Mentoring?  Me? 

Sound a bit overwhelming?  It shouldn't be:

"Mentoring is to support and encourage people to manage their own learning in order that they may maximise their potential, develop their skills, improve their performance and become the person they want to be." Eric Parsloe, The Oxford School of Coaching & Mentoring

Mentoring should be a good experience for both mentor and mentee, a two-way learning partnership. What exactly it involves depends on those concerned, but it could be face to face meetings, phone calls or just emails or texts. Mentoring is a chance to reach your career and personal goals by being supported, advised, challenged and inspired.

What does it do?

Mentoring has been show to have a great many benefits for both the mentee and the mentor. These include:

• Increased confidence, motivation and self-esteem
• Access to a role model
• Greater knowledge about the area of work
• Support through "difficult times"
• Broader network of contacts
• Skills Development
• Challenging your assumptions about what you are capable of
• And, not least, enjoyment!

Finding a mentor

You can identify your own mentor, by thinking about these factors

What are your objectives?

Be clear about what you want to achieve from the mentoring relationship. And in what time frame would you like the mentoring relationship to take place.

What would you like in a mentor?

Good listening skills, a sense of humour, integrity, emotional intelligence, an interest in personal development - think about what skills and attributes you would like your mentor to have.

You can then approach someone who you feel would make a suitable mentor.

But there are also organisations who run mentoring programmes, such as MentorSET and Women in Property. These mentoring programmes take the pressure off in terms of approaching someone off your own bat.  They can share their experience of setting up hundreds of mentoring relationships.