91/100 What I Love about Mentoring
Reflecting on a Joy
I’ve been fortunate in many ways. Namely, I’ve been blessed with the sense of trustworthiness. This has led me to being in positions to observe people grow. I find that people learn a lot of themselves when someone candidly expresses how they receive you. I remember the specific moment when someone first told me they feel safe with me, that I am someone whose company is calm and secure.
This is a gift, and I’ve tried to act with it. In this space, I recognize the authority a quality like this can create.
Across my career and life, I’ve had the opportunity to mentor others. Currently, in my day job, I am a mentor in a university partnership program and have a truly wonderful mentee. Knowing that I am someone who can command safety and trust, I have found it easier to ask growth of people.
This is what I love of mentoring. It is a tremendous thing of life to see someone move through trust to the point that they know you enough to express what they’re struggling with, receive your difficult advice, and pursue it with your guidance such that they are someone different afterwards.
What a powerful moment.
However, what has truly made this a joy of life is that I see moments to make it more regular. Mentoring or coaching can appear in even the most brief of moments and often through the mere expression of how you receive that person’s presence. Once recognizing and acknowledging that, I find you’re in a place to put forward a small challenge of what you’d like to see of that person or how they might lean into an untapped gift they carry.
More soon,
Trevor