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Last month one of my nephews turned 14 and being a first born his mum (my sister) wrote down a sweet birthday message with a part of it saying.” You introduced the word mummy to my life” and I thought ‘how sweet and how true’? For those of us who are parents you agree with me ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’ never meant much until you became one. You also agree that it is one thing to be called a ‘mummy’ and another thing to take up the responsibilities that comes with being one. There are needs that a child has which only you as a mummy or daddy can meet and hence they become our responsibilities. However, whether you take up these responsibilities or not the child will still grow and you will still be called ‘mummy’. My friend and a sought-after speaker on the subjects of marriage and parenting, Dr Stanley Mukolwe, writes in his Book ‘Rising Future Parents’”. …you may choose when to have children, you may even choose how many children to have. But once you have these children, you cannot choose when to raise them. Your choices are gone! If you do not raise them, they will still grow. But you may not like what you get!”
We decided to celebrate our entrepreneurs during this Customer service week (csweek2019), those who we have mentored over the years.
The ones who helped us realize that the word ‘mentor’ just like the word ‘mummy’ is not just any other word but it comes with responsibilities. Those we can look back to and say, “We raised them” and they can equally look at us and say, “Here is our ‘mentor’ (‘mummy’). For us to ‘LIKE WHAT WE GET’ we realize that we have to pay attention to some key aspects of Mentoring. The first one is the Empowering aspect of mentorship; a mentee in the end needs to be proud of their positive growth after a mentoring journey with us. This positive growth can and should be measured. Second is uniqueness; a mentor should never ‘cut and paste’ a mentoring approach. Each mentee is unique to us and we therefore treat them as such when designing our mentoring methods. The third one is ‘Relationship’; being a value adding relationship our mentoring is driven by honesty, respect for each other, clarity of goals as well as being a win-win for both the mentor and the mentee. The last one and not the least is commitment; We will go out of our way to support our mentees not so much because of the value of the currencybut because of the ‘personal satisfaction and shared accomplishments’ that comes with this commitment.
We desire to be like Paul in the Bible who committed time to mentor Timothy his ‘true son in the faith’ (1 Tim 1:2). Through their close relationship Paul empowered Timothy by giving him direct input and many opportunities so that he could grow personally and develop in Ministry. It is our prayer that each one that comes to us for mentorship will experience an empowering, unique relationship driven by our commitment to see them grow personally and develop in what they do. And they are right. As an entrepreneur, you have to be prepared to give it your all – energy, time, and attention at any time of the day or night.
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