The Impact Of A Mentor

Benjamin Franklin once said, "there are two ways to acquire wisdom; you can either buy it or borrow it." By buying it, you pay full price in terms of time and cost to learn the lesson you need to learn. By borrowing it, you go to those men and women who have already paid the price to learn the lessons and get their wisdom from them.

This is the essence of the mentor-protege relationship. By going to people who are ahead of you in the personal or professional. By going to people who are ahead of you in the personal and professional arena and opening yourself to their input, advice, and guidance, you can save yourself the many months (maybe even years) it would take and the thousands of dollars it would cost to learn what you need to learn all by yourself.

To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to help us learn the thing that we need to learn to achieve our goals. The mentor we choose should be the people you respect, admire, and want to be like. The advice you seek should be guidance regarding your character and personality and specific ideas on how you can do your job better and faster. Remember, you can't figure it all out by yourself. You must have the help of others. Yopu must find men and women who will guide you and advise you on the road of life, or you will take a long time getting anywhere.

There are two vital qualities to look for in a mentor. The first is character and the second is competence.

Character is by far the most important. Look for a mentor who has the kind of character you admire and respect. Look for a person who has high degree of intelligence, integrity, jugdement and wisdom. The more you associate with men and women who are advance in the development of their character, the more you will tend to pattern them and to become like them.

The second quality you look for in a mentor is competence. This means that the person is extremely good at what he or she does. A good mentor in your career is one who has the knowledge, skills, and abilities to move ahead far more rapidly than his or her peers.

The impact of a mentor on your life is dependent on two additional factors. The first is your degree of openness to being influenced by another person. Openness is so important because many people, especially young people, are extremely impatient, always looking for shortcuts. When they get advice n something that another person has spent many years learning, they often try to add their own variations and improve on it without ever having mastered the original instruction.

Remember, when you open yourself to the guidance and input from another person, concentrate first on understanding and learning exactly what that person has to teach you. Afterward, you can modify and change that lesson to suit your changing circumstances.

The second factor that determines the influence of a mentor on your life is the willingness of the mentor to help you in every way possible to achieve your goals. We know that the more emotionally involved someone is in our lives, the more susceptible we are to being influenced by that person. When you seek out a mentor, you must look for someone who genuinely cares about you as a person and who really wants you to be successful in your endeavors.

So, for a good mentor-protege relationship, you must be wide pen to the influence and instruction of the other person, and at the same time, the mentor must be genuine concerned about your well-being and ultimate success. These are the two essentials.

Your ability to choose your mentors can be a crucial step toward achievement in all areas of your life. Over the course of your life, you will have many mentor-protege relationships. As you grow and develop, you will seek out different mentors, the people who can give you the kind of advice that is most relevant to your current situation.

Successful people are very open to helping other people who want to be successful. This is especially true if they know you are willing to be a mentor to others who are younger and less experienced than you. The more open you are to helping others up the ladder of success, the more open others will be to helping you.