Grow them Wings...


Last week, I wrote about my mentors. This post is a continuation from that, talking about my experience as a mentor.

I had seen two types of mentors - people who were willing to spend time with me when I went to them and people who would come to me when they saw or felt that I needed help.

In my early days, I slipped myself into a mentor of the first type. I would help people if and when they came to me for help. This was more due to - my confidence in my ability to mentor (or rather lack of it :) ), my own inexperience since I was still reaching out to my mentors, my hesitation if people would accept me as their mentor. But even during this time, I spent a lot of time with people, whenever they came to me with a question, a doubt or a problem and asked for a suggestion. I never said no when it came to my time. But there were times, when I was not in a position to help, but went ahead to suggest the right person who can help.

Over time, I got confidence in my ability to mentor. Also, I could see quite a few people who accepted me as a mentor. Around the same time, I saw K.Balachander's Unnal Mudiyum Thambi. In a particular sequence, Kamal's cook is shown as planting trees everyday. He says that he plants two saplings everyday in the garden, and once they become a fairly decent size, he transplants them to the woods nearby. He says that everyone should do something good without an expectation. This was an eye-opener for me. I realized all my mentors were like this. They spent their time and effort to grow me, to make me a better leader and a better person, without expecting anything in return. 

That was when I slipped into the second type of mentors. I started talking to people voluntarily, to given them suggestions, help them when they needed my help. To me, the idea was to make someone a better person by sharing my experience. Once this was done, the others will follow. Over a period, people asked me for specifics, and I helped them on those areas. 

I realised the importance that people need to believe that they can fly, and all I needed to do was give them strong wings to reach their destinies. Sometimes, people do not know that they can fly, sometimes they do not have strong wings, sometimes they are just afraid. As mentor, it was for me to help them, make them realize their dreams.

To me, mentoring is like watering a seed. The seed can grow to become a huge banyan tree providing shade and shelter to many or a wonderful mango tree with sweet fruits or a cactus or it might not even sprout. It is not for me to see what the seed will become, but just to water it.

Until next week... Take care and have a nice weekend.

ps: One of persons went through a lot of trouble with me due to my ' forceful ' mentoring. I told him what he should do, what he should not, so and on so forth on a daily basis. A couple of years later, he told me in chat that he received a lot of praise from his new manager for his professionalism and he owes a lot to me. To me, that made my day, or rather years.

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