The Mentor in the Mirror

A long time ago I saw something, read it or dreamed it up about the mentor relationship and how it changes us. But the more I thought over it, the more I decided that we don't change to be like our mentors. Instead, we ARE our mentors.

We write our ideal "perfection attributes" on them and we become those attributes. In the process, we simply become ourselves endowed with our own attributes.

It works like this: you see someone who appears or behaves using traits you find naturally appealing. Those traits are appealing because of your culture, ambition or you've otherwise evolved yourself toward those traits.

So you start to ape the behavior, adopt the traits, in order to become that appealing "mentor" individual. And then along the way, you start endowing the mentor with traits you've not actually seen but are otherwise certain they must be there in your mentor. This means you made your mentor into yourself.

We build a composite of the perfect person out of what we see and like in all the people with whom we interact. And that perfect person is us; or at least who we aspire to become in our lifetime.

None of this means we lose our mentors; they are still there acting as barometers or benchmarks for the behavior we want to see in our mirrors. And we love them. That is, until they let us down.