Mentorship and Coaching
Mentorship and coaching go a long way to achieving success. Having been in the land of midlife for a while now, one of the many reflections I have is on the topic of mentoring, mentorship, and coaching in general. ( Booher has been purchased, migrated, and is now is Communispond ). It started in thought within Toastmasters but spread quickly to the boundaries of life itself.
Many people who are successful (definition bears a superfluous discussion in itself) began in the early years by hooking up with a MENTOR. It could have been a father or mother in the family business. It could have been a good friend or person who gave someone their first job. It could have been someone who recognized talent, passion, or skill in their young mentee and decided to take them “under their wing”. Then one thing leads to another and both progress.
But there are those rare individuals who are self-taught and fundamentally, did it all on their own. Now I speculate that there aren’t that many. There are those who “claim” they did it on their own, but really, if dug deeper, you would find they too, had a mentor or some mentorship that developed somewhere in their early days.
Working without a mentor means a person will make mistakes and learn from them, which is good. The problem is that recovering from mistakes can take time ………… and money. If these mistakes are too severe, recovery from such could be costly and a major setback, as the person waits for the dust to settle and the events to simply work themselves out. One common example is betting the family farm on the next “whiz-bang” idea or hot tip on the stock market. A mistake like that can teach a lot, but cost huge.
Working with a mentor means trusting someone beyond question, freeing your creativity and drive to do whatever you are striving at. It could be mentoring on a career path, how to succeed in business, how to become a better cyclist, etc, etc. The ideas are endless. But you have no fear of failure and failing because your mentor would not let you fail, correct? (Well, in most cases and I suppose there are exceptions).
Mentors, mentorship, and coaches.
We depend on many of them, within Toastmasters.
