who can be a mentor ?

Mentor: [men-tawr, -ter] :noun: (1) a wise and trusted counselor or teacher. (2) an influential senior sponsor or supporter. verb (used without object) (3) to act as a mentor: She spent years mentoring to junior employees.

Mentee:[men-tee] : noun: a person who is guided by a mentor.

The dictionary defines a mentor and a mentee in just a few simple words, but that does not give a complete picture of the privileges and power these people have got. A Mentor is someone who gives an honest and wise advice to his/her followers. Of the many followers, the one who grasps his advice and goes ahead to use them are mentees.

All of us may have a mentor, but not necessarily mentees. The reason for this being, "No one is perfect".We are all people who want to bring in perfection, be it in our personality, family relationships, work motivation, earning skill or the way we close sales. So we seek the help of a force greater than us to guide us.

A mentor is someone who hands you a torch, when you approach a dark tunnel. He doesn’t give you a lighted torch; it’s your responsibility to switch on the torch and pass through the tunnel. If a mentor were to take all the decisions for you, then what would be your role?

People usually confuse a mentor and an advisor. The latter is one who gives you a focused approach to do things, say “You need to invest 30,000 in HUL shares so that you can triple your shares”, mostly that they might not have done themselves. Whereas a mentor is someone who gives you a range of advises to gear you up to face the challenges before you, say - “You need to do the right thing, even though the wrong one benefits you the most”. There is nothing wrong even if a mentor says “You need to share your innovative idea with atleast 20 people a week, to become a millionaire” provided he has done it, and he is a millionaire..

I think this is going to hit you hard. You not only confused advisors to mentors, but have always done what the advisors had told you. We can relate this as much as, the advices we give to our peers, colleagues and friends - we might say "do this... ","do that..." but most certainly we might have opened our mouth because of our intutions rather than the existing facts.

Nothing to get disheartened, but there are three things we need to keep in mind.

(1) Don’t give advice to someone, on something that you haven’t accomplished yet.

(2) Don’t take advice from people who are not achievers themselves.

(3) Dont hesitate to follow the mentor, he is the one who has acheived in areas which you wish to excel for.

It’s not quite surprising that you may find real leaders of the country driving autorikshaws or shaving heads. It isn’t quite funny when your friend advices you to take up an MBA when he himself has no intention of taking it up. It isn’t quite fair when your relatives ask you to struggle hard in your job, when they themselves are not in a job and wouldn’t want to be either.

Now you may have the qualifications required to be the chief mentor to your company.inc.

First – don’t believe its personal experience that teaches us, we should be a fool to believe it. Its the experience and mistake of others that we need to learn from. This knowledge can be acquired from the books we read.

Second – We dont have all the years to do something from scratch, make all the mistakes ourselves and then learn from them. Don’t expect the next generation millionaires to be like the TATA's or Ambani's who took years, say like 150, to grow. The next generation millionaires are going to evolve in 4-5 years.

Third – Dont expect to be a millionaire doing a job.

Fourth – Until you become a strong leader, make sure you are correctly plugging your employees and partners to another mentor.

Now how do you distinguish a chief mentor from local advisors? Really simple. Out of every 100 people you see, there’ll be 95 advisors who are struggling, 4 mentors who are leading luxurious lives and 1 chief mentor who is super rich and famous.

You are an advisor by default, whereas if you aspire on becoming a mentor you need to get out and serve the society.