Mentorship
Safety net & build wealth
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Business planning & strategy
Mentorship programs are offered to women and young girls who want to develop themselves by learning from the experiences of their established counterparts.
Research beyond the business plan
How might Mentoring benefit me?
Hopefully if you have signed up to be mentored, you are already ‘sold’ on how important mentoring is in helping you to be successful. Here are just some of the reasons why you might find having a mentor beneficial:
- They will give you the support you need to get you to where you want to go faster
- Someone to bounce ideas off
- Someone to help you work through problems
- Help coming up with strategies to deal with some of your weaker spots (we all have them!)
- Help to keep you focussed on your ‘big picture’ goals (we all get bogged down with the day to day sometimes)
- Help thinking about your ‘whole’ self. Whereas coaches will focus on specific issues, mentors usually help you to think more about your broader experience and life goals
- Help to identify new opportunities, and decide which ones you should pursue
- They might open up their ‘little black book’ for you – don’t expect this right away though!
- Someone to help you set objectives, keep you motivated and offer you general support
Creating a list of potential qualified prospects for your service or product can be daunting when you’re beginning your business. However, this needs to be considered as a follow up on your Target Market Analysis so you can hit the ground running.
Business plan market
It is important to be clear on what mentoring is and what it is not. Mentoring can sometimes be a tricky term to understand because it can be so interchangeable with other terms and the line between mentoring and other terms is not always very clear cut. Perhaps the term that it is most often confused with is ‘coaching’ but it can also be confused with terms such as ‘guide’ ‘lead’ and ‘counsel’ – to name just a few!
Mentoring is a fluid concept, but it helps to have some guidelines, so you should use the list below as a framework for starting to understand what your role is as a mentor:
- A mutually developmental relationship where knowledge, experience and understanding are shared
- Supporting people to manage their own learning to enable them to maximise their potential and improve their performance
- Supporting someone to be the person that they want to be
- Listening with empathy (rather than sympathy)
- Supporting people to develop their insight into a situation through reflection
- Being a soundboard
- Encouraging someone to be the best (business) person that they can be
Competitor research & analysis
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