Mentoring relationship

I remember the question Kanti asks in his talk - you can see the 270 degrees but who is covering the 90 degrees you can’t see? 

Relationships are like a car service. Even if you don’t regularly service your car, it keeps running fine for most of the time. It feels like stupidity to do the service and spend the time and money in the first place. The only time we realise the mistake is when it breaks down in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere and with the family in the car. 

It’s the same with building a mentoring relationship. It’s not much use when things are going fine. Most of the time it seems like nothing much is coming out of the time we are spending with our mentor. But once in a blue moon, once in a few years, we get stuck. In a financial mess, in a decision paralysis, in a relationship mess. We feel alone and lost and so deep into the problem that it seems futile to tell anybody the story from the beginning about how we got there in the first place. And that is when the investment of time and energy into the mentoring relationship comes handy. Just like a savings account. You make the deposits and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. But in time of real need, it seems like the best thing we ever did. 

We have got a chance to see both kinds of people. The ones who kept investing into it and the ones who didn’t. Both landed into life situations because that’s life. For the ones who were invested, the recovery period was maybe a few weeks or a month. But for the ones who didn’t build that trust and that relationship it was all uphill and gone. Few lucky ones survived their business, their jobs and their marriages. Most didn’t.

With mentors and then mentors of mentors...everyone needs someone watching their back!!