Need for a mentor in life!!

Life is full of confusions. Life is full of challenges. And you there is a general tendency of people to make mistakes. I am sure there is nobody who can claim that he has not made any mistakes in his life so far. After all its normal. Because, learning from mistakes, others' or self, has been the way life goes. And so there has to be someone who tells you what is right, what is not. Because, life is too short for each one of us to experience everything. So you need to learn from others' life, pick out all the good points, but know about the not so good points also. Thats where the role of a mentor comes in life.

A mentor is nothing but a trusted person, a counsellor or a teacher. Usually a mentor is a more experienced person. He is someone you can confide in. According to my understanding, there is a difference between a mentor and a teacher. Teaching is more of a profession. Mentoring is more out of a responsibility of some sorts. Teaching is about money, mentoring is about seeing the mentee (the person who is mentored) succeed. In fact some teachers can also be good mentors too.

A mentor can be anyone. It can be your dad, your professor, your boss, your friend, your brother or even your colleague. It can be anyone who you basically trust. Because everything in life is driven by one thing, and that is trust. Coming to the question of why a mentor is required, we all are really inexperienced in anything in life. This may seem a bit confusing or difficult to understand, but my only justification to that statement is that the world is too big, and learning is a continuous journey. So we all do mistakes. A mentor can, out of his experience, foresee it. He can prevent you from doing so. Many a times, we are confused about taking this path or that. Thats when a mentor will come in hand. More often than not, at life's cross roads, we are not sure what can be good and what can be dangerous. That time again, mentors play a major role. All great and successful people had mentors. Aristotle mentored Alexander the Great, Chanakya mentored Chandragupta Maurya. Freddie Laker mentored Richard Branson. So on and so forth, history can give umpteen number of examples.

We all work hard. We all put a lot of efforts. But what is the use of these efforts without knowing what is the end result expected? Why is the effort being put? So its more important, to plan better and then execute, rather than simply putting efforts. The direction of the efforts is the most important thing. And to show this direction, sometimes, a mentors experience is very important.

How does a person generally become somebody's mentor? Its not that you select your mentor all of a sudden. And its not that discreet either. A person becomes another's mentor after a lot of things. First of all, a feeling of trust has to set in. Then the comfort levels and wavelengths of each others should match. Skill sets and interests should overlap somewhere. You need to talk to each other very often. Its all about investing time with each other. The mentor should get a feeling that this person needs me for his benefit. Its not about ego, but its about some kind of a responsibility that comes due to some sort of attachment to the other person.

The greatest qualities in a mentor are patience to listen and a firmness to tell. He should be genuinely interested in seeing his mentee succeed. But his main responsibility lies in only telling what to do, and what not to. How to react and how not to. Doing it is the job of the mentee himself. The mentor does not in himself, come out and do it all for the mentee. And the most important quality, I perceive, in a mentor is he should be tough mentally. He should be a source of strength for his mentee. And you can't be a source of strength for someone else if you are not strong yourself!!! And this mental strength is required to be with the mentee, when, more often than not, he makes a mistake and needs a shoulder to cry on. Because these are all situations which just happen!!

End of the day, its some sort of a mutual benefit that will fuel this relation. The mentee getting a whole load of experience, suggestions and ideas and the mentor in himself, some sort of a satisfaction of having played a role in making someone prosper, happy and successful.