There was a time, I was constantly seeking advice or guidance from someone who is highly qualified or with great track records. Like a magic wand, who could help me sail through the tough decisions in life through their knowledge.
Read books, articles or attended courses with trainers to gain knowledge. In all this I forgot about people who were impacting me greatly by their actual experiences directly or indirectly. Forgetting those random conversations from random people on a random day was more effective and powerful, it was kind of a silent sub-conscious mentoring that was shaping me as a person.
I realised I have grown and matured so much through their experiences.
Imagine an ecosystem where we are tapping into other people’s lessons that they’ve learnt and know the ways on how to do things, because they tried and failed first. We’ll realise we are at the privilege of gaining wisdom and knowledge, without actually going through their experiences. Impacting others, directly-indirectly, knowingly-unknowingly will shape a healthy encouraging tomorrow.
We as human forgetting the basic fact that every individual around us are bundle of unique experiences, everyone you know can be a sort of a ‘mentor’.
All we need is to encourage small little conversations, engaged listening, open ended, close ended questions, understanding (how-what-why approach) while talking.
I still remember, people shared their stories, and in my mind, I was constantly recording those important points they shared and sometimes their subject sparked my interests.
Remember, we live in an unprecedented era where there is not enough time to go through a lot of experiences in life, so the wiser way is to learn from own and others learnings, add on to your wisdom and knowledge. Believe each one of us are a bundle of unique experiences and we should play a role of both learner and educator throughout our life, there is always something valuable for someone else to learn from.
I never knew those small conversations were somewhere shaping me as a person subconsciously, and today if someone ask me who my mentors are, and my reply is “Everyone”.
So open your mind to newer possibilities and new sources of information, always learn from your mistakes, and learn from others mistakes.
