One of my personal goals for 2020 was to take a more active role in mentoring others. Looking back, this was one of the best decisions I made last year. I got the opportunity to serve as a mentor to folks both at work and other avenues. As a form of reflection, I’d like to share what I have personally gained from these different experiences. Here we go:
1. Connection
Easily the most valuable thing I gained as a mentor! I get to connect 1:1 with so many awesome people who add so much color to my life. I stay in touch with my former mentees, even though most mentoring relationships are meant to last a few months . When starting a new mentorship, I do my absolute best to make them feel welcome because I consider this to be a long-lasting bond. The mentorship chats are also often the best parts of my day/week. I suspect that the reason for such positive feelings is that it’s always great to be part of someone’s self-improvement journey. I feel very inspired seeing my mentees tackle some hard challenges and my own challenges seem trivial in comparison.
2. Awareness
My mentees have very interesting backgrounds and they each teach me something new that I didn’t know about. For instance, my non-work mentees work on very different tech stacks. It is a great opportunity for me to learn more about the new technologies being used in the industry. There have been a couple of times when the things I have learned from one mentee have helped me provide some direction for another mentee who had a similar issue. As a mentor, I am happy being a human bridge that connects awesome people 🙂
More generally, I feel a lot more aware of the job market and challenges for engineers from different backgrounds starting out in the industry. For someone who took a very traditional path to becoming a software engineer, my mentoring chats have been a very eye-opening experience. It is a reminder of how lucky I have been and to do more every day to support those who don’t have it easy.
3. Empathy
We each have our strengths and weaknesses. What’s easy for me could be hard for you and vice versa. Interacting with folks from backgrounds different from my own gave me the chance to learn this first hand. I realized that I needed to forget about my experiences since those weren’t transferable. What would be valuable for them is for me to try and look at situations from their perspective. This was definitely very hard since my own reactions would have been very different in those cases.
Another area where I need more empathy is when introducing someone to technical concepts. I sometimes forget how much I struggled when learning something new and how hard it was. As a student, I also remember times when something was easy for others but hard for me. I am doing my best to draw some parallels from my past that evoked similar emotional responses. But also finding new approaches to being a more supportive mentor.
Overall, I am practicing being empathetic every day in different ways and am thankful for the repeated learning opportunities.
4. Personal growth
Through these different mentoring experiences, I have learnt so much about myself and identified areas where I need to get better at (most of these are covered here as well):
- Being a better listener: I have a tendency to interject and share my own relevant experience to help my mentees feel more supported. But I should listen more without interrupting and talk only when they are done sharing.
- Giving feedback: I’d like to be more proactive and generous with feedback. There is a lot that I need to learn about framing and delivering feedback. I should do it such that it inspires them and doesn’t deflate them while being a honest assessment of where they stand.
- Seeking more feedback: I rarely ask for feedback from my mentees and I’d like to do more of that.
- Being more patient: Sometimes I tend to forget my own struggles when leveling up in a certain dimension because they happened a while ago.
- Being more of a coach: In a lot of situations, I should be playing the role of a coach. This involves listening (see above), asking more questions and helping mentees problem-solve on their own.
- Being a better teacher: I know how to do a lot of things as a mentor but I don’t always know how to help someone else build the same skills. This is particularly relevant when I have forgotten how I learned that skill or when I picked up something intuitively without formal learning or explanation.
In case, it isn’t clear from all of the above — I really enjoy mentoring! I consider it to be an absolute privilege to be able to support someone in their own personal journey. I hope I am lucky enough to continue doing this for years to come 🙂
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