Helping someone to flourish in their lives can be a life-changing step for your mentee, employer, and you. If you have not considered it before then it’s time to start thinking about it. Being a mentor can bring so many opportunities to you so think out of the box and beyond obstacles. Here are five reasons which are enough to explain why you should be a mentor.
1. You Learn Professional Leadership Skills
When you are in a position where younger people seek guidance from you, you get a chance to learn strong leadership skills which are applicable in your professional career. Moreover, the more you interact with your mentees, the more effective communication skills you develop. You also hone your emotional radar while working with mentees.
Not only this, but you can also train them for self-confidence and help them to reach professional maturity in their career without any sense of bossing them. In this whole process, you train others and what you communicate with them also prepares you to lead a team in the future.
2. Mentoring Brings Humbleness and Compassion
If you are involved in healthy mentoring, you make yourself a role model for your mentees. Healthy mentoring does not involve a superiority complex but you place yourself in the shoes of mentees. Everyone starts from scratch and no one is born to lead. We learn the right strategies to be successful in leading people and setting examples for others.
When you think back about your time and see yourself doing it all, then you can give your mentees genuine guidance. With this, you learn the importance of humbleness and compassion in the mentor-mentee relationship. These two-character traits are very important to feel good and not underestimate anyone. Not to mention, people reward you for your humble guidance and good mentoring.
3. You Learn Current and Future Trends
Undoubtedly your time was different than your mentees who are living in the current era. This may not be relevant to all mentors but if you are guiding someone younger than you, you find yourself more in touch with the trends. You get maximum exposure to future trends, technologies, career progression ways, people’s approaches to handling different work, and much more. This learning of future trends can improve your current standing in your career.
We all admit that younger people have different skillsets and knowledge. Even if it’s about language, they may have different vocabulary having more contemporary terms and phrases. Moreover, their hangout places will be different than yours and you get to know about those unexplored options.
4. You Get Rewarding Responses from Your Mentees
Changing someone’s life and helping him to reach from nothing to something noble gives a sense of satisfaction. You cannot even believe how much it means for others, especially those who are at the very early stage of their career. You feel awesome when you are in a place to help someone with their career development and progression to do good in the next life. With your skills and experience, you can guide them to go with the most effective career option.
Moreover, this can be a huge help for someone who is about to start his professional life and wants to learn about the challenges and dedication it requires. Your experience sharing can do wonders in their professional life. This encouragement and support can help them to get the most out of their potential.
Moreover, guiding someone having totally different career perspectives can be as rewarding for you as it’s for your mentee.
5. Mentoring Helps in Improving Productivity
In current times, everyone strives for perfection. Even employers need well-grounded and dedicated workers. No one has enough time to train the new employers and help them to work on their deficiencies. Transferring your insights to your mentees can help them to stand out from the crowd. They will be better equipped with workplace requirements, challenges, and handling unseen difficult situations. They do better at their job and this increases their chance of getting a promotion.
In all the important factors of mentoring, opening new opportunities for juniors is a good thing to do. Moreover, this leads to more productivity from your mentees which can be a great help for the organization and you as well. This helps to grease the organizational wheel quickly with younger talented workers.
There are many people who just stepped into mentorship who confuse the real meaning of mentorship. They believe that mentoring is one way of giving time and advice which can ultimately enrich the mentee’s life. They believe that mentorship is all about giving something to others and getting nothing back. However, this is not a good approach. We all agree that knowledge multiplies with teaching and guiding someone. When you pass your knowledge to a novice, you strengthen your knowledge as well and clarify those lessons. So, before you decide to assume “No” think about the discussed reasons to say “Yes” to mentoring.
