My Mentoring Journey

Premise: I want to clarify that this is not my real name. I have been in an abusive violent relationship and I cannot use my real name due to some repercussions this could have in my life and in my family. If someone thinks I am using another name to protect myself from the Internet trolls that have attacked Lighthouse Global in the last months, well I can say to them that they are wrong.

Here is my experience with Lighthouse Global.

My mentorship experience has been a journey of discovering the importance of loving myself and continuously committing myself to take responsibility to build the life I want. Earlier this year marked my second re-birthday as a mentee… I was close to depression and thought of suicide as a way to end a series of problems that were happening to me, especially since I moved to England. Fortunately, I looked around myself for help and found the person who then became my mentor.

My mentor, Sukh Singh, and I started the experience by knowing each other and knowing myself for the first time in my life. He gave (and continues to give) me many questions to reflect on myself and to see myself as an individual who could respond to different life situations rather than seeing myself as a victim of conditions that were happening to me. Having lived almost forty years of my life in abusive relationships, one after another, and giving control to different people, from family members to managers and colleagues, to manage my life, I started to discover my own value and potential as a human being and believe that something positive could happen to me.

I consider that one of the most significant achievements my mentor has had with me has been his ability to guide me through the process of discovering the victimised little girl to knowing the “baby” inside myself who needs nurturing and attention. This realisation has changed my perspective of how to respond to the world around me.

The major changes in my personal life started to happen last year. I had committed to working with my mentor on a big project for my career, when a call from my family stopped me from carrying on with it and redesign my entire life. Due to severe lung cancer, my mother’s conditions were getting worse and the idea that we, as a family, could have lost her, made me take the first available flight and go back to my mother. It was the first real difficult decision that I had to face in my life! Soon with the help of my mentor, I started the process of helping my mother recover from her mental depression, helping her to change her diet and building a healthy environment around her. Being able to do that marked another step in my personal growth because for the first time in my life, I was able to lead a union within my family, which had been driven by conflicts and unresolved challenges.

After months of being with my family and after my mother’s successful recovery, I started to feel comfortable with my parents at home. I did not show any desire and motivation to come back to England. At that time, I was working on my job search plan with the help of my mentor, a project that did not work as I got only rejections from applications. I was questioning and blaming everything and everyone again in my life! Fortunately, my mentor held me accountable and put me in a position where I could learn from my failure. I realized that I was the only one who could help myself to be in a better professional place. So, I made another plan that did not work and another one that worked successfully, because I was finally able to envision the advancement in my career as part of my personal growth. Scheduling interviews became a habit for me, once I was able to schedule 5 interviews in only one day! I was able to break down four or five mental barriers each day and come back to my mentor and ask how I could make things work better. My mentor had the ability to put me in the right place at the right moment; then I did the rest of the job. In that period, I was able to make massive changes in my physical area, and I started to train to run a half-marathon. If I look back to the months from March to August 2021, those have been the most exciting and energetic of my life, until now.

Looking back especially at those past months, I see my journey as that one of a toddler’s when they start to walk on their own: they begin by being handled their parents' hands, then they start on their own and need to balance their body in order to not fall and they know that they need to go alone without the help of their parents. This is what being mentored means for me; having the courage to fail and take the responsibility to learn from those failures, make changes inside myself, becoming independent as an individual and a human being.

The past months have marked a step in how I see one of the most important people in my life, my father. I have always had a bad relationship with him with huge resentment from each other and inability to express our feelings. Now, I am in a position where I can see my father as the only person who took me to the field during my childhood to build a relationship with nature around myself and trees.

The tree-figure has now become more important than ever for me because I have related trees with my growth. From feeling that I am nothing, I have started to see my own value and see the mentorship as the physical act of planting a tree. In many cultures, trees represent a celebration of life and in my own family, my father has always planted a tree for any newborn. My mentor has helped me to plant a new seed inside myself. The seed has sprouted and taken root in my heart. The roots represent my personal principles and values; the trunk represents my relationships with other people and the crown my relationship with my father, who has influenced who I am today, but also represent my role in this world to serve other people who are in needed situations.

I cannot find better words to express my relationship with my mentor than those that Michael Phelps used to describe his relationship with Bob Bowman... “Bob, the only coach I have never had. He had trained me, punished me, motivated me, inspired me, and proved to me the connection between hard work and success. Bob has long been one of the very few people in my life to tell me the unadulterated truth, even when I didn’t want to listen. Perhaps most important, especially when I didn’t want to hear it” (From “No Limits - The Will to Succeed”). As a mentee, I consider the ability to continuously assess my self-anchored old conditions/beliefs and my willingness to challenge as the key points for indeed personal growth.