Hi everyone and welcome to the Squiggly Career podcast from Amazing If. I'm Helen Tupper and I'm here with my co-founder Sarah Ellis.

Hi. So today then we're going to be covering a topic which was a request from one of our evening courses.

We gave people a list of topics and they voted on the ones that they really wanted to hear about and this one came up top and that is how to find a mentor and as our careers all become more

squiggly we think it's going to be more important than ever to find the right mentors who can

support you along the way and help you navigate your squiggle we've both been really lucky we've

had some brilliant mentors we've also had some not so great ones

and we're going to share our experiences of both for you and give you some top tips that

hopefully help you to do the same well find the good ones really more than the bad ones um so let's get

started with some of the basics sarah what what do you think a mentor actually is and how many

have you got at any one time um so actually that's not quite as

straightforward as i thought it might be i was like i thought i'd be able to just reel off some

sort of brilliant definition of a mentor and then i ended up thinking about it and uh obviously

going to my trusted advisor google um is that your mentor yeah pretty much pretty much um so i don't think there is necessarily a kind of definitive definition of what does and doesn't necessarily constitute a mentor.

I think my personal perspective is probably somebody who is a trusted advisor, someone who knows you really well.

And I think that's really important because then you can be

vulnerable with that person. It's somebody who should be able to challenge you. And I think also really

importantly, I know that with all my mental relationships, they're always there when I need them.

So for some people, I have more continual relationships. Sometimes it's more, I'm asking for

advice based on their expertise, so something they're

particularly good at. But I know that with these sort of two or three people, if I phone them

or drop them an email at any one time, because I really needed some support or some help,

I know they'd always be there for me. So what about you? Have you got some sort of brilliant

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