24 mentorship quotes you’ll find motivational

Mentorship plays a crucial role in people’s lives. Not only is the work important, but it is also rewarding. Many mentors cite helping others as the most meaningful contribution they make in their careers. Perhaps you’ve thought about becoming an executive mentor. As you formulate ideas for what this role might look like for you, check out these mentorship quotes — available by the dozen — to inspire your next move.

Being a support anchor for another leader multiplies your own impact. As you help them build strong cultures, embrace change, coach employees effectively and achieve more in business, your input influences their success and touches entire companies and communities.

Mentors are a launchpad for discovery

What does a mentor do? A mentor helps individuals discover new facets of themselves. Sometimes, we need another person to show us skills and capacities we never knew we had.

A mentor is someone who sees more talent and ability within you, than you see in yourself, and helps bring it out of you.

— Bob Proctor, author & lecturer

A mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.

— Oprah Winfrey, media executive, author, and philanthropist

True mentors have this unique ability to pick up vibes that everyone else misses from within you.

― Ahmad R Kazi, author, investor, and business enthusiast

Great mentors don’t just impart wisdom from their own experiences. They allow the time to understand another person’s perspective and the space needed for them to uncover the wisdom residing within.

The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image, but giving them the opportunity to create themselves.

― Steven Spielberg, American film director

True mentors don’t make their mentees a clone of themselves.

― Bernard Kelvin Clive, Ghannian author, speaker, and corporate trainer

What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher, writer, and lecturer

You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.

— Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer

As a mentor, you have to be willing to put yourself in your mentee’s shoes to understand their struggles that they deal with.

― Toby Keith, American musician

Spoon feeding, in the long run, teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

— E.M.Forster, English author

A legacy beyond your name … or your time

Mentorship empowers you to impart your legacy, allowing someone else to pick it up and carry it further than you could in a single lifetime. After all, what is the purpose of wisdom if we don’t gift it to others and the future?

Mentors build mentors. Leaders build leaders. When you look at it closely, it’s really one and the same thing.

― Tony Dungy, former coach in the National Football League

We are what our great mentors have taught us.

― Lailah Gifty Akita, writer & founder of Smart Youth Volunteers Foundation

Age is rarely a limitation to being a mentor.”

— Ken Blanchard, author, business consultant and motivational speaker

Mentoring will leave you feeling inspired

Mentorship is about giving but mentors also receive. The beauty of an authentic relationship is its reciprocity. Mentees give back to their mentors in a meaningful way. Iron sharpens iron.

“One person might be senior and be wiser and have more experience, but I’ve learned a lot from the people I mentor.”

― Michelle Obama, lawyer, writer, and former First Lady

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

— Booker T. Washington, American educator, author, and advisor to several U.S. Presidents

Mentors change lives, but students change mentors’ lives more.

― Richie Norton, entrepreneur & author

What I think the mentor gets is the great satisfaction of helping somebody along, helping somebody take advantage of an opportunity that maybe he or she did not have.

— Clint Eastwood, American actor, film director, and producer

Mentors open doors

As a mentor, you can clear the way. Mentors have the unique opportunity to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion. They can sponsor and amplify voices that aren’t being heard.

Every kid needs a mentor. Everybody needs a mentor.

― Donovan Bailey, Olympic athlete

Mentoring brings us together — across generation, class, and often race — in a manner that forces us to acknowledge our interdependence, to appreciate, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, that ‘we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny.’

― Marc Freedman, social entrepreneur, thought leader and writer

The path to diversity begins with supporting, mentoring, and sponsoring diverse women and men to become leaders and entrepreneurs.

— Denise Morrison, former Campbell Soup Company CEO

I think it’s so important as a woman, and especially as a minority, to lift as you climb. So having people shadow you or mentoring people — that’s important to me.”

— Maria Taylor, musician

Mentors change lives

At the end of the day, mentors fundamentally improve the life trajectories of those they coach. What kind of work could be more important?

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”

— Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

A good coach can change a game. A great coach can change a life.

― John Wooden, former American basketball coach

How you coach them is how they’re going to play.

― Stefan Fatsis, author & journalist

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

― Maya Angelou, American writer

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