Why Should You Become a Mentor?

Lauren Krause
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Becoming a mentor to others is a noble, rewarding choice that you can make today to make a lasting difference. Consider some of the reasons why you should become a mentor to students, professionals and others in your business and community.

Expand Your Career Family

Building a personal relationship with your protégés can be a great opportunity to expand your career family. Younger protégés often bond with their mentors and look to them as role models throughout their careers and the rest of their lives. Your protégés are likely to become close to you and may even become lifetime friends or business partners in the future.

Create a Better Workforce

By becoming a mentor to your employees, you can help them and improve your company's productivity. Help your employees identify their best talents and skills, and teach them how to use them. Protégés whom you take under your wing may even turn out to be some of your star employees.

Strengthen Your Own Knowledge

When you teach an important concept or lesson to someone else, you also reinforce and harness that information for yourself. Mentoring others forces you to place your learning in a form that can be seen, heard and understood by others. By mentoring others, you resurrect, clarify and organize the knowledge that you have gathered over the years, and you use it to further your own goals.

Give Back to the Community

If you are a successful professional or business owner, you can become a mentor to give back to the community in the form of a helpful service. You do not have to give your money when you become a mentor, but you can give some of your time. Members of society have a moral obligation to help others once they get ahead, and mentoring young students or other professionals is a great way to do it.

Change Another Person's Life

Many young entrepreneurs and professionals fail because they have little guidance on how to make it in the business world. No matter how many reasons you consider when becoming a mentor, the most important one may be that you can change the course of another person’s life through the power of mentorship. Mentorship also allows you to set an example for others, and many successful business owners attribute some of their success to the mentors who guided them early on in their careers. Your protégé may grow to become a positive force, and you can look back with pride that your positive influence helped to make it happen.

Becoming a mentor allows you to create a powerful legacy that lives on long after you retire. Many executives and small business owners find greater satisfaction and happiness while in the process of mentoring.

 

Photo courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net


 

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