On Choosing Mentors – 3 Things to Look at

How often have you asked your dance teacher about the mechanics of astrophysics? Have you ever gone to a basketball coach to ask them about tennis? My guess? Rarely, if ever.

Then, when it comes to your career, the one thing you’ll be doing for over 40 years of your life, why do you go to the most convenient sample?

Often, especially when you are starting out, you go to your parents and teachers. While that’s an excellent support system, they are not always the apt system that you’re looking for professionally. Mentors play a massive role in shaping your future. They don’t control it. But they can make your career path easier, better, and sometimes, faster. 

There is a notion that a mentor chooses you. Sometimes. Maybe. But for the most part, you choose your mentor. You make yourself available and active in circles where you’ll find your mentors. If you sit at home all day, your parents automatically become your mentors. If you go to networking nights designed for tech startups, that’s where you’ll find mentors for the Tech fields. If you go to networking nights for artists and singers, that’s where you’ll find mentors in those fields. So, finding mentors is a two-way street where you actively seek them out and they reciprocate your initiative by mentoring you. 

While finding mentors is an essential aspect of any field, looking at the current trends in bias against women in workplaces, the right mentors become even more important for women. Vittoria Adhami, a  Professional Life Coach, also corroborates that these biases against women are ingrained in society and can hurt women’s chances of success.

All this discussion points to a very important statement- we need to choose our mentors wisely. We need to choose people who believe in our capability, have been in our field long enough to guide us and have the ability to adapt.

People who believe in your capability

While it’s all good to surround yourself with ambitious go-getters, not everyone is a type A personality. People learn and act on their own pace. Finding people who are ambitious but differently ambitious from you may actually hurt you more than help you. They won’t be able to see your work the way you do and so they can’t guide you as well as someone who knows how you work.  Your mentor must see your capability and your potential. Choose a mentor who sees the future you as opposed to the present you. Don’t find someone who flatters you. Definitely not, but find someone who gets you and is willing to guide you.

Have been in your field long enough

20-year-old CEO’s sound like a great idea. They are inspiring and envy-inducing. But do they make good mentors? Let’s see. To become a CEO today, in the start-up culture specifically, is honestly, quite easy. Anyone can become the CEO. It’s not surprising then, that 90% of all start-ups fail. Experience counts for a whole lot in life. Mentors who’ve ‘been there, done that and survived it’ are the ones who will help you tide through the tough times. From bad business deals to a shifting topography to hostile company take overs, an experienced mentor can help you through it all.

Ability to Adapt

While society’s attitudes take a while to change, their behavior can easily change. The market works on behavior. The global market is a dynamic caricature of society. It shifts and molds itself according to the way the world is changing. The Internet changed everything. Tomorrow, something else might. Find a mentor who is changing with the times. A mentor who has continued to grow in her/his field and personal life. After a certain point in someone’s life, our professional and personal lives tend to mesh. A mentor who has grown personally will take those learning to her/his professional life and will be able to learn some new, some useful and some futile tactics. She/he will be able to guide you through those learning as well.

How Can You Be Persistent?

Some things are easy. Doing them every day is easy. They become a routine and we don’t even question them. Writing, however, is not one of those things. Writing is easy when it isn’t careful. When writing is a form of telling instead of showing, it becomes easy, or easier. However, when you write in order to show the world how you think, writing ceases to be about conveying a better opinion or about expressing petty differences, writing becomes a way to introduce people to your mind, your thought processes, and of course, your being.

This new year I decided to write every working day. And I have been. But it’s hard. It takes time, effort, and considerable cognitive resources. Writing is fun when the ideas just flow onto the paper (or screen) and convey every thought that you wanted. It becomes a chore when your ideas take longer to express and harder to condense. Writing becomes a menace when the sentence doesn’t fit quite right or the word doesn’t seem exact. Now, no one is asking me to be perfect or write a Booker Prize piece nor do I expect myself to write the next ‘viral’ post, what I do expect, though, is excellence.

Excellence as a concept is fickle, but as an idea it’s magnificent.

The idea that I can be the best I’ve ever been at it, is exhilarating. It’s like the rush of sky diving, just without the cameras and the height. I may be better tomorrow, but today I’m better than yesterday and the day before and the month before that. Today, I’m the best I can be, as far as writing this piece is concerned. This piece, this idea, is excellent. And for now, that’s enough.

A lot of people have asked me what it means to persist.

This is what it means to persist. Writing for me, was easy, but then it wasn’t as good as it could be and probably will be in the future. When writing got hard, I learned more, I struggled more but I didn’t give up. To persist is to keep doing something even when it’s hard. To persist is to not stop. When you persist, you make time for whatever it is that you want to do.

To persist isn’t an abstraction, it’s a difficult reality.

When you persist, you’ll learn things you never knew before. When you continue to learn them, it’ll get difficult. What was once easy becomes convoluted. And that’s the beauty of persisting. You’ll change what you knew and alter everything you already know. In that way, you’ll grow.

Persisting is doing a little bit extra today than what you did yesterday.

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Image by Scott Webb

How to Believe In Yourself

Belief has had a bad reputation recently. Like Happiness, it’s the new kid on the block who is constantly bullied. Those who have it, are attacked for having it, those who don’t have it, attack it for being so difficult to attain. Belief, unlike confidence, is an abstract term. Belief is a spiritual term while confidence is a scientific term. We have a host of articles and websites devoted and dedicated to increasing one’s confidence. One of the most famous TED Talks was, in fact, on the role of confidence in a person’s life.

As confidence has slowly made its way to the best student in class, belief is still in detention. But it shouldn’t be. There are a lot of myths, if you may, surrounding belief. While confidence is known to be a learned skill, people believe that belief is an inherent trait. While confidence is a work in progress, belief is thought to be an instant process. While confidence is mouldable, people think belief is rigid.

That’s far from the truth. Believing in yourself is a process in which you begin to trust yourself more. Belief helps you fight off your doubts and stick to whatever you’ve chosen. It enables you to worry lesser and work harder without getting distracted by the world. Belief is a skill that shapes your thinking in a better direction, where better can be anything more positive than what you are feeling at a given moment in time.

Belief is a process of learning to accept your boundaries and then slowly pushing them further and further. While belief may have its roots in spirituality, it’s implications are seen in every sphere of life. Even research shows that out beliefs mold our thinking.

If you noticed (as I hope you did) that belief is essentially a thing that changes our thinking. It’s a process. It has its inception in spirituality, but it effects everyday life. And if you still haven’t made the connection (as I hadn’t till a while back) let me tell you – belief is nothing but confidence. 

Belief is a learned skill that needs to be honed and evaluated at every stage in life. Belief, like confidence, is a process that takes days, months, or even years to acquire. Belief isn’t just about thinking positively. It’s a lifestyle that includes learning to trust yourself more, of being open to change and failure. It’s a process in which you learn to pick up yourself after you fail, in which you keep going till you reach where you have to. Belief is internalizing confidence.  While confidence is a state of being, belief is when your thoughts are confident.  Confidence is a temporary phase. It’s your body language, your way of presenting who you are. Belief is a permanent part of you, it’s the way you think of yourself.

In order to believe in yourself more, you need to realize that it’s an ongoing process. While every day changes, so do your challenges and your thoughts. Belief also wavers. You need to remind yourself to believe and to validate your belief with previous successes. To believe more, you have to learn more about yourself at this very moment. To believe in an idea, for example, would mean-

1. Doing your homework about the idea
2. Asking and answering all the pertinent questions
3. Making out an action plan for the idea
4. And then, finally, running with it.

Believing in yourself is a similar process. To believe in yourself,

1. See where you stand in life.
2. Instead of doubting yourself, ask yourself how many doubts are valid and what you can do about those.
3. Once you have an idea of what you need to do, make a plan and follow that action plan.
4. Repeat.

Every day is a different day. Every day is a different challenge. And if you’re lucky, every day is a learning day. Believing in yourself isn’t easy. But as someone wise said – nothing worth having comes easy.

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This is Why Women Hate Women

Walk into any teenage girl’s slumber party and you’re bound to overhear a conversation about some other girl that the entire group hates. The reasons for that hate are many. She’s mean. She’s rude. She’s a slut. She’s too arrogant. And while all these reasons seem perfectly acceptable to those girls, they are not.

When these young girls learn at an early age to turn on one another, to compete with one another on looks and boyfriends and to label one another, we as a society, have failed them. We have culturally and traditionally failed our daughters and continue to do so.

We have at every level taught our daughters, sisters, mothers, wives, that they are just that. They are someone only when they are in relation to someone else.

We have taught our daughters that they belong to someone. It starts with belonging to their fathers who then give them to their husbands. All our rhetorics, from Disney to Vogue, have taught us to wait for our prince charming, to be in need of a prince charming who will then forever take care of us. We are told right from the start that for one prince charming, there is only one princess and if you don’t get that prince, your life is doomed. And that is why women hate each other.

We have been systematically taught to value a man more than we value ourselves. We have been taught to listen to men more than we listen to our women. We value a firm fatherly figure than a nagging mother. And yes, this is about society. It’s about how we function, it’s about the messages we send our women. It’s not an excuse, it a rationale, or as some call it ‘a feminist propaganda’. Women hate women because that’s all we’ve seen and heard.

That’s it. But the good news? That rhetoric is slowly changing, too slowly for my liking, but I guess change takes time. In my lifetime, I have seen women hate women, but more than that, I’ve seen women stand up for women.

I’ve seen girls who value their friendships more than petty differences. I’ve seen and been a part of friendships where we treat each other with love and respect. Where we slowly learn to be our own people.

I’ve seen my best friends be a pillar of strength. I’ve seen my mother be an endless source of courage. I’ve seen my aunts tell their daughters to be strong and independent. I’ve seen my brother, push me towards being a better woman.

Change is happening. But we need to choose to be a part of it.

I’ll meet you tomorrow.

Love,

SfR