Reverse Mentoring

In his latest book, Mastery, Robert Greene stresses the importance of finding a good mentor and learning all that you can from them. The mentoring relationship is powerful and impacts both the person being mentored and the one doing the mentoring.

I have had some outstanding mentors over the years and I am particularly grateful to Larry Anderson who saw a lot more potential in me than I did back in the early 1980s. When I moved into sales and marketing management, I tried to be a good mentor myself.

One point that is often overlooked in the mentoring discussion is how much can be learned by the person doing the mentoring. With maturity comes an accumulation of useful experience and hopefully a little wisdom, but there is always more to learn. Listening attentively is often more helpful and supportive than sharing those tidbits of wisdom.

Are you a teacher or a learner today?  Or both?

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