How two babies and a toddler made me a better mentor.
I've always felt passionately about mentorship. I feel like it's often misunderstood. Or maybe what I think mentorship is, is actually something else entirely. For me mentorship is about taking someone from where they are now and helping them to get to where they want to be. I've been fortunate that I've had some very good mentors in my life both professionally and personally, and often those have overlapped as well.
I've recently become a father. My second niece Naomi was born one day before my own daughter and they're both 8 months old at the time of writing this. Being a father makes you look at things differently and think about things that you may not have thought much about before. We've had more opportunities recently to visit my two nieces and I've realised that my 3 year old niece Alice is the type of mentor I want to be. There are three main types of mentor that I see in my nieces, that I think we can all aim for.
Champion
We get a lot of great videos with the nieces interacting and more often than not theres encouragement from Alice such as “Good clapping Naomi!”
A champion is someone who cheers you on. They're the person who takes a moment to tell you that you did a really great job, or to encourage you when you don't feel up to the task. I'm sure we've all felt imposter syndrome at some time and it's often the Champions in our lives who help us through it.
Although it doesn't come naturally to a lot of us (myself included), this is one type of mentor that we can all be. Just think how the Champions in your life make you feel — wouldn't you want to give that to someone else too?
Muse
Naomi spends a lot of her time sitting and watching her big sister do things that she cannot yet do. She's been learning how to move and interact with the world by watching the brilliant example of her big sister.
A muse is someone who you look up to; someone who inspires you to be better. It doesn't even need to be someone you know or interact with. It could be someone you follow on social media, or a public figure.
There's no guaranteed way for you to become a muse to someone. Just try to be the best version of yourself that you can be and I'm sure you'll inspire others. Alice isn't trying to be a Muse — she's just being herself.
Partner
Every time we visit my nieces, my daughter comes away having learned something new. We sit the two babies down together and Naomi shows her cousin all the things that she's been learning from Alice. She's taught her reaching, waving and clapping so far. We've just had a video showing Naomi crawling, so I'm looking forward to the next time we're together for her to help my girl learn that too!
A partner is someone who is aiming for the same goal you are, or they're at least operating in the same area that you're wanting to grow in. This is someone who really understands where you're at and can feed in regularly. Being a partner is probably the most active and intentional type of mentor.
It works best if it's mutual. At the time of writing, I've just finished at a client where I regularly met with each of the engineers in my team on a one to one basis to focus on mentoring. Although I instigated these meetings, and was the most senior engineer on the team, I feel like I got as much out of them as I provided, and learned a lot.
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Richard Bell
Self taught software developer with 11 years experience excelling at JavaScript/Typescript, React, Node and AWS.
I love learning and teaching and have mentored several junior developers over my career. I find teaching is one of the best ways to solidify your own learning, so in the past few years I've been maintaining a technical blog where I write about some things that I've been learning.
I'm passionate about building a teams culture and processes to make it efficient and satisfying to work in. In many roles I have improved the quality and reliability of the code base by introducing or improving the continuous integration pipeline to include quality gates.