3 Important Qualities To Look For In A Mentor
Having a good mentor can make the difference between reaching your goals and failing. At The Life Edge, we are very grateful for the mentors that we have had throughout our journey. Some of these mentors were life-changing and we owe a lot of our success to them. Others, we outgrew sooner than anticipated.
Through this process, we realized there are 3 important qualities to look for in a mentor.
- They should be an expert in the area of mentorship
- They need to be honest with you
- They should be humble
There are other good qualities to look for in a mentor. However, we found if they were missing any one of these three qualities, then the outcome did not always work out as well as we all hoped.
Expertise
First and foremost the person you look to as a mentor should be an expert. This is something that we briefly touched on in our other post, How You Can Find A Mentor Today.
This leads to the question, “what is an expert?”
An expert can be considered anyone that is further along in their journey or has more experience than you do in a given topic. Choosing or finding the right expert takes a little finesse.
Say that expertise on any specific topic was rated on a scale from 1-100. If you would rate yourself as a 7 then anyone 8 or above could technically be considered an expert. This is because they have more authoritative knowledge than you do in that subject.
This is where finesse is required. If you are rated a 7, finding a mentor that is rated a 9 may not be the best for you. The learning curve is too flat.
An example of this would be a person who is deeply in debt financially, going to someone for advice that is in less debt. The knowledge gap between the two is not large enough to offer any kind of significant help.
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Honesty
This is pretty straightforward but very important. True mentorship will not exist without honesty.
What good is a mentor to you if they are not willing to tell you the hard truths that you need to hear? The best mentors that we have ever had were brutally honest with us.
A lot of times we think of a mentor as just being a guide. That is part of it but the best kind of mentor is someone who tells you when you are the one standing in your own way. This does not mean that it is their job to solve that problem. It means that you need someone willing to be honest and tell you when you are the problem so you can start fixing it.
This was key for us and our growth especially when it came to relationships. We needed someone willing to tell us to look in the mirror. That we were 50% of the problem.
It did not fix everything right away but it helped us realize that it was our pride, insecurities, fear, etc. that was the real issue. From there, we were able to deal with the root cause and begin to grow in our relationships.
This would not have happened if we did not have a mentor that was willing, to be honest with us.
Humility
There are two reasons why humility is an important quality for a mentor.
First, you want someone who knows where their expertise ends. You don’t want someone telling you how to live your whole life.
For instance, you don’t want someone who is single and has been divorced 3 times giving you marriage advice. They may be a perfect human specimen and a great mentor in the area of health and fitness. However if they cannot be humble enough to not hand out marriage advice, it will begin to strain the relationship. Getting advice from a mentor like this will start to cause some internal conflict as it will become harder to trust them and the advice they are offering.
Second, your mentor needs to be humble enough to admit when they are wrong or made a mistake.
This is a big deal because we are talking about someone who is helping guide your life. If this person gives you bad information and is not willing to own up to it, it could have major effects down the road.
Think of it this way.
You are a pilot with the goal of flying a plane from L.A. to New York. The thing is, you have never been to NY so you find a co-pilot (mentor) to help guide you. Their job is then to point you in the right direction and help you avoid the same mistakes they made when getting to their destination.
After takeoff, if that “co-pilot” tells you to turn right when you should have turned left and then does not correct it, you’re not going to make it to NY.
This is why humility is so important. We all know that humans make mistakes and that is o.k. However, if someone is not willing to admit it when they make a mistake, that could have a drastic effect on the trajectory of your life.
The Total Package
Remember this is not an extensive list of all the traits a mentor can have. This is the list of what they must have in order to be a good mentor.
We have found that if a mentor is not an expert in a certain topic, honest, and humble, there will not be much to gain out of the relationship for either party.
As you walk through this journey we all call life, you will have many mentors. You may outgrow some of them, others you may find just head in a different direction than you want to go. That’s perfectly fine. This is your life and in the end, you are the one who needs to be happy with every decision you make, even choosing your mentor.
We just want to help you make the best decision you can when it comes to choosing your next mentor.
Cheers