Guidance to becoming a successful mentee

• Be sure to spend time getting to know your mentor. What motivates your mentor? What is your mentor’s work life like? Share information about you as well!


• start thinking about some goals for your mentoring relationship. To do that, you’ll want to tell your mentor about what you hope to achieve in your personal and professional development (in the next year and the next few years), any challenges you’re facing and areas where you think you need to develop (such as your leadership skills). With your mentor, you can decide on the topics you will cover in your mentoring relationship and what you will work on together in your meetings.


• Write down your main objectives. Sit down, reflect and choose between all those fantastic ideas you have running around in your head. The truth is that the more focused you can be on four or five objectives for the next three to five years, the easier it will be to work on effective strategies and target those goals with your mentor. If you aren’t sure which goals or objectives to focus on, discuss this with your mentor. Your mentor is there to support you. The more updates you share with your mentor, the better able he or she will be able to do that.


• Stay true to yourself. When it comes to making decisions for your career, try to remember your mentor is there to give you guidelines and support, not to make the decisions for you. Find the time to be in silence with yourself and listen to your heart, because at the beginning and at the end of the mentorship, it is and will still be your decision on which direction you wish to take.


• Discuss your expectations and desired outcomes from the relationship with your mentor. That makes it easier to stay on top of what’s important and not travel around the mysterious forests of the day-to-day problems.


• It’s a two-way street! No matter how wonderful your mentor seems with their great business superpowers, mentors are also human, so make sure you build a relationship in which your mentor also shares things from their life and gains from the relationship. Get to know each other as far as you feel comfortable and remember you also have superpowers of your own and your mentor knows it, so share the wisdom and shape things around learning and inspiring each other.


• Keep your mentor posted on important events that contribute to achieving your goals. At times, you will even have to translate quotations, supply proposals and research results and newspaper articles, but it is useful to share important updates so your mentor feels involved.


• Acknowledge your accomplishments and give your mentor constant feedback on how they helped you achieved them. This will keep you both motivated and will be a great source of inspiration when things are not going so well.


• Stay focused! Try to remember the main reason why you were matched in the beginning, the main challenge you declared in your application and your main goals.
  This way, you will make the best out of your mentor’s area of expertise and you will be able to tackle those great goals directly.  Be as active as possible and touch base on a regular basis with your mentor.