I’ve said this many a time on this blog. It sometime helps to think of ourselves as a venture – ‘Me Inc’. We are the CEO’s and the Chief Investors in this venture. It is our responsibility to make sure this venture is successful and happy.
Just like any real world company, it is vital we have our ‘Board of Directors’. Typically, this board consists of respected people who would like to see this venture be successful. The more committed this board of directors are to the venture’s success, the better the venture’s strategic decisions are.
In our own lives, this ‘Board of Directors’ is a set of respected mentors to whom we go for advice.
Over the years, as I have come to realize that ‘The World is My Family’, I’ve had more help than I could have imagined from my own ‘Board of Directors’. There have been few who have stayed with me, some who have come and left but this group’s care, love and belief in me have constantly left me amazed.
While I will write about the difficulties of engaging mentors some other time, I think the simple idea here is to find a mentor/mentors if you don’t have one. And if you don’t know where to start from, try and find people a couple of years older who you would like to emulate/be like and then reach out to them and try and keep them engaged with what’s happening in your life.
And if you are nervous about reaching out, do keep in mind that there is 1 thing that will probably go your way – if those you are reaching out to are indeed doing well, then they probably haven’t gotten there alone. So, you have every chance they will atleast understand where you are coming from and be of help.
Universities/schools of education encourage ‘independence’ in their bid to get us ‘standing on our own feet.’ The issue is that the fact remains that in the ‘real world’, nobody gets to where they are, alone. We need all the support we can get. And just like it is a CEO’s responsibility to ensure he has a board he can rely on, it is our duty to do so in our lives as well!
A Learning a Day 