In today’s age, a mentor is a person that does far more than offer a helping hand. A mentor is a person that will help advance your career. But they will also help you grow personally. So the importance of finding one cannot be underestimated. Considering that I’ve gone through the process and know why everyone needs a mentor, I will share my reasons why finding the right mentor is important.

What Is A Mentor?

Before I tell you why a mentor is an important person in your life, allow me to explain what a mentor is. A mentor is a person that offers personal and professional assistance. A mentor is someone that you can rely on for advice on topics you might be clueless about. They’re there to share valuable lessons and guide you on the road to success. A mentor will achieve this through professional or personal assistance or even both. So the need to find the right mentor is urgent.

Mentorship is so popular nowadays that even big corporations benefit from them. A mentorship program for your company can create a workplace culture where everyone thrives. Regardless of whether you’re looking for a mentor for yourself or your business, you need to find a person that aligns with your goals, your character, and your thought process. You must forge synergy with this person that is real and functional.

While I’ll leave it to you to research tips for finding a business mentor, allow me to share my thoughts on why everyone needs the right mentor.

The Right Mentor Supports Career and Personal Growth

There isn’t a better reason for finding the right mentor than this one. Your objective is to find a person that can offer professional and personal assistance. The right mentor will help grow your career and personal life. One of the ways they do this is by setting up goals for you to achieve. A mentor in the workplace can create a culture where every employee strives to achieve their daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly goals. A personal mentor will encourage you to learn new things and offer feedback along the way.

The Right Mentor Has All the Knowledge You Need

Another reason why you shouldn’t go to the first person you see is that they don’t have what you want. Most people seek professional mentors to help them progress in a field they have relatively no experience in. If that is your goal, will you be looking for a mentor from a field you’re already a pro in?

The right mentor will provide a specific set of skills and information to make the mentorship successful and fruitful. For this reason, look for a person that specializes in a field you want to become better at. This might be any professional field, or might be a personal one. You might need a mentor to help you take the necessary steps to advance your career, or you might need a mentor to teach you how to become a better speaker. By offering the knowledge you so desperately need to improve your business or life, you benefit more from the right mentor more than you could possibly imagine.

The Right Mentor Has the Right Connections

On my podcast Becoming Great, I recently talked about how to network, and how to do it online. Networking is an important tool that can help propel your career to unimaginable heights. By surrounding yourself with the right people, you benefit in more than one way.

But networking isn’t easy. It’s easier said than done. Quite unsurprisingly, every professional focuses on growing their network. The benefits of finding the right people with the right connections are unimaginable. So that begs the question. Will the right mentor have the right connections? More so, will this person give you access to these connections? The answer to this question is yes. The right mentor for your needs will most likely have the right connections and make them available to you.

By identifying the right mentor, you are putting yourself in a great position to benefit from their network of connections. Let’s say you want to become a better event speaker. By finding the right mentor to teach you how to do it, you might also get access to a best-selling author on the subject. The right mentor will connect you with people that can help you grow personally or professionally even more.

The Right Mentor Is Your Friend And Ally

When shooting for the stars, you want to surround yourself with the best people that know how to make that happen. But more so, you need to trust these people. You can’t trust a person that doesn’t mean you well. So by finding the right mentor, you are forging a close relationship. The right mentor is an ally. But even more so, he is a friend who you can turn to in any situation. You can rely on this person to offer honest feedback and have your best intentions in mind.

Since your success is their success, the right mentor will not hesitate to be brutally honest when things aren’t going well. But that’s not a bad thing as everyone needs a wake-up call now and then. You won’t get that level of honesty by finding the wrong person. We rely on friends to be honest with us when we’re doing something wrong. And the right mentor is a friend who will offer honest guidance.

A Final Note

Finding a mentor isn’t an easy task. It is a task that might take months if not years. But all the time you invest in finding the right mentor will be worth it in the end. Regardless of whether you’re looking for professional or personal assistance, the right mentor will be there to do just that.