How to Identify the Right Mentor for Your Career

I think this is a good places any need to start welcome to today's webinar How to Identify the Right Mentor for Your Career and just a note about Q?A questions and answers please feel free to ask questions in the chat just keep in mind it may take me a bit to answer them our team is going to do the best to address the majority of them before the end of the webinar so appreciate your patience for when we time when that those when I answer those questions also I want to acknowledge my colleague from behind the scenes Steph Stevens she's going to be sharing additional information in the chat throughout the webinar so make sure to open the links to save them and last but not least this webinar is being recorded and will be posted in the osmosis events page next week and Steph will put the link in the chat there okay let me share my screen and we'll dive in here we go all right so the official Title Here of how to identify the right Mentor for your career but I was I was as I Was preparing the slides I really wanted to acknowledge that this is really multiple mentors mentorship is a team sport and you can have there's no upper limit on the number of mentors you can have in your career and so I just want to acknowledge it's it should really be about like navigating the sort of multiple mentorship relationships so let me start by telling you a bit about me so I'm a big fan of transparency and education so I like to share a little bit about my personal a sort of Life a bit here you see in the top row some of my earlier career years I met my wife and fell in love during when she was in med school and I was in residency here at UCSF and then life continues and so we're privileged to have two healthy children and some more recent pictures of our middle years of life professionally I wear a lot of hats I am a tried and true academic psychiatrist I've been at UCSF in my entire career in the department of Psychiatry where I do clinical work I also have the privilege of teaching medical students and other health professional students at two other San Francisco Bay Area health science universities and then the bottom row is my sort of non-academic disclosures and so I do receive some salary support from some medical education or health education companies including osmosis of course and I want to acknowledge I'm never leaving Academia I love it too much but I also appreciate that some Innovation happens outside of our academic IU towers and sometimes in some cases faster than inside so I think we need each other we Academia brings scholarly rigor and our industry Partners bring speed of innovation and resources and together we can improve Health Professions education both scientifically and quickly so full disclosure there about my inherent conflict of interest with some fiscal support from osmosis having said that I want to also acknowledge where I'm coming to you from I'm at UCSF in San Francisco and this is the historical and present day places for peoples from the alone and confederated Villages of John peoples I love this website native-land.ca because you can then you can overlay a Google map with sort of historical understandings of where peoples are who have been before have populated different regions so I encourage you all to not only do land acknowledgements but learn more about other people's and so every time I give a talk I love learning more about the peoples who have shepherded this land before me okay so I have the plan for today any good educator should have learning objectives and a structure for the plan so we're going to do slides for about 40 minutes and then Q?A and the learning objectives here my hope is that we will slice mentoring into three pieces or domains the first one we're going to talk about the basics of mentor and mentees ship and definitions of different terms the second one is I really want you to understand how we differentiate between some overlapping terms coaching counseling sponsorship and think about those as the pieces of mentoring if you will the tasks that mentors and mentees engage in and then the third one is real practical stuff I want to talk about all sorts of nuts and bolts of how to maintain establish and maintain a mentor mentee relationship including navigating different styles between you and mentors or if you are a mentor between you and mentees okay so those are the three main learning objectives for today okay so one metaphor I like to use U when I think about mentorship is slicing a pizza so I want to sort of propose to you that we're all used to eating pizzas with a traditional wedge shaped P pie pieces but you can go down an internet rabbit hole about different ways to slice pizzas so here's a complaint about how those T tiny corner pieces are the best pizzas and they're the smallest and only four people can eat them here's an interesting way to slice pizza where you can actually ensure that every single piece is identical so you can see those Center star wedged pieces are the same shape as the outside ones though to be fair not everybody gets crossed and then you can really go down a rabbit hole about how you can how many cuts and how many size the pieces should be of course in the end all of these pieces of pizza add up to one whole pizza and so with when we think about that I want to propose to you that we are going to dis slice mentorship into three pieces today okay three pieces of our pizza and I'm going to go over them one wedge at a time okay so those three pieces we're the first one is the definition the second one is going to be the coaching counseling and sponsorship which again are the tasks of Mentor M relationship and then the third one is all the practicalities and the tips on practical how hosts so let's start with the definitions piece okay so Mentor where does the word come from it comes from Greek mythology Odus left for the Trojan War and he was gone for a long time and he had a teenage son Tacus and so he said to his wise older friend Mentor hey Mentor take care of my son while I'm gone you know doing these amazing things and that turned out I think to be a total of 10 years in which Mentor was effectively parenting In Absentia for Odysseus his son okay so that's what the word comes from just so you know and of course the word in English has been adopted to mean someone who imparts wisdom to and shares knowledge with a less experienced colleague that's all fine and good another definition that we'll see here is a wise or trusted counselor influential senior sponsor or supporter teacher guide tutor coach advisor trainer definitions are really always good about sort of being all-inclusive I like to I like this osmosis picture here because for me what this really is about helping those who are a few steps behind or in this picture below you in their professional identity formation in their growth to the professionals that we mutually want them to be right so so when we think about definitions I will turn to my own institution UCSF for a number of ways that we locally will Define different types of mentors because it turns out that we think about five different types of what we would think of as mentors here and I'm just going to show you these definitions and differentiate amongst them okay first one is what they call we call career mentors and from our website here UCSF defines career mentors as overall career guidance and support from usually it's in the same department so Psychiatry for Psychiatry medicine for medicine and they should by definition not be the direct supervisor because that could be a conflict of interest and ideally the career Mentor is assigned or approved by some departmental mentoring facilitator so our department has a Psychiatry mentorship thing and there's a faculty member whose job it is to pair mentor and mentees for career mentorship okay that's first type second are what we call research or scholarly mentors okay in this case scholarly mentors are are responsible for the overall research and scholarly career guidance and specifically those research scholarly mentors participate in the development of the creative and independent research careers of mentees so here you have to have scientific expertise that overlaps with that mentee because your you can think about this for example it's a pi or principal investigators in a lab where you're training Junior colleagues postdocs doctoral students research assistants to grow in their scientific area of expertise okay third one is advisers they have informal relationships with mentees typically they're less invested than mentors in the long-term Career Success of the mentee so you can think this is a more time limited advisor let's say on a specific project or a specific phase of career Journey for example like first year medical student advisers who only work in the first year med school commentors are other mentors as part of the mentoring team that provide more Specialized or different content area or methodological expertise for example let's say you're doing a research study and you need some statistical expertise you might have a co-mentor who's a biostatistician or a procedural expertise you want to use a particular lab equipment in the lab and your Pi doesn't have any experience with that but another investigator has experience with that lab equipment that's becomes a co-mentor okay last one are project mentors and that's a much more limited role typically they'll supervise for the completion of defined time limited project for example you're doing a summer program and you're collecting data in that summer program and so that project Mentor is involved only for the summer while you're while you're doing that summer program okay so these are five different types of mentors here at UCSF I' I'd offer to you that one key point I'll make about these the big two at the top career mentors and research or scholarly mentors is that they take on more than merely specific projects rotations Etc. so they are a much more involved relationship with those mentees okay so what's the difference between those mentors and all these other words I mean we can think about advisor counselor or whatnot so I'd like to offer you at least my framework an entirely subjective framework but I think it's a valid one on the difference between a mentor a true career Mentor or scholarly mentor and all these other terms and there's two things three actually the first one is that the if it's done well if the mentor mentee relationship is really done well then you become colleagues over time and I say maybe even friends because certainly I've established friendships with my career mentors through the years as we've Advanced the academic ladder and as we really truly have become colleagues rather than a mentor mentee second is that the relationship should ideally be mutually beneficial that is to say the mentor also grows they become a better Mentor through the relationship with them Mente and really good mentors I think include personal disclosure as they feel comfortable doing to build human connections with their mentees and so you saw that for example at the beginning of this talk when I share with you a bit about my personal life because I want you to see that transparency in educational relationships because I think that builds psychological safety emotional room for growth and educational Max maximum educational benefit okay that's what I think makes a difference between a mentor career or scholarly mentor and any other type of senior person in your growth Journeys as health professionals all right that's the first wedge okay let's move on to the second piece of the pie in this case we're going to be talking about coaching versus counseling versus sponsorship and what I think you should think about in terms of these words is that these are really the different tasks that mentors do career mentors scholarly mentors they're doing all three of these in partnership with you as a Mente okay so let's define these terms coaching can be thought of as academic performance and task oriented things so they may be coaching you in specific coursework your grades in classes that you're taking in your med school or nursing school whatnot or they may be helping you with specific research tasks that you're doing data collection data analysis scholarly manuscript drafting and submitting to conferences scholarly dissemination so posters conferences manuscripts so those coaching tasks are specifically around those academic and task oriented things in contrast I'm going to suggest to that counseling is more in the personal life thing so here we'll think about this in terms of Life work balance making sure that you don't leave your professional that your professional efforts don't leave your personal efforts behind that your emotional well-being is is as high as it can be that they're helping you through some any personal life crisis directing you to other resources that you may not know about the urgencies and realities of we have to cancel oh I don't know for example today there's all these fires happening in Los Angeles and so that's an urgency and reality that needs to address be addressed in addition to the professional tasks and then I want to include here this notion of diversity Equity inclusion and belonging especially because the community of health professionals is not as diverse as it needs to be especially the mentor pool we have a long ways to go to really be fully inclusive and Equitable and to have the equivalent diversity of mentors that we have in the diversity of mentees but we're coming a long ways but I want to acknowledge there's a lot of lot of work to do still in there especially around inclusivity and belonging and so the task of mentors around this domain is really U falls under the counseling Spectrum and again this is where I would say that mentees can effectively Mentor up because of your own lived experiences that mentors may not have had the third domain of the third task that mentors should do is sponsorship okay and sponsorship is really around lifting you up as mentees for your professional opportunities and career advancement so that could be at your home institution sponsoring you to take on a project that you that the mentor hopes will help you grow it could be across institution so I'm sponsoring you to give a talk do a poster at a multi-institution collaboration locally and then you know more broadly at sort of professional organizations professional networking submitting to conferences being seen as a junior colleague who's advancing in that area of science area of healthcare so if you look at this framework here you can see these are three different domains that mentors can help with mentees around personal professional growth and so these coaching counseling sponsors so those are terms we use here at UCSF a lot of overlap in the way these terms are defined and used at different institutions but really good mentors should be engaged in all three of these domains okay so so again a little subjective here but I would like you offer some of my sort of advice to mentors around these domains so I would like to say specifically if any of you are mentoring you are not a parent but you're working to demonstrate that you are a trusted adult for this junior colleague or someone who's earlier in their Career Development and so to those of you that are wanting to be good mentors I would ask you to ask yourselves what would you have wanted from a mentor when you were younger or earlier in your career or both really and that's the tasks that I'm hoping that you would take on as a as a mentor who's got a growth mindset and who's getting better as you go most of you I assume in this talk are actually likely to be more likely mentees though it's never too early to Mentor even as a second-year med student you can mentor first year Med students and you know college students and high schoolers etc. etc. so you're never too young to mentee or to Mentor but if you're a mentee or thinking of yourself mostly as a mentee that I'm going to offer you are not a child you are an adult and you are in this this journey towards a becoming a responsible or being as responsible as you can as an earlier career Junior your colleague in the career trajectory you've chosen and so I invite you to think what can I learn from this more experienced person who's further along down a career path that I aspire to okay so these are ways that I think you can frame your work of coaching counseling sponsoring or being coached being sponsored all right so that's the second part of our pizza I see there's some chat comments and I'm looking forward to reading those and in the Q?A when we get through the slides but let's go to the third piece of the of the pizza so here we're going to talk practicalities and I have several different sort of domains that I've framed it up as these are the I don't know since we're not to stretch the pizza met for too far but nine different toppings on this wedge of the pizza if you will and we're going to talk about each of those toppings one at a time all right the first one is going to be about asking for mentorship so many of you may not have a career Mentor or a research or schooling Mentor yet and so you may be wondering well how the heck do I get started how do I ask for mentorship so you know in my clinical work I run Psychotherapy groups and with my with my trainees sometimes they struggle with what to say in Psychotherapy and so I like to point out that there's lots of different ways to say things right so here for example are three practical like literal utterances you could use if you wanted to ask a candidate Mentor if they were up for mentoring you either for research or scholarly purposes or for career mentorship for example these aren't rocket science sentences but I'm just offering use of examples let's say some of you are further along or you are being asked to mentor and you just don't have the time to do it that's a reality right so you're too busy with other juggling other balls and you don't feel that you can adequately be a good Mentor so how do you say no respectfully and sort of gracefully again sort of these aren't rocket science utterances but I offer at least three here that are sincere and sort of legit for why you can't Mentor someone okay I know a lot of times this stuff feels sort of second nature to me but I've been at this a long time and so I do want to acknowledge that this may seem easier said than done but having said that practice and like everything else in life the more you practice something the easier it gets the more comfortable you are and then it just gets quite easy to both ask for and to sort of tactfully decline or agree to a mentor mentee relationship okay really strongly encourage you to practice this and you know if you're really nervous practice it in front of the mirror literally because you will see your body language and what you're doing in again the more you do that the easier it gets okay practice it with friends too and they can give you feedback on what you thought you did well or what you could do better okay second topic this one I want to talk about sort of having an action plan so you've decided that you are ready to ask a mentor and they say yes okay what now what's the next steps I want to acknowledge that the osmosis medical education Network in Palestine was a sort of outcropping of the oi program The Omen The Omen program the OHLI program a few years back and I had the great privilege of working with a Palestinian medical student who had developed a network of medical students across the medical schools in Palestine and so we designed a sort of mentor mentorship program for those students that community and as part of that they had an extensive mentoring action plan that included template and a framework so I want to start with the framework and then I'll show you the template this framework is a smart goals and you can see this is all over the Internet it's not unique to this program but smart goals are defined as specific measurable attainable relevant and time based or time bound so each of those five elements of a smart goal can be present or absent right and and they're all key to defining a smart goal for some for achieving a goal either individually or together with a mentor for example and so it it's not smart if it doesn't have all five it could be smar or SMR or Mar without the S right you get the gist but each of those five things are separate right and so so I invite you to think about setting smart goals and so for the for the med synapses Omen Palestine mentorship program we gave the mentor mentee pairs a template I'm going to show you an example of that template you don't you don't need the template but I think templates are great for sort of concretizing sort of and breaking down big things into sort of tangible tasks and to-dos so here you can see for example we've got a strategic action that the mentor Mente pair want to do let's say it's learn more about PCR okay so the mentee action steps in the leftmost Box would be all right I need to read up on PCR and the mentor action steps might be I need to give this trainee some key literature to read about PCR or videos to watch about PCR whatever it may be together can brainstorm what the challenges or obstacles might be so Mente might say I'm busy in med school or I've got a final coming up or I don't know how to carve out time to read this or I don't know what the right literature to read is the resources needed here might be something like the mentor submitting stuff to the mentee The mentee Carving out protected time to read about PCR and then together they'll Define that the date of completion is going to be exactly September 19th 2025 why exactly because then it's specific and it's time bound and so it meets some of those smart goals okay the success measures is a is a framework where we could say we'll know we did this if the mentee can rattle off what they learned about PCR or declare that they now feel comfortable maybe beginning to try to do PCR in a lab right and the notes section obviously for just notes to the pair team right so I've give you a very sort of concrete specific example about a lab based sort of task or tool but you get the gist right you can be extremely systematic and document everything if you have an action plan a strategy to assess how you're doing to real time modify and improve as you go so in this Example The MENTOR mentee pairs were strongly encouraged to use this document and discuss it bring it to each meeting and discuss it in each meeting so that way they could make sure they calibrated anywhere where there were stumbling block hiccups or roadblocks okay second piece of the puzzle and the third piece of the puzzle is what I'll call a contract so I like to say you know when you engage in an educational relationship with mentors it's you want to treat it with the same deference and reverence as a signed contract like so I've known of some Mentor mentee programs where there literally do sign and I have signed a contract with mentees so that way we are extremely clear on what we're doing and so you may not want or have a contract in any kind of Mentor mentee relationship but I want to invite you to treat it with that same deference and reverence because when you sign a contract theoretically you're committing to doing what it says right both people who sign it so all the individuals who sign it so I really want you to think about Mentor mentees ship in that same degree of commitment Mutual commitment okay so the fourth piece of practicality here is availabilities right so we are all extremely busy people and we're juggling multiple balls and or trying to keep them all in the air and we work by deadlines right so all of us are frequently like doing the task that's due tomorrow be first because now I can then when I finish Thursday's task I can work on Fridays right so that's normal for all of us right but I think it's important to establish a shared understanding about how responsive mentors are to be with mentees like when are how quickly can you expect a response in this modern era where we have sort of so many ways to get a hold of each other it's it's important to establish what's on or off limit right so are you allowed to text your Mentor are you or are using email as a primary means of communication is so other social media sort of platforms appropriate or not and so if we don't discuss this it's in this gray Zone where it's ripe for misunderstanding and misinformation and confusion and so again you may not have a formal contract but I really think it's extremely worth discussing availabilities in that sort of discussion early on as you establish an action plan with your Mentor Mente pairs next piece of the puzzle is platforms so or piece of the pizza rather so the sound truth is that the more ways we have to communicate with each other the harder it seems to be effective right was I supposed to text or was that a sort of email well instead of an email well wait a minute like Believe It or Not Hospital Systems still use faxes in many parts of the world and so we've got to respond to the fact right and so is that a digital or a paint print communication and so we get lost in all of these different forms of communication even here right are you supposed to post it in the Q?A or is this a comment for the panelists there's more than one way to communicate with the me and the Osmos support team right so again I think it's extremely important to sort of communicate you don't do this at the beginning of the relationship you tend to not you forget to do it later in the relationship so I think having this discussion early on is really important say so I will tell my mentees it's okay for you to text me or I prefer email and I may not get back to you for 72 hours or something like that so please Hound me or nudge me if you if you need an earlier response and then they at least are understanding of me juggling multiple balls right so talk communication it's really valuable to ensure your success all right the next thing I want to talk about is the scope of work that you do together in a mentor mentee relationship and so in here and what I want to really talk about is if you don't discuss what domains are what you're hoping to get out of the mentor mentee relationship there's a risk of mission creep or there's a risk that that you don't get the most valuable piece because you didn't agree that it was worth talking about so what I mean here is is it okay in Fair Game to talk about with a mentor life work balance or is that something that you don't want to discuss because you've got other mentors for that and they they would rather not discuss that with you because because they would like to focus on the scientific domain or on the educational domain right and so or did you decide okay that's fair game and in fact not only is it fair game but it's so important that we're going to prioritize that our next meeting We're not going to talk science we're just going to talk about life work balance and we're going to talk about maintaining that balance in your professional Journey right so these pictures here these noodles I don't remember what they were supposed to do with osmosis originally but I thought it was they were kind of cute because what you can see here is that they're actually fighting each other and I'd like to propose to you they're fighting not because they mean to fight it's just because they're prioritizing different things with each other so they didn't realize that today's meeting was supposed to be about work life balance instead of about like reading the PCR stuff right and so one of them is trying to focus on the science and the other one's trying to focus on life work balance and so they're in opposition with each other and so there's lots of miscommunication opportunities and I think again explicitly discussing what's within the scope of the relationship maximizes the chances of success in the in the mentor mentee pair so again I mentioned to you a couple times it's worth discussing in that non-contract contract that you should be talking about upfront early on in the relationship okay next piece of the sort of pizza Toppings is termination or ending the relationship so the short-term advisors the project mentors co-mentors those are by definition time limited so there's going to be a time when the relationship comes to an end or changes when that happens I want to remind you all that it's extremely valuable even if it's only for two seconds at the end of the relationship to acknowledge and thank each other for what was ideally a good working relationship right so thank you for being my career Mentor I'm sorry thank you for being my adviser for the first two years of med school thank you for helping me with this summer res search Project where I learned how to do basic science laboratory research and from the mentor side thanks for being a great mentee I really enjoyed mentoring you and it was really fulfilling for me to watch you grow and see your professional development right now done well when you do that the terminating really well it creates the opportunity for some future reconnecting in the in the in the at any point in the future right so I love it when mentors will say you know how to find me if you need me again U my door is open to you and I have to say it's thrilling for me as a mentor when mentees actually reach back out and so if you choose to reach out to former mentors it's if you've done the termination well the reconnecting is actually super easy right so writing again after all this time to reconnect I wanted to update you on how I've been I've successfully graduated from medical school I'm now doing residency in Psychiatry at Chicago blah blah blah whatever it may be I have to tell you I have some mentees who actually like send me sort of like for years now I was at a college undergrad who I mentored and he's long since moved on to sort of like it's at least a decade and every new year's he sends me a Happy New Year's Dr a it is so thrilling to have those kinds of longitudinal connections with mentees that you've done that you've mentored in the past because you get to see them watch and grow and so just like Mentor watching over 10 years it's really good it's good for the mentor or two right and so again my hope here and what I'm encouraging you to do is to terminate the relationship in a healthy way to take time to do that as a piece of the practicalities as well all right another piece that I think is extremely important is reflection on the relationship after the fact so here we've got a beautiful sort of Dr awesome Mentor and I think let's just assume it's a she her she's leaving the clinic in the hospital she's just finished she's had that final meeting with the mentee she's walking home and she's saying what did I do well as a mentor in that relationship that just ended and as she's walking she thinks you know there are some things I can be proud of that I did really well I helped that Mentor with that personal life crisis that one time I really help them learn how to do PCR very well and I see that their skills have developed so those were things I did really well but then she should really push herself we're all continuously growing in Health Professions what could I have done better as a mentor and you know I can tell you I tell you in my own mentorship sort of like Journeys there are times when I I'm not as timely and responsive to mentees as I should be or there are times when I didn't have that scope discussion as explicitly as I should have and we didn't discuss that I wanted them to email rather than text or something like that right so you can think about things that you could have done better in that relationship that's ended both from a mentor and from a mentee perspective and then you know by the time she gets home or when she pauses on that picnic bench there to say to herself not only do I realize the things that I wasn't awesome at but the how can I do those better next time right so if it were that I didn't sort of establish a good scope discussion next time I start a new mentee relationship I'm going to make sure that I explicitly build in a discussion around scope of this relationship right so that would that way Dr Mentor awesome here gets better at being Dr Mentor awesomer next time all right so lastly I want to talk about Mentor MIP Styles right so here we see three styles of singing and all three of them are I think I hope all really good let's just assume that these are people who are really good singers or at least they're they enjoy doing it brings them joy and it brings their listeners Joy so they're all different styles right and so each of us come to any relationship with different styles of communication of interactivity and I?d like to invite you to think about broadening your style from your natural go-to to having multiple Styles right so that fundamentally you can use the right style for the right job at the right time with the right person so there are times when I need to be very direct with mentees and there are times when we can be very light-hearted and playful as part of that mentor relationship and my job as the mentor is to use the right style I like to think about it like you can think about two different ways to think about this one is a a tool kit you want to use the right tool so you know oh the more I use these different tools the more comfortable I am oh I need a wrench for this job oh I need a hammer for this job a different metaphor is a is one of a recipe if the first time you use a recipe you might be just rigidly following it and you're sort of you're not good at it because it's your first time doing it the more you use that recipe or and over again the more comfortably get the more second nature becomes and so I want you to basically get comfortable with multiple Styles here of mentees ship mentorship so and if you do that self-reflection you're going to get really good at multiple Styles and that way you can really maximize the educational yield and the comfort and safety of your relationship with mentors and mentees as mentors and mentees okay all right so I hope that I've addressed all of these pizza toppings for this wedge the of the pizza and well now you've had the whole pizza we we've eaten a whole pizza with three pieces they were at least to me delicious I hope they were for you I will remind you of our learning objectives today and then we'll go to the Q?A so we were hoping that we would Define me basics of Mentor mentees ship and then we talked about the different tasks of Mentor mentees ship which specifically are coaching counseling and sponsorship and then we talked about some practical tips and tools around navigating different styles of Mentor Mente relationship and all the other practicalities I am going to stop sharing screen and we're going to go to the the Q?A and the comments okay thank you Stephanie for posting all those awesome resources for everybody excuse me first question how can we as a medical profession differentiate between the types of definitions of mentors as shown in the slide okay so I would encourage you at your local institution to start by looking to see if your program has formally defined mentorship formal definitions of mentorship at your school or your program your institution right sorry no water here for me to drink I'll survive because the framework I offered you was was the UCSF framework you can certainly look up ucsf and you'll find look up faculty mentoring I think is the right term to use and you're going to find all that information there The Faculty mentoring program and that was at the faculty level you can also find formal mentorship programs at the medical school level and the other programs here the Nursing Pharmacy dental schools so we've tried to sort of standardize definitions here and so your school may have already standardized them so that's where I would start locally because that way you're using the terms properly with the way the school wants you to use it and then and then if you don't have a framework I would invite you to look at other health professional schools Frameworks find one you like it may not be UCSF it may be a different different institution's framework and then you can use that framework as you discuss it with any local mentors that you're looking at right so so you can say I didn't see a framework here for mentorship at Antigua the University of Antigua but but I see this great framework at the Lebanese American University and I wondered if you might if we can use this this framework as I think about Mentorship right okay hopefully that answers that question if not ask again are career goals and values aligned with time yeah so love that question so I didn't I didn't say this explicitly so I will make sure I do that in the future in future talks career goals and values absolutely evolve over time right so concrete example you may start Medical School deciding that you want to become a surgeon and then over time you discover that you're not passionate enough about surgery to make it your life's work and instead you've decided to become a psychiatrist so your career goal has evolved and so your Mentor should right one of your mentors the surgical Mentor may not be a good Mentor anymore because your career has shifted away from their area of expertise so you absolutely they can change over time and should and when they change it's really good idea to be explicit with mentors or mentors should be explicit with mentees in in my own concrete example for my life I did a research Fellowship in psychiatric genetics and so for two years of my life I was interviewing people with obsessive compulsive disorder and collecting blood samples for whether they would they had genetic contributions to OCD my career Mentor knew that that wasn't my passion so she and I talked about like hey this doesn't seem like where you really want to go in in your career and we were able to sort of successfully navigate that and agree that I was is more interested in Med Ed than psychiatric genetics right so that's an example where our relationship terminated and we parted ways in healthy ways because my career goals evolved okay does the mentor's expertise need to align with your career goals this is where I would say this is why I argue that you need a what's the word I was looking for a team of mentors we just say or you know a community of mentors it takes a village to Mentor and you want a village of mentors in your in your life so you shouldn't it may not be that there's one human who successfully touches everything that you want to be in your life right and so you can have a career Mentor who is coaching you or mentoring you on the career trajectory towards becoming a PhD scientist who does lab-based research in whatever molecular cellular molecular biology or and that person mentors you in that but you can have a different Mentor who's mentoring you on life work balance let's just say for example many times in most parts of the world a lot of the opportunity of family caring for young ones falls on the self-identified female in a relationship if it's a heterosexual relationship and so you your Mentor may not have that expertise and so you would want to find a different mentor to help with a sort of Life work balance and sort of balancing professional personal tasks priorities right so a team of mentors is my point all right do I think there are more obstacles in the mentor relationship when they come from different cultures and our ways of communicating hell yes absolutely why because they don't have those shared lived experiences up until this point in our department we actually do some workshops around mentoring across differences and so we're hoping to help those Mentor mentee pairs think about how to success Bridge across those differences in cultural communication Styles experiences lived experiences experience of for example racism and healthcare sexism and healthcare any of those agism in healthcare all of those right so absolutely acknowledging that there are by definition more obstacles in Mentor mentee relationships when they come from different backgrounds and those are totally surmountable again when done sort of like when you're attending to them when you're prioritizing them I will say here too that I think it is incumbent upon the mentor to be the person to minimize the power differential because often times they come from a place of greater power and so it's on them prior predominantly to do that to try to equalize the power relationship so it's much harder for mentees to try to you know sort of like feel that they're on an equal footing and and so U acknowledging that power differential is real I hope that good mentors really good mentors will be will be mitigating that differential as much as possible and talking about hey I know that I come from a different cultural background than you I want you to know I want to learn from you and I want to create space for you to share your lived experiences so we can help you succeed and grow with what knowledge I have all right and again this comes back to the mentors grow too when it's done well okay how do you convince a potential mentor to be your mentor and how do you know he is the right Mentor for you okay so it's the asking part that I think you'll that I come to here dear Dr Sono I admire your work tremendously because I love how you do a and C because I love how you do ab and I want to do and I would love it if You' be open to mentoring me so notice that what I've done there is I've done my homework to who that person is so I understand their professional identity formation or the work they've done so far in their career and I've explicitly shown that candidate Mentor that I've done my homework I've done due diligence to understanding who they are and what they've done right so that's do your homework basically is my advice to you right sort of a because that demonstrates to them that you're serious about a mentor mentee relationship okay and then how do you know if somebody's the right Mentor for you well if you've done some of that homework well you'll have a good sense about the domains that that that they do that you like or you're interested in learning growing in and that will help and then of course if you have those initial discussions you may decide that it's not going to be a good Mentor mentee relationship so again you could say I'm not sure if we're going to if this is going to work but I'm open to exploring it and if they say well I'm not sure either then you have a conversation that you should be having about how will we know if this is going to work how will we assess whether it's a good Mentor mentee pair so a lot of what I'm suggesting you do is make the implicit explicit here by communicating with each other about expectations responsibilities that sort of thing okay let's see how how do you know if they're right Mentor I just answer that okay what are some good and helpful ways to become a perfect Mentor for your choice of career if H well perfect is a high bar I would offer that you want to be as good a mentor as you can and and I think a lot of the sort of tasks I'm asking of mentees apply here too so self-reflection on what you did well and what you could be doing better self-directed work on how to be a good or better Mentor right so the workshops that we offer here I want my junior faculty colleagues and Senior faculty colleagues to come to those workshops to learn across differences and then read read read right or look up videos on being a good Mentor this video this recording sort of send this to colleagues or have those maybe future colleagues will find these and think that this may be useful time spent learning about how to be a more effective mentor and I know that there's literature actually published literature in in the Health Professions communities about being good effective mentors there's literature on good effective mentorship programs and you can see what kind of aspects or attributes in those programs have been success factors to optimizing Mentor growth Can mentors or mentees differentiate in terms of communication as in terms of communication being either a mentor this differ I'm not sure I understand this question let me guess what this means if mentors and mentees have different communication Styles is it possible that they will sort of sort of dis you know go further apart from one another if I understand this question correctly and if I don't post it again if I understand it correctly I would just I come back to the Styles advice here right so if you're discovering that your communication style is significantly different from your mentors then I think trying a different communication style will be a good strategy to bring you together again right so I noticed last time I used email if that's not your preferred methodism of communication please tell me what how you'd like me to communicate so I use your preferred approach if on the other hand we're talking about like literally the words you say in di synchronous dialogue in a in a meeting then I think in that case what I would invite you to do is set an agenda at the beginning of each meeting and one of the agenda items should be our communication Styles and so you're going to use 10 minutes out of the 50 minute meeting to talk explicitly about process rather than content if you will or sort of communication Styles and making sure that you both optimize communication efficacy again if I didn't answer that correctly let me know and then Steph also posted some ?how to be a good Mentor? blog post so there's that link too how do I find a mentor when I'm un sure what career path I want to take great question Janet I think that there are I think that this is where I think you I would encourage you to start exploring career trajectories more so than mentors per se yet so I don't know what stage of career you're in let's say you're a college undergraduate you're not sure if you if you want to go on to a health professional graduate degree there are U programs websites where you can learn about what does it mean to be a physician assistant what does it mean to be a nurse practitioner what does it mean to be a medical an osteopathic position and so like rather than finding mentors yet I would invite you to explore career paths and sort of different types of health professionals and those they're absolutely websites that are dedicated YouTube channels that are dedicated to what does it mean to be a physician etc. so I would encourage you to start there because that way you're not trying to find a specific human to Mentor you you're trying to find a greater sense of which kinds of TR trajectories you're interested in if you are enrolled in a program currently then there should be student services and student advising that are their jobs are to help you answer some of these questions right and so I go to those people go to those programs use the resources at your University to help you Think and Grow about what do you what career directions are you interested in most interested in pursuing okay do you believe that a mentor M relationship could still somewhat have a lasting effective path are different absolutely yes I'll come back to my own sort of mentor were who I parted ways with from childhood onset obsessive compulsive disorder so Carol Matthews is was is that human and when I was in my research Fellowship she moved career path to San Diego from San Francisco because of her Junior faculty role and she actually like I went down there like on a quarterly basis and I actually stayed we discussed it and we felt comfortable that I could stay in the guest bedroom of her house for some more explicit mentorship while you know so for the three days I was there and so we would go out to dinner and we got a chance to get to know each other better and she really helped me grow tremendously and she taught me how to be a better Mentor and even though we don't do anything related to each other's careers whatsoever at all now for years now I still think that she taught me how to be a really good Mentor she also taught me how to sort of tell me that I wasn't I was clearly not going to be a psychiatric genetic researcher and she saw that and she brought that up for me first so initiating the lasting conversation and the initiating the difficult conversation that turned out to be quite impactful for me are examples that that she role modeled for me and then I have mentees who like I told you reach out to me even though our Cent trajectories have gone completely different directions because they felt that that it was a lasting impactful relationship on the time that I was a career Mentor for them all right I think we are close to stepping up in fact seeing no additional questions I will leave you with a final thought and then some closing comments my final thought I do this with all of my sort of teaching I invite people to identify one thing you learn today or one thing you remain curious about or one thing you'll carry forward into your practice so Healthcare is lifelong learning so we're always growing so one thing you learned one thing you remain curious about or one thing you'll carry forward in your practice the last question we squeezing in here do you believe that a mentor M relationship could still someone I've you answer that I answer that right what made me become a successful Mentor thanks for the question Shrea I think that it's because I have this goal to learn and grow continuously and I had great mentors that I want to emulate and role model for my mentees and so I this is where I'll say feed it forward if you have been if you've been the luckily beneficiary of great mentorship then feed It Forward be a great mentor to Future Mente tees okay and that last question about moving on from mentoring relationship how do you do so gracefully I think you got to do some introspective work thinking talking to people that you love and trust and cherish around whether it's time to move on that communication will help you in in deciding gracefully whether it's time to move on okay with that let me offer the closing sort of comments so there's a bunch of links in here make sure you've clicked on those and before you go please fill out our super short four question survey thank you step for posting it in there about this webinar so we can make this talk about growth we're going to make these webinars better don't forget to take advantage of the free two-week trial from osmosis follow the link in the chat and then to watch this or other webinar recordings or register for future events please visit www.asos.com us is on January 30th registered today for that insightful conversation and if you're interested in more helpful free content watch a recorded webinar or register a future event the osmosis blog is your place to go so many good blog posts there on that one osmosis.org blog and for events osmosis.org events all right team I hope this has been helpful to you sincerely I really appreciate you all for joining today and I wish you amazing Mentor MIP relationships ahead helping current and future clinicians Focus learn retain and thrive.