Mentors and mentees

Telemachus and Mentor
National Gallery of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The difference between friend and mentor is not clear but good mentors are also friends although that's not quite how Daumier saw it a couple of centuries ago. Age makes a difference to the relationship. 

It's not just that the mentor has to understand the mentee, it works both ways.

One mentor has gifts of patience, humour, much tact and reserve.   We will get to a point where he, with all the experience, has his way of doing things and I want to do it another. Rather than force his way through we wait, negotiate, try to understand where and why the point of difference is. I have come to understand him well. Sometimes I know he feels pressure to come up with a solution there and then. I have come to sense when it may not be the right one. I will suggest we work on something else for a bit or have a beer or a bite to eat. He will go home and his mind will gnaw away at the problem. The next day he will invariably have a better solution. 

 He has a tendency to take over, unless I specifically ask to try, which he always allows.  

The dynamic took months, years to understand.  Mutual patience, tolerance and a focus on the other's strengths rather than weaknesses was key. 

A mentor needs plenty of life experience, patience in spades and sometimes an ability to manage boundaries. 

Trust is key in the mentor - mentee relationship. A new mentee will make mistakes, to find things hard, feel stupid and insecure. The mentor knows all this because they have been there and have likely seen it many times before. A mentor is a rock of security in a roiling sea in which the mentee would otherwise drown or wash up drenched and half dead. 

Dawn French talks about feeling stupid, but safe with people we trust. Telling the story of something foolish we did or something hard that happened to us, in a funny way, to people we trust, because we know they will enjoy it, is probably a form of therapy.  The mentor is one of those people. It converts the experience from something bad to something good that we share and in doing so, learn from. 

While there is usually an external focus, the thing being learned, the best lessons are not necessarily about that. A purely utilitarian relationship is a dead and rotten thing. The most valuable thing is the relationship and the epiphenomena, the incidental experiences and insights. It is a profound experience.