availability of your mentor, and establish a
regular meeting schedule.
Be a good mentee. Just as there
are specific characteristics of a successful
mentor, there are attributes that make
a good mentee. Remember, a mentor is
doing this from the goodness of his or her
heart, so being a good mentee is the best
way to ensure the relationship enjoys a
healthy, purposeful existence. A mentee
needs to be committed, willing to ask for
help, open and receptive to learning and
trying new ideas, able to accept and act on
feedback, able to communicate appropriately and effectively, able to meet on a
regular basis and be personally responsible and accountable.
How to Become a Mentor:
Becoming a mentor can boost your
own professional development, as well as
help others. Through constant reflection
on your own best practices and mistakes,
your continuous self-reflective analyzation often reveals myriad characteristics
that may have gone overlooked. However,
good mentors, must not only be successful
and experienced within their own
positions, but must also desire to develop
other people, seeing their growth and
success as their own.
Define your Goals. Establish
guidelines for the relationship early
on with your mentee. They may have
concerns about specific issues such as
confidentiality, so talk those through in
your initial meetings. Your ultimate goal
is to empower your mentee and it can
be more effective to ask constructive yet
challenging questions. Ergo, your role
is to guide, not enforce. If your mentee
turns out to not be fully committed to
the process, reaffirm your boundaries for
the relationship. Your time is valuable and
mentoring should be enjoyable and mutually benef