In this monologue, a mentor with 23 years of professional and volunteer experience explains his core mentorship philosophy. He emphasizes deep listening to understand the specific context of a mentee’s workplace challenge, and providing candid, compassionate feedback rather than vague, sugar‑coated platitudes. He shares a recent example where he reassured a student that a current crisis would not derail their long‑term career, highlighting the importance of framing problems within a broader timeline. The mentor also stresses the need to recognize both his own and the mentee’s unacknowledged privileges, noting that advice from well‑meaning leaders often fails when it is rooted in advantages the mentee does not share. Drawing on his intersectional lived experience, he tailors guidance to each individual, ensuring the mentee receives actionable, context‑aware information instead of generic “work hard and it will pay off” advice.
Chapters
Absolutely. Something I'm deeply passionate about. I have worked with, I've worked with young people for, for 2 decades now, both in volunteer capacities as well as professional capacities. And every year I mentor dozens of new professionals, both informally and formally. And what is really important to me, like the cornerstone of that mentorship is being, is A, listening to them, like listening to the situations that they're bringing and not sugarcoating the realities that they are facing. Because usually when folks are seeking out guidance, it's because they're going through something difficult. They're encountering a difficult situation in the workplace that they don't know how to resolve, right? Typically no one is seeking mentoring when everything is hunky-dory, right? Everything is great. They're finding help because they're going through something hard and they don't know how to navigate it. And just this week, I was chatting with a student who was going through something and I said, listen, you know, and again, you know, I'm very, I'm compassionate with how I communicate, but I will be, I will be forthcoming because you need to— again, it's better to know what you're dealing with than for me to be really vague and high level and not give you anything to work with. And I, you know, because someone was facing a very difficult situation, I said, here's the thing, the good news about all this, because we talked about all of the difficulty and kind of how to navigate it. But I said, here's the good news. The good news is that on the grand scheme of your career, and I said, and I say this You know, standing on this end of 23 years of experience. So I recognize it may be easier for me to say than for, you know, than for it to feel like it's real yet for you. But I said, the good news is that this situation is not actually going to affect your career. It seems like it's really big right now and it seems like it could have a big impact. But, you know, I said, and then I won't get into the details, but, you know, due to these particular contextual factors, You actually have a lot of support in this situation, and it's how you navigate this and how you decide to move forward that is going to be important. But this is not actually going to affect your career. This is not, this is not something that's happening 15 years from now, right, with a different context. And so I, my approach is I want to listen because I want to make sure I really understand their situation. I ask questions because I'm trying to, I'm trying to figure out the context that they're actually dealing with. And then I'm, I'm very, um, honest, but I will also say that I am recognizing also the relative privilege that is involved in their, their situation at all times. And what do I mean by that? What I mean is that sometimes people come to me very confused because they have received advice from other people who have given very well-meaning advice, but sometimes the advice that people, you know, that other leaders give comes from a place of unrealized advantage. You know, so, and I know this from my own experience. So let's say, you know, 15 years ago when I was, you know, I was in the earlier days of my career, I was trying to sort some things out and I just couldn't understand why the advice that very well-meaning people gave me, why it wasn't working. Like, why is this not working? I'm doing everything they've said. And I would go back and I would ask them. They're like, oh, that's really strange. I mean, it worked for me. You know what? Just keep going, you know, keep doing it. You're doing all the right things. And at the end of the day, those were not the things that ended up working for me. I had to find other ways. And it took me a lot of years to figure them out because I had to figure them out myself because I didn't have a me to, you know, provide that, you know, that transparency. But, you know, sometimes very well-meaning people are giving advice from a place of unacknowledged or unrealized advantage. That just won't work for someone who doesn't have those same advantages. And so that is another thing that I bring is all of my lived experience as someone who is intersectional. And I recognize I also have a lot of advantages and I recognize those. And also I'm very tuned in to paying attention to, to where those, to where the, my lived experience may be different from others. And so bringing that to these conversations means that people actually have the information that they need, right? I'm not going to sugarcoat things to people and say, oh yeah, just work hard. And, you know, if you work hard, it's all going to turn out well.
