Looking For A Mentor

Are you looking for a mentor? The following checklist is a rather detailed, point-by-point, academic exercise in trying to help you find the ideal mentor you for. What you’re really looking for is a person whom you know cares for you, believes in you, and naturally encourages you. A good mentor is a person who you enjoy being with, who has more experience than you have, and who would be happy to help you win in life. If you already have that person in your life, this checklist will only confirm your intuitive guess that this person would make a great mentor.

What to look for in a mentor:

1. Honest with You

Someone who will take you aside on occasion and tell you things you need to hear but frankly don’t necessarily want to hear.

2. A Model for You

Thomas Carlyle’s words are worth repeating: “Be what you would have your pupils to be.” What do you learn by watching them as well as by listening to them? Part of your mentor’s role is teaching you by letting you watch them in addition to telling you things.

3. Deeply Committed to You

It may be a little difficult to see a mentor or a protégé as family. But the Apostle Paul, when writing to his young protégé, Timothy, captured this thought when he said, “Do not rebuke an older man, but exhort him as a father, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters, with all purity” (1 Timothy 5:1). Even though they are probably not blood relatives, see both your mentor and your protégé with a family level of commitment.

4. Open and Transparent

Every mentor has struggles that the protégé never sees. The protégé might say with some hesitation, “My mentor can do this, but I don’t know if I’ll ever make it because I have problems with discipline (or doubt, or self-worth, or fatigue).” Ask your mentor to share their struggles, along with success stories.

5. A Teacher

Many people do things well, but don’t know how to explain to another person how they did it. At one time they learned how to do a given exercise (an accounting practice, a writing style, a trick of the trade) but have long since forgotten how they do it. Look for a mentor that can tell you how and why they did, or didn’t, do something.

6. One Who Believes in Your Potential

Your ideal mentor needs to be the kind of person who looks at you and says, “Yes, I think this person has tremendous potential. I think if I invest some of my life in this person, they have what it takes to make a real difference.”

7. One Who Can Help You Define Your Dream and a Plan to Turn Your Dream into Reality

Ideally, you are looking for a mentor who can help you clarify things which are in your head and in your heart. The mentor helps you answer the dream question. “How can I make the most significant difference for God in my lifetime?”

8. Successful in Your Eyes

You must feel that your mentor is the kind of person you would like to be like some day, in some ways.

9. Be Open to Learning from You, As Well As Teaching You

This might sound off as a prerequisite for being a good mentor because it seems like the mentor’s job to teach and the Protégé’s job to learn. But in fact it is always good to have a mentor that remains teachable, then they are modeling the teachability that they want you—their protégé to have. You can learn from everyone. What’s more, if a mentor pours their life into a person and gives and gives and gives, sooner or later that person in whom they have invested so much in will want to give something back.

10. Having A Flexible Agenda

A mentor is a person who has a flexible agenda, and teaches the importance of having a flexible agenda.