5 Benefits Of Being A Mentor

I just walked in the door from lunch with one of my mentors.

He’s nearing the end of his life; he has stage 4 cancer…for the second time.

For years, we met monthly for lunch; so now, even though he can’t eat like he once did, he still insists we eat when we’re together.  The food is different…it’s softer…easier to swallow…less adventurous, but still, we “break bread,” each time we sit together.  And as we nibble away at our food, time becomes irrelevant, and I feast on morsels of wisdom.

Today’s morsel had to do with gratitude.

Maybe one day I’ll share what he said about gratitude in a blog post, but right now…in this moment…I find myself holding his wisdom close to my chest…unwilling to share it with anyone…irrationally feeling like giving it away would be like giving him away, and I’m not ready to be without him yet.

Irrational.  Yes.

Selfish.  Maybe.  Probably.

But…

Honest.  Raw.  Real.

So, I’m not writing about gratitude today. 

Instead, I’m writing the second installment of two teaser-like posts about mentoring.  And like the first, this too will be bullet-point style with as little narrative and explanation as possible, leaving the meatier, weightier explanations to the mentoring experts who’ll be serving as guest bloggers in January for National Mentoring Month.

Anyway…

I opened by mentioning our lunchtime conversation, because during today’s lunch and during any number of lunches through the years, this great man…this kind, gentle man…has regularly stopped the conversation cold to tell me what he gets out of our time together. 

What follows are the things he has been gracious enough to share with me about life on his side of the mentoring table, and the older I get and the more young leaders I’ve been privileged to mentor the more I concur that these are the…

5 Benefits Of Being A Mentor

1. FRESH PERSPECTIVE

When you are the mentor, people are coming to you to learn from your perspective.  They want to understand how you view the world…what you see that they can’t.  But mentoring is a two-way street. 

Inevitably, as issues and situations are being discussed, the mentee will bring up a new way of looking at an old problem…it may not even be presented as a statement or assertion, but more as a question or a pondering – a ‘what if.’  And before you know it, your mind is spinning and swirling with new ideas about old concepts…things that had grown stale for you become dynamic and interesting, exploding with new possibility…with fresh perspective.

2. INCREASED MENTAL ACUITY

Something we’re all aware of is the slow atrophy of the brain that happens as we grow older.  It’s part of the natural order.  It’s biology.  It’s human.  But that doesn’t mean we have to accept it without a fight or that we can’t do things to thwart its advance.

Studies show that learning new skills, attempting new challenges, and engaging in new experiences all have positive effects on the brain, and the same can be said for taking on a mentee who knows how to ask great questions. 

The more your brain is stretched and challenged to come up with insights, answers, and observations the stronger and healthier it will become.  And the increase in mental acuity multiplies exponentially with each new mentee you add, as you’re forced to respond to questions on a wider variety of subjects and offer those responses in ways specific to each individual’s circumstance and season of life.  

3. LEGACY

When you pass along your life’s learnings to others, your impact and influence echo far beyond you long after you’re gone.

4. BEST VERSION OF YOURSELF

As a mentor, you will almost certainly, at some point along the way, find yourself giving advice to someone that you’ve either stopped applying to your own life or (and this is mind blowing, but it happens all the time) you’ll say something that you’ve never thought about before but that you personally needed to hear.

And when that happens, if you’re smart and still doing the internal work that we should all keep doing until the day we die, you’ll leave that interaction and start applying that advice to your own situations and relationships.

Giving advice to others reinforces the life lessons that were most helpful to you along the way, and it reveals new or forgotten life lessons that will help you become the best version of yourself.

5. GRATIFICATION OF MAKING A DIFFERENCE

Both of us teared up at different points in our lunch today as we spoke with pride about the things some of our proteges were accomplishing in the world.  (It was almost as if we were trying to one up each other by telling the stories of other people’s success.) 

Other times we’ve talked about the positive life change we’ve seen people make.  The way someone took a piece of advice and ran with it and did far more with it than we ever thought possible. And we’ve smiled contented, satisfied smiles.

As a mentor, there’s an incredibly gratifying feeling that goes along with seeing someone you’ve invested in exceed the contributions and accomplishments you’ve personally made.  And if you’re really lucky (which most people who make mentoring a lifestyle turn out to be), you’ll have the privilege of having one of your mentees call you…or write you a letter…or sit across the table from you and tell you how their life is better because you took the time to pour into them. 

There’s nothing quite like it.  It’s supremely gratifying.

I hope that in reading these last 2 blog posts something has stirred inside you and you’ve decided to find a mentor and a mentee…to travel life’s journey with someone ahead of you and someone behind…to become more and better personally while helping others do the same.

That’s certainly been my experience. I hope it’s yours too.