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A while back, I had a thread on finding a mentor that I'm pasting below (I deleted a part I got helpful pushback on, more on this if you click on number 12). But I wanted to add to these tips the importance not just of mentors, but of models for how to be a human. A quick thread!
1. A mentor is someone who helps you to become better at what you do. That might or might not mean the mentor lives and works the way you you want to live and work. The mentor might give good feedback, write good letters, be warm/encouraging in meetings and that's all. That's ok!
2. You don't need your mentor to also be the person who models the way you want your life to look like. The point though is to find people who can act as those models, preferably people within the career you want, which, for me, is the academy. Who are the people who do it well?
3. Everyone wants different things but I wanted to find models for being
a. kind as a continual practice
b. parents and partners
c. citizens at their university and in the broader world
d. creative and wide-ranging in their intellectual work
e. maintaining spiritual commitment
a. kind as a continual practice
b. parents and partners
c. citizens at their university and in the broader world
d. creative and wide-ranging in their intellectual work
e. maintaining spiritual commitment
4. What I realized pretty quickly is that these different goals don't need to come from the same person. And I also realized, as I talked about with mentoring, that most of my best models are people my own age or even younger, who seem to just be really good at certain practices.
5. And this is where I think there's the biggest difference from mentoring, because I think to have an adult modeling relationship, it almost always requires a relationship that feels more like friendship or family than what a lot of mentoring relationships feel like.
6. Again, certain mentoring relationships are also modeling relationships but they don't have to be! The key thing in a modeling relationship is that you can ask not only straightforward *procedural* questions but also much, much harder *life* questions and feel safe doing so.
7. A good mentor takes time to answer, with kindness and generosity, any question about how to handle a peer review or courses to take or how to write a research statement. A good model answers questions about their marriage to help you with yours. That's a big difference.
8. Those models can be (and often are) friends or family or others from outside of the career you want. But, especially given how consuming a lot of our careers are, it's good to find models who accomplish some of who you'd like to be while also doing the job you want to have.
9. And you only get better by practicing and reflecting on your practice with trusted guides. That's true for pretty much everything, I think. And so, at least for me, one way I become a better human is holding certain people in my head as models and guides that motivate me.
10. I've never met some of those models because they've been dead for centuries. But the most important of those models are people I ask for help, advice, and accountability, w/hard questions about how to live. That's not what I need from a work mentor. It's a life model. Fin.
oh, sorry--I forgot to post the mentoring thread! Here it is, and you have to click on 12 to get to the rest of it. I hope any part of any of these threads is helpful. https://twitter.com/jeffguhin/status/1291460099643305984?s=20
