Being a professional mentor is a difficult and demanding task: time, energy, giving of yourself and working on yourself.
The reward, in turn, is the satisfaction of what one does every day, which compensates (at least in part) for fatigue or lack of time for other activities. For me, the most important motivator is that I simply enjoy my work.
What else can/should motivate us?
Money, of course, for the work done. In the case of mentoring, it has become accepted (though fortunately we hear it less and less often) that mentoring is a helping profession. On the one hand, we have “profession” in the name. – that’s good, “assistance” – also great, because it’s useful, but at the same time there is a feeling that it’s such an addition to “real action” and should be free. Nothing could be further from the truth! Mentoring can and should be earned.
I continue to be and will continue to be an advocate for engaging in social programs, as their impact on what is happening around us cannot be overestimated. Thanks to them, we can help those who could not commercially benefit from such assistance. This, however, does not preclude earning from mentoring, where we prepare for sessions, pass on our experiences and respond to the mentee’s needs.
Other helping professions (e.g., therapy, medicine, coaching) are paid, mentoring is still often provided in companies, universities, or community programs. Happily, I’m getting more and more calls from mentors and mentees who want to provide their services to the market and are looking for the right place for them. Excellent! We look forward to seeing you!
Taking pleasure in giving of oneself and supporting others is an equally good motivator. However, this should not be confused with the desire to save the world and repair business or life relationships. Such an approach firstly shows the lack of distance of the mentor and the hidden problems he is trying to solve in this way. Second – it carries the risk of assuming responsibility for whether the mentee succeeds in something or not. And that is not the role of a mentor or mentee.
A good and quite common motivator is also the desire to make a change in one’s life and experience something new or make things easier. To be a mentor, you don’t have to do it professionally. You can be a leader at the same time, who, using the skills, models and tools of mentoring, makes it easier for yourself to function in business, have more and more achievements and more satisfied people around you.
And finally, one piece of advice: in order to keep your motivation to be a mentor or mentee at an all-time high, you need to find time to stop and think about yourself – treat yourself as you would a customer.
