Have you ever had a mentor?  Wasn’t it great to have someone to turn to when you had questions, to get guidance on how to do something?

Mentoring is an important part of the Toastmasters program.  There’s no paid instructor with all the answers, which is what helps make Toastmasters so cost-effective.  You learn from your peers, your fellow club members, and when it comes to technical details about the Toastmasters program, having an experienced member to turn to can avoid a lot of frustration or wrong turns.

Where do these mentors come from?  The members — YOU.  Have you been a member for at least a few months?  Chances are you would be able to answer someone’s questions about your club, like how to get scheduled for a speech, how to volunteer for meeting roles, and ways to find ideas for speeches.

Serving as a mentor is a personally gratifying experience, a way to build a friendship that can go well past Toastmasters.  Not only are you helping a newer member get the most out of Toastmasters, but you will also learn from your mentee as well, who brings in fresh approaches and new ways of looking at things.

Mentoring, like Toastmasters itself, can have a widely varying time commitment, as little as an hour every month or two.  You don’t have to have a Competent Communicator award or hold a club office to be a mentor, you just have to have a desire to help someone else navigate through Toastmasters to be a better communicator and better leader.

Serving as a mentor is recognized in two places in the Toastmasters educational program:

• The Competent Leader award, project nine
• The Advanced Communicator Gold award

In our strongest clubs, we commonly see new members immediately matched up with a mentor, and even 20-year members have mentors as well.  Everyone benefits from having a colleague to bounce speech ideas off of and to keep motivated.

In new clubs, mentoring is still important — there may be only a very limited number of experienced members available, so pairing up new members to co-mentor each other can work very well.  One person will never have all the answers, but together, they can find out, they can keep each other motivated, they can listen to each other practice, and they can give speeches together as they work through the manuals.

Lastly, a strong mentoring program is crucial to membership retention.  Members with mentors will be actively involved and working on speeches, a result of someone taking a personal interest in their progress.

Go forth and mentor!