5 Tips for Finding Your Next Best Mentors
What specific area of your life or professional career do you wish you could be better at? Networking, confidence, facilitation, managing others, vision casting, leading meetings, finances, parenting, marriage, or something else?
Finding a great mentor might be just the relationship for you to invest in. Here's what's so fantastic about finding a great mentor: Mentors can support our professional and personal development as they share their expertise, offer guidance, and even act as an advocate for us! AND they can accelerate our growth in areas that would otherwise take us years to learn ourselves. Not to mention help us avoid those potentially inevitable mistakes that we're prone to when we're trying to become good at everything all on our own.
The reality is, no one mentor is going to be a perfect fit for every area of your life. In fact, you might find it really helpful to have a mentor for a number of areas of your life like career, finances, parenting, marriage, or even for your hobbies. But finding great mentors can feel nearly impossible to do if we're not looking in the right places.
Here are five tips to help you find a great mentor and grow in every area of your life from someone who’s been there already!
#1 Find someone you admire
When looking for a mentor, you want to find someone you admire in the area you’d like to be mentored. Make sure not to make the mistake of thinking that they have to be older than you; they just need to have had more experience than you! The person I admire the most in my hobby of triathlon is younger than me, but she’s so much more experienced than me! Age doesn’t matter, it’s the experience that does.
The key to finding a great mentor is finding someone that you already know and interact with. This is the best way to know if they’ll actually be a good fit for mentoring you in a specific area of your professional or personal life. Since you already know them and interact with them, you already see and admire how they do what they do and want to learn from them. That’s the perfect kind of mentor. When you don’t already know someone and interact with them, you might find that you actually don’t admire them as much as you initially thought you did while watching them from a distance.
I have friends whom I really admire, but after spending more time with them know that they wouldn’t be a good fit for being mentors for Jake and me as parents or for marriage because we don’t share the same core values. We still admire them, but we know from being in close proximity to them that we wouldn’t actually want them to be our mentors.
#2 Determine what your goals are
Once you find someone who you want to ask to be your mentor, think through what your goals are in that area of your life. What are you hoping to gain from the mentoring relationship? What do you want to learn from them? In what specific areas do you want to grow? After having them as a mentor what would you like to be different in your career, finances, parenting, marriage, or your hobbies? Or what do you see in them that you'd love to learn how to do yourself? Have a good idea of these goals before you ask them to mentor you.
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#3 Ask them if they’d be willing to be your mentor
Once you know what your goals are, ask them to be your mentor. Share with them why you admire them and what your goals are for the mentorship. You have nothing to lose from asking them. Even if they don’t currently have the time and aren’t able to do it, they will be totally flattered that you asked them to mentor you.
And if they don’t have the time right now to mentor you, is there something you could do for them to serve them that would also put you in closer proximity to them? Could you rake their leaves, shovel the driveway for them (obviously a Northern reference, we woke up to snow the first week of November!), mow their lawn, run an errand, help them with their kids, get creative! Even if it’s not the mentoring relationship you had envisioned, you’ll be blessed by the time you spend around them!
#4 Set expectations of what things will look like
When they say yes, take the lead in starting the conversation around the expectations of how often you’d like to meet and what you’ll do in the mentorship. Will you meet bi-weekly, monthly, bi-monthly? For how long? 6 months, 12 months? Where will you meet? Same place same time every time? Will you go through a set of questions together or read a book together or workout together or have different topics to talk through each time you meet? When you bring these logistics up you will help them see that you’re going to take this seriously and that you really are committed.
#5 Evaluate how things are going
Lastly, once you start meeting, make sure to regularly evaluate how things are going. There’s nothing worse than setting up expectations and putting in the time to get together than to not be getting the results that you were hoping for out of the mentorship. Make sure you regularly evaluate how things are going for you, your mentor, and the mentorship relationship in general. Look back at your goals and see if you're making the kind of progress you were hoping to.
These are five tips you can use to find a great mentor and set up a successful mentoring relationship. Now that you know how to get a mentor, I'd love to hear from you! Tell me in the comments below the area of your personal or professional life that you’re going to start looking for a mentor! What’s the biggest insight you’re taking away? Most importantly, what is the first thing you’re going to do to find your next mentor? How can you turn that insight into action today?