My experience with mentorship

Over the years, I have heard people talk about mentorship again and again. Even people in my circle throw in ‘my mentor said’ once in a while and it used to irk me. In my mind, I was almost always like what’s the big deal about mentorship and I had a subconscious plan to ‘make it in life’ without a mentor – something like this one. Looking back now, I know all of that was borne from a place of frustration and not having a mentor of my own. All of that changed in the past year and I now understand better the importance of mentors.

My first experience with being more comfortable with the idea of mentorship came with reading Dr Ola Brown’s article on mentorship. Some points she shared were that you can have multiple mentors and also have a mentor from a distance – you don’t have to have close relationships with all your mentors.

This was satisfying for a time as I began to see people I admired as mentors and read their books more. Over time, I realised that this wasn’t enough and I still needed mentors I could closely interact with. This brought on a new dissatisfaction but this time, I chose to find mentors as opposed to rebelling against the idea of mentorship.

I started my search by finding people with careers in my field of interest, reaching out to them and asking them to be my mentor. As you may have guessed if you know anything about mentoring, this approach didn’t have the best results. The lack of results made me want to return to my rebellion against mentorship but I chose to try searching a bit more. I decided to reach out on professional platforms I was a part of to seek mentorship opportunities. This didn’t yield much at the time as there was no such opportunity available so I had to continue my search. (They now have a mentorship platform which I like to believe was (partly) influenced by my ask).

As I kept interacting with senior colleagues, I found that I related more with some people and so I chose to stay in constant communication with them. As time went on, these relationships turned into a comfortable mentoring one without me formally asking the ‘will you be my mentor’ question. During my YALI training, I also got the opportunity to have a mentor formally, and that was one of the major highlights of my program. I was deliberate in choosing my mentor – a female – and our sessions were filled with discussions on women at work that I didn’t even know I needed. Although that mentorship period lasted just a month in line with the program, the benefits are long term.

I am still pretty new in exploring being a mentee in this mentorship business but I can say it has been fulfilling so far. Having a more experienced person guide you and offer insights as you build a career – and sustain it – cannot be overemphasised. I no longer feel the urge to rebel against it – I have now joined the ‘my mentor said’ gang. 😀

Is mentorship worth the hype it gets? I shared my thoughts based on my experience. Find out here. Share on X

I started writing this post with the aim of sharing tips on how to find a mentor (I think I did that slightly) and get the best out of the relationship. To keep this post short, I will share that in a different post. You can find that here.

I would like to hear about your mentorship experiences as well if you have any. Or your experiences with finding one.