My journey of understanding mentorship

From a very young age, I have been fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of

mentorship from great mentors, be it in the family, school, debates, or college. No matter how

formal or informal, how short or long the duration of those mentorships has been, the impact of

each one has been significant in my life. For a very long time, my understanding of mentorship

was limited to coaching and guiding for which one had to be an expert in the required field.

Later, that idea sort of evolved when I started debating. Initially, while I was learning how to

debate, I was assigned to mentors who weren’t necessarily experts but people who had gone

through the experience of the same journey I was about to undertake. But it was not until I took

Developing Your Mentor Philosophy class that I learned what mentorship truly was and

comprehend the magnitude of the impact it could set on lives of both mentors and their mentee.

Mentorship, for me, is a relationship between two individuals based on mutual trust and

understanding of each other’s abilities and committed towards the personal and professional

growth of parties involved. It is the process of assisting the mentee to reflect on their own

experiences, help make informed decisions and act upon the ideas that are generated. I certainly

do believe that there could be a set of guidelines with general ideas of mentorship, but I also

believe that it’s not really fair to put all aspects of mentorship in a box or a fixed criterion

because mentoring can be different to different people. To understand the subjectivity of the

mentoring relationships, I would like to compare them with pebbles. Now, the general idea of

pebbles is round, flat, grey stones but when we observe them individually, we notice how

uniquely different they are, some have bulgy edges, and some are sharp, some are dark brown

and some are dirty white, all pebbles have unique shape, if not shape, unique color or edge.

Similarly, the objective of any mentorship relationship is about bringing positive growth in both
mentors and mentees and the uniqueness of mentorship exists because each of us have our own

strength and weaknesses and we develop at our own pace. As long as the goal is to strive to

explore more by strengthening one’s abilities, it’s mentorship and it is reasonable to believe that

this type of influence is positive for all of us.

One of the key aspect of mentorship for me is knowledge, and it can be a very

questionable aspect in different philosophies. For instance, in Plato's dialogue, Theaetetus, Plato

contends that one’s “true belief” can only be accounted as knowledge if s/he can provide enough

reasonings to justify his/her belief. As I have mentioned earlier, I strongly believe that mentoring

is a partnership between a mentor and a mentee and when this partnership is based on shared and

justified belief, the result is more effective. It is no doubt that the fundamental purpose of

mentorship is to share knowledge in between the participants. When the knowledge is being

exchanged, it is very important for the one who is at the receiving end to be clearly convinced

that the knowledge s/he is receiving is true and that can happen when the mentor provides

enough justifications to the knowledge s/he is sharing. If a mentor is unable to be convincing

enough about the knowledge s/he is transferring, it very unlikely for that partnership to be

successful. Hence, in order to serve in bringing forth knowledge in mentees, mentors should first

be able to win their trust, then advocate for their beliefs with proper justifications because power

of having faith in a common idea which is established with clear minds brings the power in the

mentorship.

Additionally, from “The Epistemology of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism”, by

author Gi-Ming Shien, we learn how the same truth or knowledge can be perceived from

different angles. According to the teachings of Buddha, our nature is ignorant of reality but

Buddha after knowing the reality returned to the materialistic world to teach other people see that
reality, very much as the men of Plato's cave, after seeing the light, return to the cave to teach

those in darkness. The first step then is to learn to discriminate between appearances-to find a

door into reality. Similarly, we learnt from Dewey that each individual has their own ways of

experiencing the truth, experiencing knowledge and hence the faith of individual intelligence and

imagination should be nurtured.

I was able to relate this idea to duality of reality, how for example, night is a time of

darkness for man, but, for an owl, it is his day, how filth is rejected by humans, but is home for

the insects. In this way, since the necessities and conditions of each specific being differ, each

perspective is with respect to the specific creature; all knowledge received from sense

impressions is estimated and relative and that has very little to do with the true reality. This

relates to me with the idea of mentorship because I believe that no person is truly detached from

all biases, our conditioning and backgrounds shapes how we perceive the truth or knowledge.

Because every individual has their unique experience of understanding the reality, sometimes we

need to realize that our mentees might have different angle of perceiving the reality and we need

to respect that.

We also learn how three principles of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism lead us to the

same destination of seeking the true knowledge of oneself. For me, knowing the true inner self

means to recognize our innate ability of knowing more either by adaptation of environment

surrounding us or by the knowledge that comes from within. In this sense, being true to yourself

and living truly seems to be the easiest thing to do yet all of us struggle to do so. For me, this

applies to mentorship because I realize that knowing yourself helps you know others better. In

this way, this keeps reminding me that it’s not always that easy to be true to yourself and

everyone is going through that struggle of understanding the journey better.

 Another key aspect of mentorship is emotional intelligence. From Emotional Intelligence

Inventory book, we learn that emotional intelligence in mentorship, is very essential in

effectively dealing with your mentee and recognizing their emotions and seeing how that will

influence them. Because mentorship is all about learning and having a positive influence on the

mentee for their growth, I believe emotional intelligence there becomes obligatory.

Consciousness of self helps us demonstrate our emotional intelligence on working with and

influencing individuals and groups to bring about positive change. Additionally, from Plato, we

learn about the power of true knowledge, which here can be recognized as the technical skill we

acquire in particular field and pass on to our mentee. Technical knowledge when merged with

emotional intelligence can help us achieve greater goals to both mentors and their mentee.

In my journey of understanding mentorship better, I also had an opportunity of actually

mentoring a student in my college. Tchemon Rabiatou Coulibaly, is a freshman from Ivory Coast

studying mechanical engineering. Besides, being a little help to Rabi, I believe I have earned

some valuable moments as well. Ever since I can remember, I have always told myself that how

fortunate I have been to be in the receiving side of the mentoring relationship, but this mentoring

relationship has taught me that no relationship can have only one receiving side, all sides, in this

case, both sides receive the benefits of mentoring. Mentoring Rabi has equally helped me reflect

on my own strengths and weaknesses. I have become much more confident in terms of

understanding my own self, which for me, is the most important thing I am taking from this

whole experience. Even though, this was my first experience, this mentoring relationship

however, has impacted my understanding of mentorship significantly. My mentoring relationship

with Rabi has been the demonstration of what I have learnt in the class and how I have perceived

the knowledge of mentorship.

 In conclusion, from my experience of learning and demonstrating mentorship, I have

understood mentorship as the relationship where individuals transform knowledge through

sharing individual experiences in a trusting learning environment which allows mentors and

mentee to stretch beyond their personal and professional boundaries. Honestly, I have grown in

more ways than I expected to, in terms of understanding the concept of mentorship, reflecting on

my own self and demonstrating mentorship. Now, when I take a moment to reflect on this

journey and trace my steps, it encourages me to look forward and take more challenges of

mentorship where I can incorporate things I have learnt and comprehend the new things I will

learn in future.
References

1. Shien, G. (1953). The epistemology of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.

Philosophy, 28(106), 260-264.

2. Plato. (trans. 2017). The Republic.G. Farlik (Trans). Denver, CO: Parietal

Publishing.

3. Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New

York: Bantam Books.