You Know More Than You Think: A Practical Guide to Becoming a Mentor

September sometimes brings with it a sudden realisation that there are only a few months left of the year and those goals you set yourself back in January haven't quite all happened yet…

And whislt we back Mentoring every mointh fo the eyar at Meat Business Women, now is a great time of year to focus on it!

And we're starting with something we hear surprisingly often:

“I'd love to mentor someone, but I'm not sure I'm qualified/senior/confident enough.”

If that sounds familiar, here's what we'd like you to know: you probably know far more than you think you do!

You don't need to have all the answers - really.

One of the biggest misconceptions about mentoring is that a mentee comes to you with a problem and you're expected to provide the solution, but thats not really how great mentoring works.

Your job is often to help someone think, not to think for them which simply means sharing your perspective & asking them questions like...

Tell me more about that.
What's making that difficult?
What would a good outcome look like?
What options do you think you have?
What's one small thing you could do next?

Often our mentees just need an external perspective and the time and space to say something out loud and work through it.

Your 'normal' experience might be incredibly useful to someone else

Think about everything you've learned through your career so far.

Perhaps you've learned how to speak up in meetings. Manage your first team. Deal with a difficult conversation. Return after parental leave. Move from operations into a commercial role. Ask for development. Manage competing priorities. Recover from a mistake. Or just get stuck into an industry that can sometimes feel pretty daunting.

Those experiences might feel completely ordinary to you now, but to somebody facing them for the first time, they're anything but.

You don't need to be ten rungs further up the career ladder to help soemone else out, because being a couple of steps ahead means you remember exactly what that stage felt like.

Four things you can actually do in a mentoring conversation

Still wondering what you'd do as a mentor? Here are four simple techniques.

1. Ask, don't immediately answer

Before jumping in with advice, ask another question. “Can you tell me a bit more about that?” is sometimes going to give you more information before you can get ot a solution

2. Really listen

Good listening isn't just waiting for your turn to speak. Pay attention to what your mentee is saying, how they're saying it and perhaps what they're avoiding saying. Reflecting something back – “It sounds like confidence is the bigger issue here, rather than capability. Does that feel right?” – can help someone see a situation differently.

3. Help them remember what they're capable of

If someone feels stuck, ask them to think about a time they handled something well. What did they do? What strengths did they use? What could they bring from that experience into the situation they're facing now?

4. Turn big ambitions into small steps

Career goals can feel enormous. A mentor can help someone explore where they want to go and then bring the conversation back to: what could you actually do before we next meet?

And we won't leave you to figure it out alone

MBW members have access to our Mentor Toolkit and Mentee Toolkits, covering everything you need to get a mentoring relationship off to a great start – from preparing for that first conversation to setting goals, asking useful questions and reviewing progress.

You can also hear directly from MBW mentors Katie and Victoria, who share their own experiences of mentoring and what they've learned along the way.

And if you've still got a few questions or doubts, read All the Things You Wanted to Ask About Mentoring (But Didn't), where we tackle some of the most common mentoring myths.