Business Mentors

The fourth edition of Inspiring Mentor, the mentoring program of the non-profit Young Women Network aimed at supporting the empowerment of young women in Italy, has officially started.

The Mentoring is an increasingly common practice in the business and corporate world. It consists of a relationship between an “expert” and a “student”, the mentor and the mentee, which enriches both parties through a voluntary and selfless relationship that leads to personal and professional growth.

#InspiringMentor is an accompaniment process through which mentors make their time and skills available to support the growth of young professionals, the mentees. their identity and their professional goals, while ignoring the negative messages fed by the media and society.

Think that the etymology of the word Mentor can be traced back to Homer’s Odyssey : when he leaves for Troy, Ulysses entrusts his son Telemachus to Mentor, friend and adviser, who takes care of him and guides him in the path of growth and succession to the throne. This makes you understand that if you want a comparison, an inspiration, a dialogue with someone more experienced, an advice, a guide, the mentor is what you are looking for. if you want to be the figure that maybe in your career was fundamental, then a mentee is what is right for you.

The evolution of one’s professional career is often left too much to chance.

No one would dream of participating in a sports competition without having prepared or advised by an expert on the best diet, exercises and training sessions to undergo.

In Young Women Network we believe that the same rigor must be applied to the world of work, to successfully achieve set career goals, but also to face the daily work routine with determination!

This is why Inspiring Mentor was born 3 years ago, a six-monthly course reserved for the members of the association, in which senior figures from the Italian business and entrepreneurial landscape make available their time and work awareness to share experiences, suggestions and practical cases on topics like entrepreneurship, leadership, networking, work-life balance, etc.

But what is a mentoring program for?
The idea behind initiatives like Inspiring Mentor is that each of us, and especially young women at the beginning of their careers, need a guide, a person who can encourage ambition, inspire, advise and stimulate. to give the best. In short, not a person who provides “turnkey solutions” to our problems, but able to show us the best tools to “get by on our own”.

There are now numerous studies that demonstrate the social impact of mentoring and that the most successful people are also those who have managed to create, during their journey, a vast network of relationships that they can rely on in the most crucial moments of their lives. professional and not.

Why? What are the benefits of a mentorship relationship?
We asked directly to some of our members who have tried the program in previous editions.

For Marina, for example, mentoring helped her reflect on herself as a professional and as a person. Thanks to a different point of view, she was able to review her way of approaching work, and to have a gateway to another world, that of her mentor, who is now also a great friend!

Carla, a historic member of the association, defines her mentoring path as stimulating and enlightening, a way to open one’s mind and horizons. The relationship with his mentor was born two years ago, and it became so strong that he asked to be able to continue together also the following year. Thanks to her mentor, Carla was able to focus on the goals achieved and on what distinguishes her from others, and to understand how to marry her professional career with her interests and passions. A continuous mutual exchange of stimuli and suggestions, from which even her mentor came out extremely enriched and satisfied.