“Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen and a push to the right direction” – John Crosby.

Have you ever tasted or experienced to be as a mentor or as a mentee? Do you wish to know the magic a mentor would make in a mentee life? 

Mentoring is derived from Greek word meaning “Enduring” which states as a sustained relationship between a youth and an adult.  This relationship is more extended to sustenance young minds when they are in grim period to face new challenges or new issues and juggling to sort it out.

Mentoring is an influential instrument in sharpening and shaping the life and to enhance the self-confidence among the young minds.  Motivating towards right goal, guiding and advising in right direction to achieve success with proper training and support are the foremost role of mentor in the progression of mentoring. Mentoring is helpful to circumvent unwanted risk and mentor act as a role model, advocate, friend and as advisor in the timely context-specific from experience, wisdom for solving the problems. Mentoring is a formalized process where an experienced person plays a supportive role in overseeing and encouraging reflection and learning with their mentees to augment and facilitate the personal growth and development.

Mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself_ Oprah Winfrey.

Mentoring is of different types like one-on-one mentoring, group mentoring, speed mentoring, reverse mentoring, peer mentoring and distance or E-mentoring.

One-to-one mentoring is the traditional method where an experience and a senior mentor will be linked with the required set of individual or group of mentees to get guidance and support to lead with confidence to meet any impediments in the path to accomplish the goal.

Though group mentoring is designed for groups, every individual in the group will be exposed to get mentoring from different mentors and also to get from different mentees as they are in groups.

Another interesting mentoring method is speed-mentoring where small discussion about convinced and specified questions will be addressed by the mentor for a very short duration of time. For speed mentoring to be effective right location, pooling of mentees and mentors, aligning of mentor and mentee, scheduling of right time for meeting and allotment of moderator to maintain the time is of more important to make the speed mentoring more operative.

To get fresh insights from young minds senior mentors will sometime gain diversified knowledge from less experience person/ mentee is called as reverse mentoring. This approach of reverse mentoring is widely used in corporates to get latest, fresh and out of box thinking.

Peer mentoring takes place between people who are the same stage of the career, age and experience. This is the opportunity for the peer mentor to upsurge their own social and also their professional networks.

Advances in technology has provided a great opportunity to reduce the time for planning and coordinating the sessions for mentoring. Tele-monitoring or E-monitoring or distance mentoring is supported by using technology and not as face-to-face mentoring sessions. Misunderstanding the communication, time consuming in building the trust between mentor and mentee are the major challenges in this mentoring.

“A mentor is not someone who walks ahead of you to show you how they did it. A mentor walks alongside you to show you what you can do”

Questions to be address for identifying a mentor by a mentee:

• What is the current life status?
• Where do I wish to be in near future and the organizational goals I wish to achieve?
• Do I have any skill or experience gaps which are not fulfilled to achieve the goals?
• What type of mentor will be of more appropriate to achieve my goals and bring the reduce the gaps?

By addressing the above specific questions, the mentee will be able to identify the right and perfect mentor for him to achieve his goals and claim the ladder of success.

“A mentor -mentee relationship is ideally like that of a guru and disciple: motivated by the desire of guru to impart knowledge to the disciple.”

Vivek Wadhwa