Identify The Persons Who Made Significant Positive Impact On Your Career

We learn lessons from mistakes and we keep on remembering the negative impact they had on us due to the painful consequences we suffered as a result of not being prepared or knowing in advance. In any situation, we can identify at least one friend or family member who helped us out of this situation and left a significant positive impact on our life at a time we didn’t know we needed him. The actions those persons do to us may be tiny or sometimes may change the course of our life. Those persons make the best mentors for us. Mentors are persons who advise other people called mentees with less experience or knowledge about a given subject. Mentors are more experienced than us and they can help us prevent making mistakes or going on the wrong path. Being able to impact our lives in such a way without expecting anything in return, reveals how altruistic mentors can be. For this reason, we are sometimes reluctant to ask a bit of advice from a person we know is more experienced or has greater knowledge about what we are doing. We feel like, for the sake of being altruistic, not all people would want to share the knowledge and experience they paid a lot of time and risk growing.

Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who have many advisors because they know that they cannot do everything by themselves and they cannot develop their expertise without the help of others. The thing that we often disregard is that mentors, besides being altruistic, have an interest in helping you because they get out as much as you from the mentorship relationship they provide. Mentors volunteer to help you and other persons because they get an opportunity to demonstrate their leadership style and knowledge. They encourage you to grow and develop professionally and personally. Besides the fact that they are better at setting goals, they maintain and help you maintain accountability and hold you responsible for accomplishing your set goals. Mentors are knowledgeable about a subject however they gain more knowledge and experience in helping others and learning and listening to different opinions too.

To be able to identify those persons who can be a great support and source of knowledge, encouragement, and inspiration to you, you need to network and be open for advice constantly. You need to trust people in your network who can give you the right advice when you share your thoughts with them. At the same time, you need to expand your network, one of the best ways to do that is through the help of mentors themselves. It is not so difficult to identify a friend or a family member that you have known for years to be a good mentor. However, when you cannot find help from your social circle and you want to reach out to total strangers, it is here where things become more difficult. Whether you are employing social media to expand your social circle and look beyond your network relying on common connections or simply attending events, meetings, conferences, or international forums the approach is almost always the same. Have clear and precise information about the topic you want your mentor to help you with, be prepared to freely state what you want upfront and keep it short because you respect your future mentor’s time, and always openly state your preparedness to give back.