Mentorship is not a manual: Why context is your ultimate teacher.

Mentorship is often hailed as a shortcut to growth. It is seen as the super highway to wisdom paved by those who have been there and done that. Rightly so, a good mentor can save you years of trial and error, offering hard earned insights, powerful connections, and a mirror to your blind spots. However, it is safe to state that mentorship is not a manual. Following your mentor’s advice without applying contextual judgment can do more harm than good. Context compliments content in saving the crown. Context is the real king. What worked for your mentor might derail you if the circumstances are not aligned.

The mirage of one-size-fits-all mentorship

Many protégés fall into the trap of trying to replicate their mentor’s path. They adopt strategies, decisions, even habits without evaluating the forces that shaped those choices. This often leads to frustration, confusion, or missed opportunities. So why does this happen? This is because mentorship too often is treated as prescription, not perspective.

So what differentiates Mentor-Protégé scenarios?

Here are key variables that make one person’s path fundamentally different from another’s:

• Timing: Your mentor succeeded in a different market cycle, industry trend, or technological age. Timing influences strategy more than we admit.
• Resources: The networks, finances, and team support your mentor had access to might not mirror your current reality.
• Personality & Strengths: Leadership style, communication habits, and risk tolerance are personal factors that shape every decision.
• Cultural/Organizational Context: A mentor’s decisions may have been driven by specific company culture or geopolitical climates that no longer exist or totally different to yours.
• Stage of Career: Advice that worked for someone transitioning to executive leadership may not apply to someone entering mid-management.

Smart Filtering: A guide to applying mentorship with context

1. Ask “Why did it work?” before “How do I copy it?”- Seek to understand the conditions that made your mentor’s advice effective. Was it timing? Their role? A specific team dynamic? This helps you in building mental flexibility. For the fact that Warren Buffett said it does not mean it would work in your home country. Be willing to probe it!
2. Map advice to your reality – Do a reality check. Create a simple comparison table.
3. Extract principles, not tactics – Behind every tactic is a principle. A mentor who preaches penny stocks might just be enjoying a seemly steady economy as against a Protégé who jumped into the pool of penny stocks while based in a highly volatile economy. First translate advice into principles that can be adapted, not adopted blindly.
4. Contextualize before you act – Ask yourself: What am I trying to solve?, Is this advice relevant now?, What constraints exist that did not exist for my mentor?, How can I test this idea in a low-risk way?
5. Cross-check with multiple lenses – Do not let one mentor become a single source of truth. Compare perspectives. Run your situation by another experienced professional, coach, or peer for triangulation.

Beyond asking your mentor, “What should I do?”, also endeavour to ask the following:

• “What were the key variables that made this decision work for you?”
• “How would you have approached this if you were in my position?”
• “What might make your advice less relevant to my context?”

These questions help to shift the conversation from directive to diagnostic; giving you deeper insight and better judgment.

Mentorship is a gift. However, it is not a substitute for contextual thinking. Think of mentor insights as raw material, not finished products. Your job is to reshape and refine them using the lens of your current reality. In the end, the best decisions are not copied; they are adapted.

Dear mentee to a mentor, start your next conversation by framing your context clearly. Also as a mentee, start filtering advice, not just collecting it. The real wisdom lies not just in what is said or read but in how and when you apply it.

Finally, being a mentee does not mean slaving away for a supposed mentor. If this is what you have going for you, then a re-evaluation is required.

#Thoughts #Mentorship #Workplace #PersonalLife