Want to volunteer as a mentor for other women?

The purpose of mentoring is to use your existing knowledge, skills, and experience to support other women to create their best life. Mentoring is non-judgemental, meaning that a mentor supports decisions made by the mentee. The goals and outcomes of a mentoring program will differ depending on the needs of each mentee.

The mentor acts as a role model for the mentee, but mentoring relationships are beneficial to both parties involved.

• For the mentor, it serves as a way to give back and is an important experience for them to grow as women.
• For the mentee, mentoring can help develop new skills, build a larger social network, reflect on and solve past scenarios, and have an example to look up to.

Below are more details on the main benefits of becoming a mentor for other women.

Benefits for the Mentor

Develop leadership skills. Being put in the position of a role model can instill confidence in their ability and help mentors become better leaders in their community. The responsibility of supporting someone’s life journey and their goals requires the mentor to motivate, to advocate and to offer honest feedback in difficult conversations. All these skills are at the top of the required list for a leader in the community.

Being recognised as an advisor. After a good mentoring session, mentees are likely to mention it to others in the community. In a short time, people will come to you for advice and doors will open for you to become involved in leadership positions or projects.

Communication and listening skills. If you’ve ever had to explain something to somebody, you probably noticed that you have to think it through and clean up your explanation to make it easy for another person to understand. You become more competent as a mentor when you are forced to generalise your advice to somebody based on your own life experiences.

Learn the latest thinking / approaches. While the mentor is usually in the position of imparting knowledge and support to the mentee, a mentoring relationship can also help the mentor learn new skills. It’s usual that mentors have good communication skills, but this is an area where we can all continue to improve and also learn new skills. A mentor can learn a lot from interactions with their mentee,  especially new skills or a new way of doing things.

Giving back. Mentoring provides the opportunity for the mentor to give back to their community by supporting mentees as they re-integrate into education, employment or engagement in the community.

Personal satisfaction and self worth. Mentoring can help increase the sense of self-worth that a mentor has because they will be able to see how their skills and abilities can help someone else and gain satisfaction as those women become more competent and satisfied. Mentoring is a huge ego boost!

‍If you would like to know more about becoming a mentor, check out our article specifically addressing how to mentor someone, or if you’re ready to get to it contact us and let us know that you’re interested in volunteering. A very supportive learning environment as well as free mentor training is provided to our volunteers.