and it is not an exaggeration to say they saved my life.? I had a difficult early life.? As a teen, I felt isolated, and I knew for sure that nobody understood what I was going through.? I was stuck in my own whirlpool.

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Details aside, at a certain time I was exposed to some brilliant people who gave me the courage to look up instead of down or to the side, who talked about ideas and principles instead of events. I realized that I was not who I thought I was, and that I could be more than I had thought I could be. I started to listen to these people who had open minds, and who wanted to share their knowledge.

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This perspective shaped what I believed about life, and it still does to this day.? Certain short things that were said during that time will stand out for the rest of my life.? Here are some of them.

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From my art teacher, Bill Reilly: “There are no mistakes in art.? If you think you made a mistake, change your idea and make it look like it was supposed to be that way.”? He helped me to visualize my own life as being a work of art.

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He encouraged me to find my own path, at a time when I was getting a lot of messages that were not encouraging me to do that.? He believed in me. He told me, “Don’t listen to them. They’ll turn you into a hack.? Live your life, and then you will know.”?

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From my rhetoric and composition teacher, Marion Shelby: “Truth lies in fine distinctions.”? When we are willing to look at those fine distinctions, we see that life is not cut and dried, one way or the other. There can be many differences in the way we process information and communicate it.

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From my communications teacher, Paula Kurman: “Almost everything we say or do is done by our body language, our gestures, our tone of voice.”

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Learning how to think, how to live, how to be: that’s what a mentor offers you.? It can be hard sometimes to get past the old ideas, but it is worth it.? When you find a true mentor, cherish the opportunity and make the most of it.

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