The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.
Steven Spielberg
The key to happiness and success is in giving of ourselves to help someone else realize their dreams. Parenthood is at the centre of all this but so are our individual dreams. We have two paths to take in our journey. The first is to find a mentor, to work hard, and to one day come into our dreams. The second is to find someone who needs a guiding hand and help that person get to their destination.
There is a deep and delicate balance that needs to be exercised here. If we insist on certain things being done a particular way because that is how we have done it, we sometimes risk stagnation. We risk circumventing something new because we are creating people in our own image. But mentoring at its very core demands and insists that another person who is guided and supported by us accomplishes or attempts greater things than we have. That doesn’t make them better. It is not a linear, quantifiable journey. But helping someone reach for their dreams should take everyone deeper, wider, and fuller into the beauty of the human experience.
If you get stuck, or as a general practice, it is important to find the time to be grateful and manifest that gratitude by paying it forward. When we help other people achieve what they dream about it, we can’t help but be transformed either. They are changed, and we are changed along with them. We intimate the experience, but they fulfill us in ways we could never imagine or anticipate.
We have always meant to be together and to work together for a greater good. But we often get in each others way. Instead of working together, we isolate ourselves and try to protect ourselves from dangers that often come to naught. How much better would our lives and the lives of everyone around us be if we gave what we had a lot more and gave other people the opportunity to be themselves and to create or recreate their dreams?
Mentorship is not something you choose to do when you get to where you want to go, because you will never get to where you want to go. Once you arrive in one place, you’ll awaken a new desire to go to another place, and this dance from one dream to another never ends, until we take our last breath and let others carry on our contribution. Mentorship of another person, or parenting, or teaching, or a coffee with a friend, whatever you want to call it. This is something that should have utmost importance in our life.
We need to make the time and take great care to uplift someone in our life. We can’t be timid, shy, and quiet. We have to be confident, inspiring, and boisterous. Despite the delicate balance that goes into proper mentorship, we have to look for opportunities each and every day and leave other people better than we found them. We need this to become a compulsive disorder. A disorder by appearance only. We were all born together. Different mothers, different fathers, different places and different circumstances. But our experience and our destination is the same. So is the call to help each other because that is how we truly help ourselves.
