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Mentorship Can Be Toxic — The Dark Side Of Mentorship And How To Avoid It
If you are a Star Wars fan/seen or read any Star Wars material, then you most likely are aware of what good mentorship can look like. Hint: Yoda and Luke Skywalker!
There is no doubt that mentorship has so many values. In my article “ five lessons from my first 60 days in the workforce” I spoke about why you should consider having more than one mentor because of the value mentorship can give you and your career. However, there is a dark side of mentorship that very few people address.
Mentees sometimes idolize their mentors, and this can be very toxic and harmful. Aside this, some mentors can be unhelpful in the advice they sometimes give and because mentees respect them and hold them on some sort of pedestal, they listen to these mentors and suffer later.
I am passionate about tech education in Africa, especially Ghana, and I have a non-profit that seeks to educate high school students in Ghana about computer science and the STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Arts and Mathematics) field in general. I started this project in my teens, and over the years, I met people who were also doing non-profit work in Ghana. I was fascinated with their work, and I adopted some of them as my mentors. They were great mentors, but I began replicating their steps and expecting the…
