Why Be a Mentor (continued)
Personalities Do Matter.
They matter a lot. Mentoring is a relationship, if there is friction between mentor and mentee, nothing good will come of it. The best mentoring relationships are built on mutual respect. The mentee respects your work and the way you do it, and you, as the mentor, see a potentially great teacher inside this bundle of educated insecurity. If either one of you thinks the other is a waste of space no mentoring can occur; likewise if you just don’t connect (blame it on psychology or star signs) you really can’t develop a mentoring relationship. This is why smart head teachers don’t assign mentors randomly. It is also why you should feel free to say no to a mentoring request if it is not a good fit.
Benefits are not linear
For the mentees, benefits are obvious; they get to ask a lot of questions, gain wisdom, maybe make fewer mistakes, and learn that they are not the only ones in the universe who ever had this problem, whatever it is.
For the mentor the benefits seem to vary, but those I spoke to agreed on a few key pluses: the chance to discuss why they do what they do, the delight of rediscovering some activity or technique they used to use but drifted away from, and the positive feelings of helping someone improve in a tangible way. Personally I’d add that it energizes me- it keeps me from becoming complacent and lazy. After a discussion in which I advocate mixing it up and doing things right even when its costly, it is pretty damn difficult to head into our cattery and not do what I advocate’. That, along with seeing a newbreeder really come into his or her own, is what will keep me mentoring (back to first page)
