3 Steps to Find a Mentor

This is such a common question that I get asked as a career coach. People know having mentors is important but do not know who to ask or where to start.

A mentoring relationship is the most rewarding when it is a two-way street, i.e. you rate them and they rate you. You want to ask them for advice and they get the joy of seeing you succeed. This is a relationship that is worth putting in the efforts and time to build.

What doesn't get you a mentor is when you ask someone straight up, cold, when they have no existing relationship with you. You will most likely get a no or a no reply because they don't yet care about you.

If you can get into a formal mentoring programme at your workplace or in your professional association, then go for it as this is an easy way to be matched up with a mentor who has the skills and knowledge you are looking for. Generally, these formal mentoring programmes come with a structure and will force you to set goals. I would recommend that you get paired up with someone you can relate to as this is the determining factor in how beneficial this relationship is.

For those of you who are not in formal mentoring programmes or prefer to have mentors organically (definitely my preferred way of having mentorship), here are 3 steps that will help you find and maintain these mentoring relationships:

1. Find someone you admire

Have a think about the people in your life, they can be in your personal and professional lives, who is someone that you really admire and what do you admire about them? From these two questions, you will know who and what you want to learn from them.

2. Build that relationship through informal catch ups

Once you have identified that person,  the second step is to start building a relationship with that person outside of the work or the personal interest context. What you are doing here is that you are slowly turning a work or personal relationship into more of a mentoring one. How I usually do this is to start having a casual coffee with them, then I will schedule another one if I find there is mutual interest, then another one. Casual catch ups mean you are talking about what is happening in their lives and telling them about what is happening in your life.

Through these informal catch ups, you will build trust with this person and be able to gauge what you can learn from them and how keen they are in helping you to succeed.

3. Establish a routine

Now that you have had some informal catch ups, the third step is to establish a routine of regular catch ups. This is your cadence, your rhythm of meetings. It might be 30mins every fortnight or 1 hour every month, whatever that suits your needs and both of your schedules. You might say something like this to your mentor "Hey I have really enjoyed having coffee catch ups with you, I can learn so much from you. I wonder if you would be keen to catch up every month. If so, I will set them up for us."

The key thing to remember here is that you as the mentee is the driver of the relationship, you are asking for what you need and it is not the mentor's job to handhold you.

Hope these career tips are useful and book me in using the button below for a free 30min coaching chat if you want further tips about your career.