Have you ever had someone  that you look up to? This could be someone close to you or  even a celebrity.  Now ask yourself: Could one conversation with them change your life?

Whether it be one conversation or a lifetime of them, changing your life is the role of a mentor. Their job is to have conversations with you that will give you direction, advice, feedback, support, unbiased opinions, and facts about things that will help you in your journey to success.

There are many reasons why a mentor is specifically important to your success. First of all, mentors in your field are usually your ideal role models for where you want to be in your field or maybe even your preliminary model of success in your field if you want to reach beyond that. Role models are particularly important to success because they provide inspiration, motivation, and a visual representation of how you want to succeed. Having a role model can even help you with goal setting for your accomplishments.

Mentors are not only role models but they are also informal educators as well as humans. They provide you with examples of obstacles and hurdles they had to overcome in the process of succeeding themselves and can provide you with information on how to avoid running into certain obstacles. They show you the realistic side of success, meaning they will show you that success is not always black and white or high and low. Success is not perfect, nor is the journey toward it.

Now you may ask, is a mentor absolutely needed to succeed? The answer is no. Many people succeeded greatly without a mentor such as Vincent van Gogh, J.K. Rowling, Nikola Tesla, and Howard Shultz. Mentors simply just make the journey to success a little easier and clear-cut.

According to Jamie Birt in an article on Indeed, a global job matching site, “Mentorship can provide numerous benefits for mentors and their mentees. Developing this relationship can help both of you learn new things, build your networks, and grow as professionals.” So not only does mentorship help people succeed, it helps mentees network and build connections with others in the field at all levels.

So if you’re ever thinking about your future and don’t know where to go, where to start, how to navigate, or whom to talk to, it is highly recommended that you try to find the mentor fit for you to help to get you from where you are to where you want to go and/or finish. You can find a mentor in a friend, in an elder, in a pastor, and in many other places. Some mentors are permanent and some are temporary, its all about having someone lead, guide, and be there for you.