How to Overcome Workplace Challenges With Career Mentorship

For many people, work problems are a serious cause of stress, especially when those problems start spilling out into personal hours. Whether it’s an ongoing point of conflict between you and a colleague or a problem you’ve not yet managed to solve, finding the best advice for overcoming workplace challenges can be hard, especially if you’re reluctant to share those problems with your friends and family.

But what if there was someone outside the workplace who could nonetheless offer an informed and productive perspective? Someone who’s experienced the same problems you’re going through right now and can help you work your way through them with the benefit of hindsight?

That person is a career Mentor and today we’ll be exploring how they can help you to overcome your workplace challenges and say goodbye to stress.

Identifying Key Challenges

More often than not, the challenges we struggle to overcome on our own are the result of a blindspot. We all have blindspots from time to time and the unfortunate fact is that, by definition, we’re the people least suited to identifying them in ourselves. A Mentor, on the other hand, is perfect for identifying blindspots and helping you to overcome them.

You see, it’s impossible to overcome workplace challenges unless you really understand the problem in question and who better to understand your problem than someone who’s stood in your shoes. Your Mentor will be just that person and that means they’ll be able to help you get to the heart of the matter faster than you would on your own.

Your Mentor will have the benefits of both first hand experience and a more objective view-point. They’ll be able to relate to you but they’ll also be able to come at it from an exterior perspective. This is important because with many workplace problems the biggest challenge is identifying the source of the issue. Once you’ve done that, you’ve taken the most important step.

Establishing Clear Objectives

Once your Mentor has helped you lay out the source of your workplace problem, it’s time to start building the solution and that means defining your goals. No matter how simple or complicated the problem, the best way to work through it is always to have a set of clear objectives. Working with your Mentor, you’ll be able to put together a step by step guide for how you, personally, are going to tackle that problem and what you’ll do should it happen again.

Leveraging Mentorship for Solutions

As you work in a job role, you’ll build up a list of solutions and approaches to handling problems. This is great, up to a point, but it can become an issue once you’ve grown comfortable and a new and unfamiliar problem comes your way.

Having a second opinion here can be career-altering. A Mentor isn’t just someone to teach you, after all, but they’re also someone you can bounce ideas off of and someone who can help you to think outside the box. They say that two heads are better than one and, when it comes to mentoring, that couldn’t be more true.

The next time you’re facing a unique problem at work, why not arrange a meeting with your Mentor. Whether it’s a fast-paced brainstorming session or simply a chance to calmly talk things through, their perspective could be the key to finding the perfect solution to your problem.

Continuous Learning and Growth

Some problems happen only occasionally. Others are frequent. Some are major, like being made redundant, while others are more minor, like managing organisational problems within the office.

In just about any job role, in any industry, the longer you’re there, the more you’ll hear the same cliched solutions for overcoming workplace challenges. The cliches might not be bad – they might even have been quite useful – but after a while they cease to mean as much as they once did. Furthermore, you start to find problems where the common solutions just don’t apply.

When you reach this stage in your career then you might be tempted to think you’ve reached the point where nobody can teach you anything new. You’ve heard all the perspectives on all the common problems and, if they haven’t satisfied you by now, then they’re never going to.

How can you improve when there’s nothing left to learn? Where do you find growth when you’re an expert in your field?

The answer is to become a Mentor! By mentoring someone else, you’ll be reintroduced to the fundamentals through a fresh set of eyes. You’ll have to find new ways to teach the old lessons and, in doing so, you’ll have to rethink many of the assumptions that are core to your job.

Become a Career Navig8r today and start a whole journey of growth and development!