Being a guide for someone is definitely not an easy task. You have to be experienced and wise enough to be able to share knowledge and wisdom, and moreover, you need to be able to know how to share your knowledge and wisdom well enough in order to be completely understood. You also have to know how to approach people, how to empower and encourage them, and how to make them feel better about themselves without babying them. You also have to tread the fine line between cloistering people and keeping them away from the wrong path in life, while still giving them the chance to learn on their own by making a few mistakes on their way to greatness.
There are many different ways that you can be a guide to a potential follower, and it all depends on what you aim to do, as well as on how control you are willing to exert. There are three main paths that you may want to take as the guide, and you can do this through mentoring, coaching, or directing. Although these three different types of guidance are often mixed together or interchanged in both conversation and media, there are actually subtle differences amongst them that you need to understand and explore.
In mentoring or mentorship, you are dealing with a relationship between a mentor, who is more experienced, knowledgeable, and wise; and a protégé, who is less experienced, probably (but not always) younger, and sometimes flighty and uncertain. A mentor will often be more prominent than the protégé, or more skilled in a particular field. The mentor is then the teacher of the protégé, and serves as the guide for the protégé to do better in the field. Most often, a mentor will teach by example on the job itself: for instance, a mentor opera singer will have a protégé who the opera singer will take on while the opera singer is at the peak of his or her career, and while the protégé is just starting out. By emulating the opera singer, the protégé will hopefully succeed one day as well.
On the other hand, coaching refers to a guidance process in which a person, acting as a leader, oversees a group of persons, or sometimes even a single person, with the aim of achieving a goal. Coaching differs from mentoring in that a coach will often be out of or done with his or her career already, and will therefore be teaching a younger generation based on his or her experiences. Another difference between coaching and mentoring is that coaching often has only a single goal in mind, while mentoring might be more abstract and widespread in its aims.
Coaching is most popularly seen in sports teams, where a person who has once been a good player is now helping other players to succeed in their game, and with the aim of as many victories as possible for the team. Another popular coaching technique is that of life coaching. In this case, a person is not necessarily dead done with life, and coming back to teach the living. Instead, a person is already successful enough and is probably ready for retirement, but is coaching other people in making their lives start to work. In a variant of life coaching, a person who has already faced all of his or her fears can also coach persons who are still living in fear, helping them to get over their anxieties and emerge as better people.
Lastly, the process of directing involves the instruction of a higher person to that of a lower person. In the mentor and protégé relationship, the mentor acts as a guide, not as someone who makes orders; a guide will steer a student through to the right path, but not point it out directly. In the coach and team relationship, the coach acts as an encouraging person, and even as a trainer, but not as someone who directly tells the team what to do. In directing, a boss-employee relationship would be closer in definition, especially when the higher person is ordering the lower person on how exactly to live his or her life.
When people say that “no man is an island,” they don’t only mean that no man or woman should live alone. That much-used phrase also refers to the fact that men and women are perpetually learning creatures: they need the help of someone to guide them through life, and to help them make wise decisions. Moreover, as these same men and women grow older, they also have the chance to be a guide for someone who is younger and less experienced than they. This need for people to feel connected, loved, and taught by someone better than they are has given rise to different concepts such as mentoring.
Mentoring, or the process of mentorship, is really a growing, strengthening bond that occurs between a mentor, who is more experienced, not necessarily older, but who is certainly wiser; and his or her protégé, a mentee or someone who is less experienced and wise, and who therefore needs to be guided by the mentor. The concept of mentorship has long been known and tracked in history. In fact, it was Homer’s Odyssey that first gave rise to the term “mentor” through its character called Mentor, who, despite the fact that he is presented as a somewhat debilitated old man, is actually used by Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom, to guide Odysseus’ son Telemachus through a difficult time in the young man’s life.
The concept of mentorship also takes various forms in different cultures and periods of history. The Ancient Greeks had the concept of pederasty, in which teachers could hone young men to greatness. The Hindu and Buddhist religions have the concept of the guru, where a wise, religious man serves as the spiritual guide of someone who is misguided or who needs to know the Truth. In Judaism and Christianity, the concept of discipleship forms both history and current practice, as clergy or deeply spiritual people guide their respective flocks or followers. Lastly, in the medieval guilds, an economic system was built in order for apprentices to learn from guild masters and thus ensure the longevity of their respective crafts.
There are many famous mentor-protégé relationships in history. Take, for instance, the triplet of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, three great minds in philosophy who actually preceded each other. That is, Socrates was the mentor of Plato, and Plato was the mentor of Aristotle. Aristotle was even the mentor of Alexander the Great. The Christian faiths owe a good deal of their spread to the letters and preaching of St. Paul. In the music industry, the rapper Dr. Dre is mentor to younger rappers Eminem and Snoop Dogg. In the movie industry, the famous and late British actor Sir Laurence Olivier served as mentor for multi-awarded actor Sir Anthony Hopkins.
Even fiction has its own share of mentors and protégés. There are the Jedi knights of the famous Star Wars epics, where Qui-Gon Jinn mentors Obi-Wan Kenobi; when Qui-Gon Jinn dies, Obi-Wan Kenobi takes on Anakin Skywalker; Luke Skywalker, Anakin’s son, is mentored by Yoda. The master-padawan relationship in the Star Wars series is actually akin to that of a mentor and protégé, not so much fighting or sparring partners.
In the employment arena, there are also mentoring programs to help employees do better. For instance, in new-hire mentorship, new employees are taken on by experienced persons in the company in order for them to work better and be accustomed to the company culture and climate. In high-potential mentorship on the other hand, existing employees that show promise are taken on by experienced persons who may be interested in seeing them progress higher through the company hierarchy.
These are only a few facts that are associated with mentoring. There are many mentoring and mentorship programs available, and you can find out more about them through the Internet.
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