A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.

While in the past I would encounter problems, figure out their causes, and design my own ways to get around them, others who think differently than I do will make different diagnoses and designs. My job as mentor was to help them be successful at that.

What it comes down to, I believe, is that mentoring often involves telling people what they need to hear, rather than what they want to hear. When you are able to be humbly honest with someone about a situation with which you have personal experience — even if you risk angering or hurting that person — you are offering the most valuable gift of all.

mentor is someone who has already done what you want to do and is successful at doing it. Don't find an advisor. An advisor is someone who tells you how to do it but may not have personally done it.

If you want great mentors, you have to become a great mentee. If you want to lead, you have to first learn to follow.

In life we look to our parents to guide us, but we also need mentors, those voices that come without the baggage of being your blood.

While I made my living as a coach, I have lived my life to be a mentor, and to be mentored! Constantly. Everything in the world has been passed down. Every piece of knowledge is something that has been shared by someone else. If you understand it as I do, mentoring becomes your true legacy. It is the greatest inheritance you can give to others. It is why you get up every day — to teach and be taught.

Mentoring is an archetypal activity that has timeless elements which can connect us to the universal ground where nature renews itself and culture becomes reimagined. Youth and elder meet where the pressure of the future meets the presence of the past. Old and young are opposites that secretly identify with each other; for neither fits well into the mainstream of life.

There is also the professional mentor, a person whose success in his or her career can be a source of practical wisdom and inspiration. This success might be mea sured in material gain or far-reaching influence, or in lives touched and relationships fostered. These mentors can offer a model for good business, ethical practices, and effective work habits, and they often provide the motivation we need to seize whatever opportunities come our way.

Mentors have their own strengths and weaknesses. The good ones allow you to develop your own style and then to leave them when the time is right. Such types can remain lifelong friends and allies. But often the opposite will occur. They grow dependent on your services and want to keep you indentured. They envy your youth and unconsciously hinder you, or become overcritical. You must be aware of this as it develops. Your goal is to get as much out of them as possible, but at a certain point you may pay a price if you stay too long and let them subvert your confidence. Your submitting to their authority is by no means unconditional, and in fact your goal all along is eventually to find your way to independence, having internalized and adapted their wisdom.

I always tell people to trust their instinct, because that’s their soul whispering advice to them.

all remained loyal to him, not because they always agreed with him, but because the regent listened to and respected different opinions.

They encouraged me to always look for the good in people instead of assuming the worst and trying to find fault.

A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel.