Serving you better: Are you en route to achieving your New Year career goals?
Publication date:
05 January 2021
Last updated:
25 February 2025
Author(s):
Connect e-mentoring
If you are like most people, you have probably started the New Year full of resolutions to make 2021 the year to achieve your career or business goals. So, you are ready to start making some positive changes.
The big question is, how will you achieve this? What are you planning to do differently this year? Do you have any milestones in place that you can measure your progress by?
Not setting business or career goals and developing a plan of how to achieve these has often been compared to setting off on a journey not knowing where you are going or how you are going to get there, but instead just hoping you get to the right place.
If this is you, the good news is that our mentoring platform can help you.
Become a mentee
A mentor will work with you to help you clearly identify the important goals you’d like to achieve this year. They will help you plan out what you need to do to achieve these goals and help you set out realistic timescales for achieving them. They will also help you set milestones along the way that you can use to monitor your progress, keep you on track and help you see results sooner rather than later.
Your mentor will guide you on your journey and help steer you on the right path to achieving your goals. But, just like a satellite navigation system, they won’t do the hard work for you. You still need to be in the driving seat and making the final decision.
Joining is free and easy; just sign up with your membership details, and you will soon be matched with mentors who have the skills and experience to help you.
Become a Mentor
Winston Churchill once said: “We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.”
The magic of mentoring is that it not only helps the mentee, but it also aids the mentor and can be very rewarding.
Here are some key characteristics of an effective mentor:
- Commitment: Are you willing to dedicate the time and effort necessary to a mentoring relationship?
- Courage: Do you have the courage to take risks, admit mistakes and let others do the same? You’ll have to tolerate the occasional error and use it as a learning experience.
- Curiosity: Are you hungry for knowledge? Don’t limit your answer to professional areas. If you’re always asking questions, trying to find out how things work and why, you’ll be a good mentor.
- Compassion: Are you patient with others when they make mistakes? Do you try to understand situations from the other person’s point of view? As a mentor, your job isn’t to pass judgment but to create opportunities for growth in other people.
- Communication: Explain what works for you and why. Telling a mentee what to do in a specific situation doesn’t really teach him or her much. You’ll be more effective if you communicate as explicitly as you can what strategies and techniques have worked best for you and why you took the approach you did.
Think you have the characteristics of a mentor, or think you could benefit from having one?