Spring is here – Time to start your professional rejuvenation!

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Mentoring can provide much needed care for your professional garden

For months the cold barren fields have made being outside unbearable. Spring is nature’s way of saying it is ready to get down to business, it is the time to flourish. Birds are chirping, animals come out of hibernation, we clean our homes, and go outdoors to rejuvenate our souls. Similarly, in terms of career, we embark on rigorous paths and propel ourselves into more difficult challenges. These challenges can range from wanting to get more involved in your work environment and moving up the corporate ladder to beginning an entirely new career path.

For a professional women, spring can also be the season of cleansing the mind of old tactics and realizing the need for development. Planting seeds in the beginning of spring ensures that we have crops to consume in the coming months. Similarly, the small seeds of effort we put into leadership development and building our skill sets can mature into big initiatives. In order to grow to their full potential, these small seeds need to be nurtured, watered and given incubation. Let us say, as a young professional you have embarked on a journey toward the position you want. You are taking all the right steps in that direction but what if there was a way for you to achieve that goal in an efficient manner? Having access to an open environment, unbiased advice and a strong support system can enable a young woman such as yourself to rise to the top.

How to go about that change?

Finding a mentor who sees potential in you, is a positive way for a young woman to overcome obstacles in achieving her dreams. It is true that finding opportunities to gain practical exposure in areas of interest is tricky and at times inaccessible. Often, I hear the question, “who can benefit from mentors?” Generationally, millennials would benefit from mentoring because they have the passion to create value around them. While mentoring helps young professionals, there is still a general misunderstanding that mentors are only suited for those who have recently graduated and are struggling. The segment of young women who have worked for a few years and want to take charge of their upward career mobility also benefit from mentoring. Not every environment boasts initiatives to drive these women into the next phase of their career and their talent can simply be lost in a sea of mediocrity

Mentorship is a very powerful tool used to launch and advance careers and has been proven to help in all stages of professional development.

As a person wanting change, you need to own it, and drive it. Obtaining a mentor at this stage can help find purpose and make big positive life changes in order to be that fully rejuvenated x.0 version of yourself. Learning from others mistakes, obtaining guidance from industry professionals and propelling yourself forward professionally are just a few reasons that a mentor can be a great tool for a young woman in any stage of her career. As with warm weather and new beginnings, spring is a wonderful time for a professional woman to lay down the seeds for her career.

With the help of a mentor a woman can water and nurture the career plant and watch it grow into something incredible and, best of all, realize her own potential

We all have dreams waiting to be pursued why not get them out of our closets and give them life this spring?

As a nonprofit organization, WINGS for Growth provides a mentoring program on leadership development. At the end of this month our present cohort of mentees will begin their formal mentoring journey. We are incredibly proud of these young women who have taken their first step in taking charge of their professional development. If you need more information about this event, drop a line to [email protected]. If you are looking to join WINGS as a mentee, click here

This blog article was contributed by Anita Chitnis an aspiring writer, blogger and a volunteer at WINGS.

Celebrating International Women’s Day!

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WINGS Mentees strike a pose at our Orientation event!

From all of us here at WINGS for Growth, we would like to wish you happy International Women’s Day!
We admire and strive to mentor women to become strong leaders and have discovered that an outcome-based mentoring program, with a carefully tailored program and matched mentor to mentee, can make a huge and positive difference in attaining the mentee’s goals.
Here at WINGS, we are convinced that mentoring focused on leadership development is an opportunity that many early career women are looking for. There are many programs offered by employers to their employees. These programs are great in giving the visibility and exposure to move up the ladder. However, not all mentoring experiences amount the same. Some of them were weighed down with mentors who did not have time to spend with them.
In some instances, the mentees faced an endless loop of mentoring with no concrete goal in sight. In many cases, the mentoring was a spot treatment to solve a problem and the mentee and mentor often lost touch over time so that they couldn’t easily tap in to a comfort zone of teaming with each other when they needed to.
This is why WINGS chose to offer a formal outcomes based mentoring program. The mentors and mentees themselves are committed to the 10-month long program and are subjected to a rigorous 4-step selection process.

Our mentors are senior industry leaders who are truly paying-it-forward and passionately believe in our cause. Our mentees have taken the first bold step in recognizing the need to be mentored and are already on their path to success by their initiative.

WINGS’ proprietary methodology and framework guides our mentors and mentees them through the entire program. The mentors and mentees are paired manually, per the guidelines of our methodology. The first order of business is to devise a development plan for each mentee that the mentor approves with the oversight of a champion, then the mentor and mentee pair work on development areas.

The WINGS program offers connectivity events every quarter to ensure there is visibility among the established industry leaders, other cohort members and our sponsors. We also put together a curriculum of classroom training and executive coaching session in a group to promote interactive learning.

Each mentee is also given an opportunity to work on a project with partner nonprofit organization(preferably) to practice the skills that they learned, which enforces confidence in the ability to lead – a huge step forward.

They might get an opportunity to mentor a junior mentee from high school or middle school during this program.

After all, the success of our mentees is a true success for WINGS for Growth!

In this video, we bring inspiration shared by our mentees who have been through that self-reflection, recognize the need for growth, and share their opinion on why they joined WINGS. We hope you can feel their passion through this video.

On this day of celebrating women internationally, we urge you to reflect inwards and seek a mentor in your life, if you haven’t already. Make that bold step and commit to developing yourself. We would love to hear about your passion and growth areas and how a mentoring program can help you. Leave your thoughts, share the blog post, and show some love to our mentees for taking this step.

CALL TO ACTION: We invite every woman to celebrate herself, if you want to become a leader and be a better leader – Sign up for becoming a mentee with us!

As a male or a female industry professional who has seniority, support an early career woman – consider imparting your wisdom in others, Click Here to sign up!

To more women leaders and beyond!

-WINGS for Growth