How To Have a Successful Mentoring Relationship

Many of us have gone through different mentoring relationships in our lives. Professionally, emotionally, and even physically, you may have a mentor in each category and sometimes you’re even unaware that a person has become a mentor/guide figure to you. But the question is, what steps can you take to assure a successful mentoring relationship?

The Eight Principles Of Mentoring

Here at AugMentors, our primary focus is making sure that your mentoring relationship is successful for both the mentor and the mentee. For that, we developed the Eight Principles of Mentoring to help guide mentors and mentees reach their goals together. 

The Eight Principles of Mentoring Include:

Ready to know how these principles work together and are the key to mentoring success? Let’s dive deeper!

Vision

At the top of all the principles is Vision. This will serve as your goal and your foundation for the mentoring relationship that you’ll be committing to. To find your vision, you need to know what is your passion and what how do you see your professional life.  Combine those two together and find people who share the same vision as you so you can find inspiration on setting up your own goal. Lastly, an important element is approaching vision with vulnerability and humility to continue to support your relationship and interactions. 

Roadmap

Once you have your vision, it is time to put it into action. To do so, you need to set your roadmap. Having a roadmap means that you’ll stay on path throughout your mentoring journey with your mentor/mentee. To set up an effective roadmap, you need to:

• Be out there. Gather perspectives and ideas from people you meet on the way and use those perspectives to see things from different points of view in your mentoring relationship.

• Map it Out.  Having a map will ensure that you are pointed in the right direction.
• Pack Your Backpack. Having a backpack means that you can bring out your tools whenever you need them as well as add more perspective and ideas from the people you meet along the way.

Search

The next step is finding the right mentor profile for you. The most important part of the search is trying to focus your search on people that meet your criteria. This saves you time and effort as you’re narrowing down the choices to a few. To make the search much easier, it is important to be yourself. This allows possible mentors to really get to know you and they might be the one approaching you instead. One thing to remember is, take a breather, a mentoring relationship is not a race but a journey.

Pitch

They say that first impressions last and this is especially true in mentoring relationships. How you approach a person can make or break your chances of establishing a relationship with a mentor. A perfect approach needs to have:

• Find the connection. Nothing beats a pitch from a person you know. Take your time to do some research before your pitch.  Share your connection and enthusiasm.
• Be flexible. Provide options for your mentor. It gives them the impression that you’re willing to adjust for them.
• Understand time sensitivity. Setting the perfect time for your mentor means that they’ll feel no pressure to meet your requirements and schedule.

Connection

Now that you found your mentor, an authentic connection is necessary to make sure that your relationship will go forward. Authentic connection means that you’re both creating space for each other to share vulnerably and truthfully which you can achieve by being an active listener when your mentoring partner is sharing their thoughts. Lastly, you need to know and show true kindness to each other. True kindness means that you’re willing to show kindness without expecting something in return. True kindness is contagious in that it transfers from your circle to other people’s circle.

Consistency

Consistency goes a long way in building a healthy mentoring relationship. It means that you’ll always be there for your mentoring partner. When you have meetings every week or every month you have to be there for them. To practice consistency in your mentoring relationship, you need to:

• Ready your mindset. Be always ready to take a minute and think of the next move before executing it. This ensures that you’ve chosen the best possible step for the situation.

• Be curious. Always try to get something out of your mentor/mentee. Ask questions or share stories. Be curious so that you’ll continue to be consistently learning from one another.
• Know when to take risks. Taking risks means that you’re ready to take the next step in your mentoring relationship and evolve. 

Resilience

Nothing is perfect in this world. This is also true when it comes to mentoring relationships because they are vulnerable to pitfalls. Having resilience in these kinds of situations means that you’re ready to bounce back even after a setback to continue your mentoring journey. Setbacks can be prevented or lessened if you think ahead and plan ahead of time on what you’re going to do if you meet a pitfall in the journey. You can also use your intuition and experiences which you can use as a basis for your decision making. The most important thing when it comes to setbacks is the trust that you have with your partner. Unexpected setbacks can still happen even after planning ahead, but if you have trust in your partner, you can go through those together.

Evolution

The only constant thing in life is change, may it be good or bad. In a mentoring relationship, it is important to continuously look for ways to improve your relationship and evolve it to the next level. In order to evolve, you need to:

• Stay away from stereotyping. Don’t stereotype yourself when it is not working out. They chose you to be their mentor/mentee because they see the potential in you.

• Form the best team. Strive to improve, walk the journey, evolve together and form the best mentor/mentee team.
• Don’t be afraid to ask. You’ll 100% miss the shots you don’t take. Learn to ask so you can continue your path to evolution.

Summary

Having a mentoring relationship is never easy. You have to constantly think of not just yourself, but also your mentor/mentee when it comes to what’s next. Having these principles can guarantee that you’ll have a smooth path towards the goal of your relationship and evolve to the next level. Interested in having mentoring that matters? Connect with us now!