What is an Effective Mentor and How Do I Find One?

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When I got married, I wasn’t sure how to be a wife. I didn’t honestly know what a relationship between a husband and wife looked like. I had never seen nor experienced a healthy marriage. My parents were divorced when I was two.

When I had children, I wasn’t sure how to be a mother. Failure seemed to be my best friend and teacher. I didn’t know who to turn to for questions about raising toddlers, raising teenagers, and everything in between. I felt lost and alone.

When our family first moved overseas, I wasn’t sure how to navigate a foreign culture and language, how to raise kids in a cross-cultural setting, how to deal with the frustration of culture shock, how to balance family and work life, how to survive crazy Arabic language study.

“Have you ever had a mentor?” someone asked me one day.

“What’s a mentor?” I asked.

I had heard about mentors for troubled youth, someone to walk alongside them to help them figure out life and get back on the right path. I had also thought of mentors as those who worked with apprentices to learn a new trade or skill. However, I had never thought about having a mentor in my own life.

What is a Mentor?

“A mentor is a person or friend who guides a less experienced person by building trust and modeling positive behaviors.”

Hmm . . . “guide a less experienced person.” That really intrigued me.

Riverside Webster’s II New College Dictionary 1995 defines a mentor as “a wise and trusted teacher or counselor.”

In my early years of marriage, parenting, and living in a foreign land, that is exactly what was missing. I needed someone to come alongside me who was older, wiser, and more experienced. I needed someone who had walked that road ahead of me, someone who would share their journey openly and honestly with me. 

I didn’t have that for years. So, I started looking for it. 

I began looking for someone I could follow. As a woman, I was looking for another woman I admired, someone I aspired to be like. I wanted someone who led a life that I desired. When I looked at that person, I wanted to be able to say, “I want to be like her! I want to be a woman, a wife, a mother, and a professional businesswoman like her. I want to follow in her footsteps.”

To me, that’s what a mentor was. I didn’t have a woman like that in my life, but I wanted one. I needed one.

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How Do You Find a Good Mentor?

 I wasn’t sure where to begin to find a life mentor, so I started right where I was. I looked around at my current relationships and asked myself some questions.

—Who in my life is a model, an example of the life I want to lead?

—Who do I know who is real and authentic about their own life, their successes and failures, their joys and sorrows?

—With whom in my life have I already shared something personal that has been kept confidential?

—What older person in my life do I trust?

—Who do I look at and say, “I want to be like them when I grow up?”

—Who do I see who has characteristics and qualities that I would like to have as a person, a spouse, a parent, or a professional?

—Who do I know who is a good listener, with compassion and empathy?

—Who do I know who can ask good questions to make me think?

—Who in my life do I consider to be wise?

—Who would I be comfortable opening up to and sharing some of my deepest struggles and challenges?

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What is Effective Mentoring?

I also did some research to find out what mentoring was all about. 

According to the American Psychological Association, the primary characteristics of effective mentoring include the ability and willingness to:

• Value the mentee as a person

• Develop mutual trust and respect

• Maintain confidentiality

• Listen both to what is being said and how it is being said

• Help the mentee solve his or her own problem, rather than give direction

• Focus on the mentee's development and resist the urge to produce a clone

It was also important for me to understand what mentoring was not: “Mentors, however, are not intended to serve as mental health professionals, legal professionals, or parents.”

Mentoring can also overlap a bit with coaching, as mentors are also encouraged to actively practice other-centered listening and to ask practical, open-ended questions. 

However, mentoring is different from coaching in that mentoring provides more clear direction to the mentee from the pool of wisdom and experience of the mentor. Coaches, on the other hand, are there to ask questions in order to help guide you to find your own discoveries and solutions. In any case, the questions and coaching of a mentor can help us move forward in our lives when we are simply stuck and don’t know what next step to take.

“The questions and coaching of a mentor can help us move forward in our lives when we are simply stuck and don’t know what next step to take.”

Courage to Ask

While looking around at my current relationships, asking myself some reflective questions, and trying to identify who might be best equipped to fulfill the role of mentor in my life . . . I made a list.

It wasn’t long. When I was honest with myself, there weren’t a lot of women whom I had strongly admired and who met all the criteria. However, there were two, so I started there.

I also looked for other resources and contacted organizations, like See Beyond, who could connect me with an experienced mentor who might be just the right fit for me in this season of my life.

I reached out in an email to a few of them and explained what I was looking for. One of them responded favorably.

“I would love to mentor you. It would be an honor to walk alongside you. Let’s meet!”

That’s what we did. I was living overseas. This woman lived in the United States. Through a simple Zoom call, we were able to meet. I explained to her where I was in life and what I needed during this season. She understood. This woman was about twenty years older than me. That was just right.

We agreed to meet the first day to determine if it was a good fit. It needed to work in both directions, and it did.

My mentor and I have now been meeting regularly for the past year. She has listened well to my story. She has empathized. She has asked questions. She has coached me. She has counseled me. She has shared her similar experiences with me. She has told me about her life lessons learned as a woman, a wife, a mother, and a hard-working business woman.

Having a mentor in my life has changed me. I now have someone I can rely on, someone I can go to, someone I can ask questions to, someone with whom I can share my story. This wise woman has walked the road ahead of me, and I can learn from her life, her example, her choices, her behaviors.

This mentoring journey has so impacted me that I am now mentoring a few young women in my life who are 20-30 years younger than me. The lessons I have learned are now being passed down to the next generation. 

That’s what mentoring is all about—passing the baton and leaving a legacy to those who follow in our footsteps.