Have you ever felt you needed a professional anchor who could handhold you to success?
This is exactly what a mentor does for you. Mentors are people who help us understand our business, produce outstanding results and also stand by us in times of need. Mentors are guides who are also friends and philosophers. Just about anybody could be our mentor if we consider them our inspiration.
Business leaders, Team Managers, Entrepreneurs, Filmmakers, Artists, Writers, Bloggers and just about everybody have their own mentors. While they seek inspiration and guidance from their mentors, they become mentors for their juniors in return and thereby, this process of exchange of knowledge and learning continues seamlessly.
Mentoring has been in place since times unknown. As per a Harvard Business Review article, “Mentoring is a formal long-term relationship” and nonetheless, it goes well above and beyond just career counseling. Mentoring includes seeking guidance from one’s mentor for professional conduct at work, managing work relationships as well as technical direction at work.
Here are the top 5 benefits of having a mentor by your side:
1. They help you develop stability at work: Mentors often guide you conceptually besides helping you with the technical know-hows. As they are experienced people, they know how relationships are built at the workplace and how these relationships could be successfully utilized for achieving business results.
2. They guide you technically at work: Mentors provide technical inputs for you to excel at your job. Ideally, they are people who have already worked in your field and know the details much better than you do.
3. They help you see through situations and conflicts successfully: Mentors are people who have faced troubles and conflicts at work much before you did. Therefore, they are good at conflict resolution and help you with solutions to problems.
4. They provide choices when you are looking for solutions to problems: Mentors are people with broader thinking. They provide not just one single solution to problems but also provide several alternative solutions for you to choose from.
5. They provide novel perspectives to situations and circumstances: Mentors access people, situations and happenings from a third person point of view and analyze situations objectively. As a result, their suggestions are less emotional and more beneficial to your problems.
To conclude, a mentor is someone who stays with you when the whole world seems to have deserted you. Likewise, their teachings are eternally applicable to all your problems and truly remain an inspiration at all points in time.
It has been a while since I wrote my last article but as we start 2019, I do hope to share the importance of having at least a mentor. I hope that you begin this year supported, heard, and empowered.
Follow us at Voices Of Asia to enter a world where everyone feels safe and supported, through mentoring and learning:-
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Kelvin Kong, Founder & Mentor, Voices Of Asia & Senior Vice-President, Learning & Development, Lazada Group
