"What I need is someone to talk to who has walked down the path
I'm just beginning," said Lisa, four months into her new marriage.
"Whenever I go to my mom or dad with a situation, they end up parenting
me or teaching me something I don't really need to learn."
Lisa, like most newlyweds we have met, needs a mentor. Mom and Dad
certainly serve a helpful function in the life of a new bride or groom,
but they cannot usually offer the distance and objectivity that a
mentor gives. For this reason, it is important to realize exactly what
a mentor is not.
The following is a list of mistaken mentoring roles we have
witnessed, offered as a guide to keeping you from making the same
mistakes. A mentor is not:
- a mother or father. Your job is not to parent the person(s) you are mentoring.
- automatically a pal or a buddy. Your job is not necessarily to be friends for the purpose of socializing.
- "on call" for every little crisis. Your time is limited to discussion about major situations, not minor ones.
- necessarily committed long-term. The mentoring relationship may
have a prescribed timeline or it may follow a natural cycle of its own.
- a professor. Your job it not to instruct in the traditional sense;
you'll typically not need to prepare for your meetings or do any
research. Your life experience is your teaching tool.
- a know-it-all. We'll have more to say about this later, but let's
make it clear right now: your job is not to have all the answers.
Instead, a mentor is a relatively happy, more experienced person purposefully investing in another to effectively navigate a journey that the person has already begun.
