Being a Mentor as a Health Care Professional

As a health care professional, whether you had a mentor yourself in the past, you might be wondering whether you should become one. Mentoring has benefits for both the mentor and the mentee, and it can be an excellent way to share knowledge, improve your skills, and expand your contacts.

Important Characteristics

Are you ready to be a mentor? You might be eager to help, but make sure that you're in the right place in your own life and career. An effective mentor is good at communication and inspiring others. Other characteristics that make you great in this role include being a creative problem-solver and unafraid to take risks. You should know yourself and your strengths and weaknesses well. 

You don't have to have all these characteristics, but you should have some of them. There are also a few things to watch out for. Are you too busy to take on a mentee currently and communicate with them regularly? Do you tend to dump too much on people or to micromanage them? None of these things make you a bad person, but you may want to work on these tendencies and wait for a time when you're less committed elsewhere before you take on this role.

Extending Yourself

In its most basic form, your role should involve spending time with the other person, helping them identify and discuss their goals and giving them advice or information based on your own experience, while ensuring that you let them make their own decisions. However, if you are working with someone that you really connect with, you might want to do even more for them. One concrete way you can make a big difference in the life of someone who wants to pursue a health care career is by becoming a student loan cosigner to help with the approval process.

The other person may need a cosigner if they don't have much in the way of a credit history, which is true for many young people. Cosigning can help them get approved for a loan, but it also carries obligations on your part. Make sure that you are comfortable with making this agreement, understand your responsibilities and can take on the financial burden of payments if they do not repay them.

Building Leadership Skills

Becoming a mentor helps you build your leadership skills and gives you the opportunity to show your mentee what leadership looks like. Keep in mind that sharing not just times when you were successful but also things you tried that were unsuccessful can be instructional for the other person and can also show the value of humility and learning from your mistakes. You may also be surprised to find that there is a big benefit to you in discussing and reflecting on how you handled situations in the past. You may get some new insight as a result.

Increase Your Knowledge Base

The flow of knowledge is not entirely one-sided, but mentors are often surprised to find out that they can learn from their mentees as well. Depending on how far along the other person is in their studies or career, you may find that they are able to provide you with information about new techniques or approaches that are different from the established ones that you've always used. 

In addition, simply having the opportunity to work closely alongside someone who is bringing their own set of ideas and opinions to your discussions can sometimes be revelatory. You may find that there are points on which you diverge, and even if you never come around to seeing their point of view, the process of reflecting on your own approach and why you think the way you do can teach you a great deal.

The Value of Helping

When you care about your profession and where it goes in the future, there can be a great deal of value in helping someone either launch or further their career. It also simply feels good to help others. Mentoring is an opportunity to pay it forward for all the people who helped you along the way. In addition, you are likely to inspire your mentee to take on a similar role in the future.