Mentoring - growth goals

Collaborative Vision

A mentor is able to point out challenges to come that they have seen or expect based on their experience as well as guide in the selection of goals. Having mentors and role models in your area of interest can save time navigating relationships, technologies, resource management strategies, and learning the nuance of a craft. Building the vision together is an act of molding. The possibilities seen in the eager mind are extensive and can be hindered if too aggressively corralled by the more experienced in the field. Practice with action and review can create a fluid and constructive give and take allowing the boundless new possibilities to be explored with the foundations of experience within a certain system.

Helping Pipeline

The most profound and inspiring goals we recommend are often the ones that complement or expand what we were able to do along the path already walked. In the mentor relationships already in your life, directly or witnessed with peers, working to locate and note sinkholes, sand traps, and water hazards on the course taken by those at both sides of the experiential scale within a craft will help see what options are possible and challenges likely in the course to come.

High Bars

The standards we set temper the effort put in and results we produce. Maintaining high expectations and standards reduces the prevalence of doubt in the minds of people building skills in a task. The Pygmalion effect moves people to produce the results expected of them by those guiding them. The body works at the capacity it has been built up to and at which it is expected to function based on the situation. Creating environments where excellence is the standard aids in setting the mental foundation to strive continually in the work being done.

An approach to explore could be sharing goals being worked towards and giving reasons why we believe the bar being set is in fact a high one. The number and drive of people applying for a grant, complexity and persistent time to fruitful results of an area of research, and interpersonal growth needed to make vision projects bloom are a few ways to point to specific achievables around the goals and challenges along the roads paved in professional and personal development.