The Value of having a Personal Mentor in your Life | by Debayan Mitra | May, 2022

Areas in life where having a mentor can prove transformative

Where should we invest today ? Cryptos / Stocks / New age Startups ?

I’d rather say — In a Personal Mentor

1. A Good Mentor

2. The Right Mentor

Please note the 2 terms — good and right. These are 2 different things.

Good obviously means he/she should be good/well experienced in the domain that you are seeking guidance in your journey.

Right means that the mentor is right for you. Please note that someone who is good might not be right for you. Right would be someone who is most suited for your personal concerns, your personal circumstances, your current level that you are in and can take you to a level where you want to reach. This requires that they also understand you a lot on a personal level, your background and might not be the best but can elevate you to a level you want to go within your personal boundaries.

Today, we have many Teachers & Educators on Youtube and absolutely no shortage of them — but we have extremely few Personal Mentors !

Let’s say you’ve always had a dream to crack CAT exam with 99+ percentile. But you’ve always had a fear of Maths since your high school and you’ve always had extremely poor grades in Maths. None of your family, friends think you can clear CAT exam with good scores and they’ve probably given up all your hopes on you clearing CAT with high scores. You feel hopeless, You feel depressed. You feel there is just too much competition and that there are much better people than you who can clear it easily, You feel you stand no where compared to them.

The Teacher will impart you with all the knowledge, syllabus and how to aspects of it and would transfer his/her knowledge over a session in an instructive manner which you need to follow in a timely manner to get there, Carry out regular Mock tests to check your performance — suggest you on areas to improve & work upon, topics to improve & give your marks & feedback areas to improve based on that.

A Mentor on the other hand has everything mentioned above, but also an Emotional & Psychological angle to it. He/She will be there during times when you feel inadequate (when most probably you are thinking to give up on your preparation because you feel it’s outside your league) to motivate you, understand your fears, strengths & weaknesses and curate your syllabus, teaching style & topics in a manner so that you feel that you are improving. You go through a truly transformative experience in this process. Apart from working on your topics & improving on your Maths, you are also building a very solid trustworthy relationship with your Mentor — You are looking up to him as your Role Model, You are overcoming your fears & insecurities that you’ve had in your mind since years, and also battling your mental resistances as you solve those scary math problems & equations.

(The one who guides us and helps us in shaping our career paths and achieve our career goals)

We no longer live in a world where what we do today — we will be doing the same 10 years down the line. We live in a rapidly changing technology driven world where markets change every 5–10 years, social structures & fabrics change — thanks to powerful technologies like the Internet and Social Media. Every 5–10 years, new lucrative career paths would evolve up and we might want to transition to newer and more in demand career paths.Thus this mandates us that we stay up to date with our domain and skills throughout our entire 30 year career journey.

A few of the many challenges that we might face in our career journey that would require us to have a personal mentor —

1. We are too old to explore these new career options and younger generations will be better in exploring in these new career options.
2. We are not from a good college.
3. We do not have the right education / degree.
4. There’s no time for me to learn new skills and or pursue this new certification course.

Few tips on finding the right mentor in this category —

1. Ideally your mentor is someone whom you look upto them as your role model. They might not be active mentors per se but you can always reach out to them and ask them to be your mentor — ensure you have regular sessions with them for a considerable duration of time even if it means paying them a hefty premium on a per hour basis.
2. You can source your mentors through some platforms online / attending some local events / conferences, alumni network / seniors from your college / company. You just need to ask them to be your mentor without facing the hesitation for it and without having the limited belief system of Why someone would want to do that. But you must remember that humans are in by nature Altruistic in nature. So, You would be surprised in how many people will be willing to help you and mentor you.
3. Generally, we do not have the mindset of asking someone to be our mentor personally , rather we focus on existing educator platforms / existing networks where the educator market already exists. However, just reaching out to someone whom you think can be your mentor has infinite benefits on a personal and professional level.

(The one we can talk to when we think that no other people — our family/spouse/friends/relatives seem to understand us)

How much ever we want, we cannot discard the relationships aspects of our lives. Our Friends , Relatives, Family Members, Spouse , Colleagues are some of the people whom we interact on a regular basis and probably affects our mental and emotional well being more than anything else.

With the rise of freedom of speech & expression, there are bound to be differences in opinions, values, beliefs that create frictions between our relationships. With the social media and Internet century opening us to infinite possibilities, it becomes easier to just jump ships and ignore our personal relationships whenever there are conflicts in this area — This can include Family Conflicts, Lifestyle differences, Generation Gaps, Opinion Differences, Value system differences, personal attitudinal differences & certain other emotional blind spots which we might / might not even be consciously aware of within us. However, the real social & emotional well being in this aspect of our lives comes with the depth of the existing relationships and bonds that we cherish.

Therefore, it becomes absolutely necessary in today’s world to have someone to guide us, to talk about our thoughts etc.

1. Having a family counsellor / personal counsellor helps to a large extent.
2. But you can also find mentors from someone you know in your network who is experienced and has faced the issues that you are currently facing — because after all a lot of learnings can come from someone experienced with these things and not necessary that every answer is found within counselling sessions.

The importance of this cannot be over emphasized. With rising inflation and the financial experiences gathered during the Covid19 pandemic of economic slowdowns, planning and managing our personal finances becomes absolutely necessary.

Because how much ever we think that money isn’t important and that there are other important things — let’s face the reality that Financial well being reflects more or less nearly all areas of our other lives and is probably one of the most important determinants of overall person’s social, emotional and mental well being.

So having an experienced mentor is beneficial. Now you might ask, but why do we need a personal mentor becuase after all there are many finance educators on youtube as well. Yes true , but here’s the catch — the life goals / ambitions / aspirations that I have might not be the same that you have, the Idea of what a healthy financial well being means will differ between what I think and what you think, it would also depend on your personal circumstances, on your personal experiences with money in your life so far. That’s why it’s called Personal finance because there is a personal angle to it and carries a very high weightage.

Ideally the mentors in this category would be someone who —

1. Has led the similar life at some point in his/her life that you are currently leading (Lower Class / Middle class / Upper Class). Basically he/she has already been through that ~10 years ago. You can have the best of learnings from the best personal finance courses but the best learnings come from someone who has already been there and experienced that you are currently facing.
2. You look upto as your role model as having achieved success in life and you wish to lead his/her style of life at some point of time in future — Think about 2 different situations below.

Situation 1 — You might aspire to quit your day job and become a startup entrepreneur in the future and you are inspired by a role model who has been through the hard startup phase you are currently going through the same and he/she has already been through that and has achieved a level of success that you wish to reach.

Situation 2 — You might be inspired from someone in your network who has climbed up the corporate ladder very quickly and built a dream house that you want to. You are inspired by him/her and wish to undertake a similar journey.

Both the above situations require a completely different approach to financial planning, completely different mindsets towards Money/ Planning / Lifestyle etc. There is no one solution to all.

Doing these has multiple benefits —

1. When you pay high money, your seriousness level also increases + also your mentor starts taking you more seriously as well and is more focussed and cared about your personal growth.
2. You develop the attitude of allocating this money as Investment & not as a Cost you have to incurr. The former mindset gears you up towards a personal growth trajectory, whereas the latter just feels like your are only burning your pockets.