Be a Mentor! January is National Mentoring Month.
Millions of people around the world and in your community are looking for a mentor. Be a mentor to someone new this January either online or in your community. “Mentoring Transforms Adversity into Achievement.” The Mentor News.
President Barack Obama issued a proclamation designating January as National Mentoring Month in 2014. He stated, “In every corner of our Nation, mentors push our next generation to shape their ambitions, set a positive course, and achieve their boundless potential. During National Mentoring Month, we celebrate everyone who teaches, inspires, and guides young Americans as they reach for their dreams.”
Around the world people rely on mentoring to maintain and grow their families, communities and businesses. It’s our duty to give back. Thought and emotional processes that are critical to success cannot be taught and learned in a classroom alone. Real life experience is needed to teach our new generations the success tools required to succeed in families, communities and businesses. Benjamin Franklin said: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and show me and I learn.”
I take on one new mentor each year from FindAMentor.com and then I hide my profile so I’m not flooded with requests. Most of us mentor many people and we have many informal mentors. I mentor my sons, their friends, my nieces and nephews, business colleagues, spirituality friends, etc. Some people I mentor once a month, others once a quarter or once a year. The mentoring relationship differs with each mentee and usually shifts over time in each relationship. Some of my mentors I only see once a year now. As a mentor, we can set the time frames for a mentee relationship. I allow 1 hour per month of time for new mentees. Often, after the first session, time requirements diminish.
Mentoring is a lifelong natural process we all do to different degrees as mentors and mentees. Remember, mentors often learn as much as their mentees in a mentoring relationship. They feel rewarded.
Make a list of the characteristics you are looking for in a mentee and what questions you want to ask them, so you can determine how to help now or if they can be helped:
- What type of experience do you expect them to have, if any?
- Are they involved in the field of interest of career now, or just wanting to be?
- How much experience do they need to have to be my mentee, if any?
- How old should they be?
- Should they be male or female?
- Ask the mentee questions to determine if they are a good communicator. What does a good communicator look like?
- Ask questions to determine what emotional process habits they have and if they are the right ones to succeed.
- Can you help them with confidence, patience, persistence and perseverance?
- Ask questions to determine what knowledge they have in your field right now.
- What do they need to know that they don’t now?
Peer mentoring or masterminding is a great option if you want to have far reaching affect. Masterminding is simply a group of people working together and meeting regularly to achieve common objectives. Napoleon Hill identified Masterminding as one of the common denominators required in achieving success of any magnitude after he interviewed thousands of the world’s most successful people. Any executive team is a mastermind. Sales teams, accounting teams or production teams, etc., are all mastermind groups. When a mastermind group is active, “a third invisible intangible force is created likened to a third mind’, writes Napoleon Hill. Hill devoted an entire chapter to masterminding in each of the many success tool books he wrote.
As a mentor, if you want to have a greater effect on more people, try leading a peer mentoring or masterminding group as a senior mentor. By leading a mastermind group you mentor more than one person at once and dramatically increase the learning curve in each of your mentees. Here’s how it can work best:
- Have 4 to 6 people in the mastermind group.
- The group identifies objectives each member, and the group, wants to achieve. Minutes are taken in each session by one of the members. Often the minute responsibilities are shared from session to session. Minutes are typed and forwarded to each member.
- The senior mentor shares the knowledge and emotional traits necessary to achieve objectives the group has identified.
- The mentees discuss how to utilize the knowledge and invoke the emotional traits determined necessary to succeed.
- In each session, each mentee identifies goals to be achieved and practical actions they are committing to accomplishing before the next session.
- In each session the mentees discuss their actions and goals achieved, or not, since the last session. Wins and challenges are discussed in detail by each mentee or mastermind member. Learning curves are increased dramatically when each person’s daily, weekly or monthly activities are shared and listened too. When there are two people sharing we learn twice as much, twice as fast. When four people share we learn four times as fast and four times as much.
The most successful masterminds I’ve witnessed in a business environment meet every week day. I’ve seen sales teams increase sales 30% year over year in a tough economy as a result of meeting daily. I’ve witnessed customer service teams increase product knowledge and improve customer service dramatically when the team meets daily. Meeting schedules are more demanding in a business team environment. Peer mentoring type masterminding with different purposes require much less time. I meet with a spirituality group once a week.
Common mentoring is a type of masterminding as well. When I meet with one mentor I am masterminding my development. When I call four different mentors and ask for an opinion on a challenge, I’m still masterminding using a different format. I take what fits for me from each mentor and discard the rest.
Having at least 4 mentors for every aspect of life that is important to you is a great idea. I personally have four or more business mentors and the same for spirituality mentors. I have 4 communications mentors. I have mentors for hobbies like construction or renovations. We can and do have mentors for many aspects of life. It’s a good idea to continue growing our mentor network. I meet new people every year that I use as mentors.
Be a mentor to one more person this year. Millions of people are in need of guidance and searching it out. If you find a new mentee on-line at FindAMentor.com or another website utilize the ‘Tools and Tips’ pages (top menu on home page) at FindAMentor.com. There are mentee and mentor questionnaire forms that you can use to help you verify the authenticity of someone you meet on-line as a prospective mentee or mentor. There are tips for being a good mentee and mentor. There are tips for the different types of mentoring you might be interested in utilizing for your company or organization.
If you need a daily inspirational email from us, join the emailing list. We won’t send you spam, we will just inspire you every morning with some inspirational quotes from a different mastermind group each day. We want to motivate you to achieve your goals. Go out and make it a great day. Thank you for reading.
Please tell your friends to mentor someone. Millions of people are looking for mentors. And we can all be a mentor to someone in at least one field of interest.
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