Here is how to be a business mentor. First, you must have attained a certain level of expertise in a particular line of business. This comes with the strengths you have achieved and the shortcomings you must have experienced in the process.
Becoming a mentor is not an easy task, this is because, when you finally decide on becoming a mentor, you have decided to invest a good percentage of your time in your mentee’s financial growth and expansion. In as much as it is demanding, it is also rewarding.
Seeing your mentee financially stable and successful in the end will make you feel accomplished. To become a successful mentor, it takes more than giving advice.
Ready to mentor? Let’s help you make it successful.
How to Be a Business Mentor Successfully
What kind of mentor would you become? This is the big question that should be answered by anyone who has decided to venture into mentoring.
Mentorship is not an easy thing. You should be able to answer a few questions that would determine your capability of becoming a mentor.
Questions like these:
- Would you be able to put in all of the sacrifices it takes to guide a younger entrepreneur?
- Would you be able to continue mentoring that person, even though you hold different opinions on certain issues?
Other questions that also show your level of loyalty to your mentee, for when it’s going tough. Suppose you’ve been able to establish your willingness and loyalty that takes to be a mentor. In that case, you can pick any individual to mentor.
1. Develop the act of listening
After successfully picking a mentee, you should be able to hear them out. Most mentors don’t usually listen to what their mentee wants; they just tell them what to do.
As a mentor, you should be able to develop good listening skills. Don’t only force your opinions and ideas into their plan. Let your mentee have a say, it is their business.
Your job as a mentor is to support them and guide them when you feel they are taking the wrong step. Listening to your mentee will help you know what they like, and this will strengthen your bond.
2. Have a set goal
By listening to your mentee, you should know what they hope to achieve by getting a mentor. This will enable you and your mentee to have a set goal by marking out the level of success you would achieve within a certain period of business time.
Setting your goal makes it easier for you as the mentor to know what you’re working with. Avoid limiting yourself to just having a set of goals.
Goals are just expectations, dreams and aspirations you hope to accomplish. You certainly won’t accomplish it by just setting them; you have to put a reasonable amount of work into achieving them.
3. Be constructive in your criticism
It is believed that a mentor should be able to listen to his mentee to figure out what they want for their business. Still, at the same time, a young entrepreneur, especially one that is just starting out, might now know what’s right for his business.
You should be able to disapprove of an idea that you feel might result in a loss and while doing this, avoid openly criticizing them; this is to avoid hurting their feelings. Instead, advise them.
You can share your past experience with them, so they would learn from it. Also, refrain from only noting their mistakes; you can also point out something positive they’ve achieved and commend them for it. This will help to improve the confidence of your mentee.
4. Employ empathy
Being empathetic goes a long way in strengthening the bond between a mentor and mentee. Taking an interest in your mentee as a person helps to achieve higher levels of empathy.
As a mentor, you can’t be blind to your mentee’s feelings. When your mentee is having a bad day, you should be able to pick up on their energy and work with it. You should abstain from being hard on your mentee, not everyone is the same.
In cases where your mentee is slow to learning, you only need to apply patience with them. Always put in a good word of encouragement with them daily to boost their confidence.
5. Celebrate your mentee
Everyone likes to be celebrated and your mentee is no different from others. As a mentor, you should be able to celebrate your mentee on their achievements. Most mentors only talk about negative things, like the shortcomings of their mentee.
When you make out time to commend your mentee, even for their smallest success, you find out that it makes them happy, boosts their confidence, promotes good behavior, keeps them focused, and prompting their drive in the business.
From the video: Do you have people come to you and ask you for advice and you sometimes felt like, “Wow, I don’t know if my advice really works or not but these people keep coming to me.” Well, you’re a mentor, and this is for you to learn how to become a successful mentor.
My name is Kirk Duncan and I train people on how to be a successful mentor. Over the years and when I say years, the last 20 years of my life, I have had many people approached me to ask for advice. In the beginning, I could not understand why people were asking me for advice, my own personal life was messy.
I couldn’t even hardly keep my own home organized and here people are coming me to me for advice. I could not figure out what and why they were approaching me. So, along the way I surrendered. I figured if they’re approaching me, they must know something about me I don’t even know.
What I did notice is I could give advice and it wasn’t just ideas that might work. I actually had figured some things out that I didn’t even realize I even knew. So, here I give someone advice and their life gets better. And now I probably should follow my own advice.
So, I kind of fell into this experience about being a mentor. Since then, years and years and years ago, I have definitely studied and done the work and done my due diligence to educate myself about what it takes to be a successful mentor. Now, mentors, something that’s cool about mentors is it’s a personal experience they’re sharing with you from their own lives.
That’s what a mentor does. They share from their own lives their wisdom, their knowledge, their experience, their failures, their successes. And so you get real information from mentors, which is awesome. Why would I ever want to make the same mistakes somebody else did?
Why don’t I learn from them? Why don’t I save myself time? Well, the same thing applies to the people who approached me. Is that they’re wanting to save themselves time. They’re wanting to save themselves the hassle, the struggle.
They’d rather get on to their new struggles but get caught up or get moving up to where I’m at from the experience I can share with them. So, let’s talk about what it takes to be a successful mentor because people are coming to you.
So the big question is why? You know why are people approaching you? What’s happened? What is it that you actually do know that you could share with people? You know, because it’s time to get yourself a little bit more organized here.
What do people keep asking you about? This is something that would suggest to you that you track. When people ask you for opinions and ideas about their challenges or problems, I think you pull out your phone and you write down these questions that people ask you. Because they’re telling you, you have some deeper insight in this area than you even recognize yourself.
This will help you build your idea of why you can be a great mentor. As long as you keep pushing it away and keep denying that you could ever be somebody like this, maybe it’s time to listen. Maybe it’s time to recognize what people keep asking for.
