Teamwork and personal relationships are essential elements for running a successful business. Whether in-person or digitally, finding a mentor to guide you and offer advice makes a huge difference in starting and growing your business.
We recently sat down with Javier Boquete, an entrepreneur from A Costa da Morte who is an expert in branding and also mentors other business projects.
When asked about the relationship between entrepreneurship and mentoring, he told us:
Mentoring, oh mentoring…, that term that we find today even in the soup, which seems so recent and, however, so veteran and practiced for centuries (the term has its origin in Ancient Greece).
We hear it a lot, but dare we define it? It seems a bit complex, or maybe it’s not. At least the way we who are part of iSlow Coliving understand it.
This is what the popular Wikipedia says: mentoring is a personal development relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps a less experienced or less knowledgeable person. Well, as good Galicians, we agree, and we do not. It depends. 😉
I accompany you in the brave decision to undertake your project
Javier Boquete
We believe in mentoring as a process of personal and professional growth, in which the only condition is not only that one of the parties contributes more experience or knowledge. We also believe that other circumstances should be generated and promoted.
Personal connection centred on empathy
The first and most important is that there must be a good personal connection centred on empathy. And we can ask ourselves, why is good personal harmony necessary if what we are looking for is a professional objective? We answer, how could it be otherwise, with another question ;-): Would you trust someone who doesn’t listen to you or doesn’t like you?
We defend, tooth and nail, empathy as the driving force in personal relationships and also in professionals. So much so that we really miss a subject with this name in early childhood education.
Enjoy the process
The second circumstance is knowing how to enjoy the process. What is the point of deciding to be an entrepreneur and be the owner of your professional project and, therefore, also of your time, and not enjoy it?
Learning in a mentoring process is part of entrepreneurship. If you also enjoy it, it will be much more efficient and faster.
Mentoring as mutual learning
And finally, mentoring is a mutual learning process. For mentors, the learning acquired in mentorship is a newly approved subject. They are knowledge acquired in matters such as communication or empathy that allows you to be more complete in your next sessions with other entrepreneurs.
And logically, for the mentee, their learning from the mentor is key to understanding their project, the environment and managing processes and deadlines in their goal of growing.
At iSlow Coliving we believe a mentor is someone who accompanies you in the brave decision to begin a new journey. And since entrepreneurship is a journey that marks your life, going through it with the right person is necessary to enjoy it and, above all, to learn.
For these reasons, we offer our space as a link between those people who need a guide in those first steps on the path of starting a business and those who have travelled it before and have experiences to share.
By joining iSlow, you will have access to both a physical space and a supportive and intentional community of co-livers, digital nomads, entrepreneurs, and mentors that will support you in your entrepreneurial journey.
At iSlow, we support our community with their projects through mentorship in different forms:
- Running a professional workshop in our co-working space
- Sharing skills with other co-livers and community members
- Booking a private meeting room for a session with a mentor
- Going for beautiful hikes to unwind and/or brainstorm new ideas alone or as a team
If you are a young international entrepreneur, and you are interested in spending a stay at iSlow Coliving learning about entrepreneurship while developing your business idea, take a look at the EYE program. We might be able to collaborate.
Anyhow, if you wish to receive more information about the mentoring processes that we develop in iSlow Coliving, do not hesitate to contact us. We will be happy to help.
