The Importance of Situational Mentoring

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Career Development   Leadership  

I have a very good friend who is several years older than me. Aside from being a close friend, he also refers to me as his mentor. I used to cringe a bit every time he said it. I am younger than him and felt that our relative overall life experience didn’t earn me my mentor status.

I took some time to reflect on some of our discussions. I realized that there were some topical areas where I had a significant amount of experience where he had gaps. He understood that my experience filled his gaps, and didn’t consider age to be a barrier to helping him in those areas.

While neither of us were seeking a mentoring relationship, our friendship has morphed to include his mentoring of me in some areas, while I mentor him in others. We are situational mentors to each other based on experience and need.

In my book Behind Gold Doors – Nine Crucial Elements to Achieve Good-Enough Contentment, I talk about nine distinct areas of your life you can assess as to your degree of contentment. Based on the book, I wrote and posted Your North Star – Creating a Practical and Sustainable Purpose Statement on my ProjectManagement.com blog to help give my readers a lens into each of the contentment areas. The contentment areas are as follows:

1. Career Contentment - How content you are in your current and future career potential
2. Family Contentment - How content you…

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