Inspiration, Motivation, Action: The Three Pillars of Being A Business Mentor

Coming from a business background, mentoring might feel like the natural next step in your career but for some that step can seem daunting. After all, just because you had a successful career, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to teach the secret of your success to others, does it?

In practice, business mentoring is far easier than many people assume so long as you have the experience and the right mindset. In order to help you achieve that mindset, we’ve put together our top tips for a business mentor. With these three, simple principles, you’ll be a transformative force in someone else’s career, helping them to excel in a space they’ve always longed to.

Inspiration

People often underestimate the importance of inspiration but when it comes to mentoring, the value of inspiration simply cannot be overstated. It’s one thing to have a dream, but to talk with someone who’s living your dream and who can tell you how they got there is incredibly motivating.

The first (and most important) step to any achievement is to believe you can do it. As a mentor, it’s your job to be that source of belief, even when your mentee can’t quite see it. While your feedback and your expectations should always be as honest as possible, it’s also important to reinforce that you believe in your mentee and the incredible things you know they can achieve.

If there’s one business mentor tip that really could have a profoundly meaningful impact on your mentee’s career, then it’s this one. After all, your mentee is stepping out of their comfort zone, venturing into a place of uncertainty. You can be their rock – a reliable guide to point the way and to help keep them on their feet.

Motivation

Of course, motivating your mentee isn’t just about getting them to believe in themself. You also need to keep them invested and engaged in what they’re doing and for that, your mentee will need a sense of progress.

The feeling of progress can be a hard thing to engineer but it’s also a crucial part of achieving your goals. The key is to understand that a person’s sense of progress is not always tied to how much progress they’ve actually made, although it often is.

This is because real progress is often nebulous and hard to define. Milestones and goals can help a lot in this regard – and we’ll talk more on that later – but, when it comes to learning new skills or developing the right mindset, how much progress you’ve made can be a tricky, almost impossible thing to measure.

So how do you create that sense of progress?

It all starts with making a point of recognising and verbalising your mentee’s development, wherever you see it. It doesn’t have to be over the top. You don’t have to give them a medal each week or congratulate them every time you start a call, but it really does help to always take a moment to focus on how and where your mentee is progressing.

This is also an excellent diagnostic tool for your own methods. After all, if you can’t find anywhere where your mentee is really advancing, then that’s a great opportunity to ask yourself where things might be going wrong and what you can do to help push them forwards.

Action

And now we come to our third and most important business mentor tip: encourage action wherever possible.

Hopefully by now we’ve made a good case that how your mentee feels has a profound impact on their productivity and their ability to achieve their goals but all of that means nothing if your mentee isn’t sure of their goals in the first place.

Goals come in two types – general goals and actionable ones. General goals are your long term aims. They’re broad achievements such as the salary your mentee hopes to get or the type of company they want to work for. Actionable goals, on the other hand, are the current aims your mentee will focus on – the next steps that need to be taken in order to progress along your career path.

Creating good, actionable goals is one of the most useful things a mentor can do – quite literally showing their mentee the way. Actionable goals also feed back into creating motivation by allowing your mentee to feel that sense of progress as they tick goals off of their list, getting them closer and closer to their dream job.

Ready to put your expertise into practice? Ready to show the next generation how it’s done? With Career Navig8r, you could be the life-changing inspiration that helps your mentees to build incredible careers!