The Power of Re-evaluation: How Mentors Become Masters

It’s a sad truth that, once you pass a certain point, the better you get at a skill, the harder it is to progress. This plateau is not only frustrating but often incredibly demotivating. After all, what’s the point in trying to improve when you’ve passed the point of progress?

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. The line between intermediate and expert might feel like a chasm but the truth is that, with the right tool set, it’s easy to cross. So let’s take a closer look at what you can do to improve your skills once you’ve learned everything there is to be taught and why it is that so many mentors become masters in their fields.

 Finding Your Foundations

First of all, it’s important to understand that most learning isn’t linear. Much as we might like to learn a skill step by step, slotting each new piece of information perfectly into place, in practice, it’s never this simple.

For almost any skill, there are countless directions you can approach your learning from and countless levels on which you can understand an idea. In practice this means that your average ‘intermediate’ person is usually an expert in one or two areas, and a beginner in several others. Even once you’ve developed each of those skills as far as you can, it can be really challenging to take a step back and build a really good understanding of the underlying principles.

That being said, by returning to your foundations you can take a more holistic approach. Instead of just understanding the methods, you can now learn the ideas that underpin those methods, strengthening those foundations and allowing you to build higher than you ever thought possible.

Understanding New Perspectives

When returning to those foundations, the best approach you can often take is to teach them to someone else. The process of teaching not only forces you to start organising that information that you may have learned in a more jumbled fashion, but it also pushes you to understand it from a new direction.

This is because the explanation that worked for you won’t always work for your mentee. Therefore you’ll have to find new ways of explaining it and in doing so, you’ll find you broaden your understanding of something you might have thought you fully understood.

Broadening Your Horizons

Did you know that, from around the ages of two to sixteen, the human brain devotes much of its work to cutting connections. This process – referred to by medical experts as synaptic pruning – allows the brain to minimise unnecessary information, filtering out what it doesn’t need and refining what it does.

In a broad sense, this process of refinement is how we learn almost anything. With most skills, there are multiple ways of achieving the same goal but, for experts, the key is not just to achieve the goal but to achieve it perfectly. In order to do this, it’s often most efficient to remove any approaches or techniques that don’t fit with our own chosen method.

If you’ve ever wondered why two experts at a skill can have radically different – sometimes even opposing – perspectives on the best way to achieve an end result, this is the reason. At a certain point, anything other than the refined method that works for them would simply feel like clutter.

All that being said, while there are many benefits to refining your approach, the true masters are those who can do so without losing sight of the bigger picture.

We often split people into two camps: generalists and specialists. While that might seem like an intuitive division, the reality is a lot more messy. The best specialists build their knowledge on an excellent general understanding. To be a good generalist, meanwhile, one needs a level of specialist depth in certain areas.

At the end of the day, if there’s one thing that separates experienced intermediates from true, undeniable masters, it’s the ability to rethink everything you know, and the best way to do this is by seeing through the eyes of someone with no experience. Going back to the foundations can help you to understand why you chose the path you did and how your refined approach could be improved by thinking outside the box you’ve built yourself.

Or, to put it simply, a good specialist can afford to step back and take a more general approach.

If you’d like to take your skills to the next level and learn the lessons nobody else can teach you, then become a mentor today with Career Navig8r!