Post Shift Shot #41 - 3 Levels of Mentorship

Mentorship in this day and age is the simplest and most difficult than it has ever been, people must balance between an abundance and lack of information, we are bombarded every minute of every day via social media, the internet and direct contact from friends and family. This strange dichotomy of having all the knowledge in the world in your palm and asking for help from professionals has led to mentorship is a difficult relationship to cultivate, for any age, demographic and social status. Traversing this new environment where relationships are becoming harder to cultivate, finding modern elders that are willing to nurture and guide you in your career is difficult at best. With this all in mind, the three levels of mentorship cover this modern business terrain successfully.

Self-Mentorship

Self-mentorship or self-education is the easiest, most prolific and is best adapted to the modern age. Considering the nature of technology’s involvement in education, educating oneself in anything is a blog post or YouTube video away. Self-education is fulfilling albeit difficult one to start and continue as it is propelled by your own motivation and willingness to teach and learn yourself. This is the definition of self-mentorship in a nutshell, you must be your biggest supporter and critic at the same time willing to push yourself to be better, waking up every morning and getting at it.

Set yourself goals, such as attaining a certification, extra studies or starting a side hustle; set it into place on a timeline and then work backwards from that, setting yourself points along the path to check on your progress. Again, this takes a huge amount of self-awareness and drive that you first must focus on as a personal trait to complete your self-mentorship process. Self-mentorship should be the first step in bettering yourself because no one else will believe in you as much as you do and if you don’t believe in yourself, you can’t expect someone else to change that for you. Look inwards, become self-aware and get your goals.

Online Mentorship

The next level is online mentorship, which sort of does play into the self-mentorship a lot. You have so many resources online for certifications, online courses and pillars of your industry. Utilizing social media, sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn give you an abundance of industry professionals to network with. Online mentorship is sort of a little bit of self-education, but with everything being so interconnected these days, you can have mentors in different parts of the world that help you through your day to day. Message people you aspire to meet and make a connection, you could do this 500 times with 1 response, but that one response could be the change you are searching for.

Expanding your network outside of your city is the perfect way to gain online mentorship from someone that you may only see a few times a year at events or conferences. Finding someone who you can ask questions to and build your experience and build your knowledge on is important. And I think using the online platform as that is you can learn a lot more from online than you can usually learn from your own city.

Personal Mentorship

The third is the most traditional and can sometimes be elusive, the first two can be much more controlled by you, your pace, your style and your goals. This is where self-mentorship and online mentorship, it really comes down to you putting yourself out there and pushing yourself to become better. Personal mentorship is a little bit more personal and so reaching out to people who are in your industry and sort of asking for, “Hey. You want to hang out and have coffee?” or “Can I take you out for a beer?” is a resource in your city to learn and be mentored face to face. Personal mentorship shouldn’t be looked upon as lesser, but shouldn’t also be looked at as the most important part of mentorship; the world of audiobooks, podcasts, online resources has grown the resources for anybody to take control of their lives personally outside of the traditional mentorship methods.

These are the three levels of mentorship that I believe exists, which is self-mentorship, which I think is the most important. I think you need to have self-confidence in yourself to push yourself to be better. Online mentorship, reach out to your industry’s stalwarts, do it; Reach out to people in your industry that you would normally not think that would even answer, the worst they would say is no. Someone will say yes and someone will take you under their wing and give you some pointers and give you some advice and that’s a big thing. And then finally the one on one personal one, this one is more difficult in smaller cities because of just pure density and people that live in the city, so go up and shake that big name at the next conference you are at, network and take that confidence from self-mentorship to create the career and life that you want.