Mentorship and It’s Alchemy

I have been privileged to experience a wealth of mentorship throughout my lifetime. I have known mentors from all walks of life. When I look back, I see them in all their many guises. I re-experience their enormous, life changing generosity.

Mentor, a common word with an uncommon origin,

It is in Homer’s Greek epic The Odyssey, we learn mentorship originated as divine intervention.  When King Odysseus went off to the Trojan War, he left his friend and confidante, Mentor, to oversee the education of his son, Telemachus.  But as Mentor, was not always sufficient to the task, Athena, The Greek Goddess of Wisdom, often took on Mentor’s form to better advise Telemachus and later Odysseus himself.

Today, when we think of mentorship it is almost always in the context of professional development and getting ahead in our careers. A mentor in this sense can motivate us and provide guidance on how best to perform in the workplace. Corporations have been known to establish formal mentorship programs with the expectation that a highly motivated workforce can reflect positively on the organizations’ bottom line.

I’m here to propose that mentorship be applied with the same rigor in our everyday lives. Why? Because mentorship can cultivate highly motivated human beings, and highly motivated human beings can reflect positively on the planetary bottom line.

Now you might think that a stretch, but let’s take a closer look at mentorship and its powers.

Allow me to return to my personal experience with mentorship. My engaging with a mentor might last weeks, months, years or could be a one-shot deal of mere minutes, our paths never to cross again.

Yet, no matter the duration of time 10 minutes or 10 months spent in the company of a mentor the one constant, always, was their determination to reveal something I desperately needed to know about myself: my gifts, the rich and wondrous promise of my life if I had but eyes to see.

And there’s the tricky part, the other half of the mentorship equation: the mentee.  All mentors are guides and all mentees students. As guides, mentors show us uncharted dimensions of our lives, foreign, strange and often intimidating places – but always expansive, that take us out of our comfort zone. When the mentee is ready the mentor appears. The mentor not only presents him or herself, but is recognized, seen by the mentee. The mentee has eyes to see and now the alchemy of mentorship can begin.

And just what is that alchemy? It is the transmutation of the raw, rich soil of our lives into a garden of possibilities; the life ensouled in us that lies latent – waiting to be activated.

Such is the power of the mentor – mentee relationship.

Remember what I said about the effect the practice of mentorship might have on the planetary bottom line? Can you imagine how a population of human beings motivated to cultivate their gifts, living their lives through their gifts, promotes the welfare of the Earth and all her inhabitants?

Seem overly simple, seem impossible?  What we forget, is we already practice mentorship all the time; albeit unconsciously and a pretty, weak, watered down version. Because we do so with diminished awareness our mentorship has limited to no effect. What if we were to practice mentorship with awareness of its power, with intention? What would that look like?

I say it would look like this: Human beings no longer limited by the fear of not having enough, of not being enough, – who instead rejoice in living their lives through their gifts powerfully, lovingly, and fearlessly.

Now imagine applying this wisdom.

Imagine revealing to people their gifts; to those you love, those you dislike, to the stranger – to everyone. Imagine making this your life’s practice of how you show up in the world.

Now, inversely, imagine being open to receiving that same wisdom, from those you love, those you dislike, from the stranger – from everyone and making this too, your life’s practice.

Embrace these two practices and begin to experience the alchemy of mentorship in your own life. You just might benefit the whole world.