Finding Professional Mentorship as a Remote Worker

Being a fully remote worker doesn't always make it easy to find and identify an internal mentors at your employer organization. When you go to an office and see various groups of people from yours, and other functional areas, you can engage in spontaneous hallway conversations that lead to deeper work connections and even mentorship. It's certainly not impossible to do when you're remote, but there is less spontaneity about how it develops.

I have found though that I have access to some of the best mentors available via books. 

(Sigh) 

I get it. Books was not the professional hack you might have been after. However, staying motivated by curiosity and always wanting to improve is the best way to get creative about finding mentors and extracting their lessons for your own growth.  Books are one way to do that. I've shared this before, but I keep a running list of several of the books I've read on my website for others to find and potentially add to their list of mentors.

Side note:  I just recently picked up Scott Galloway's, The Algebra of Wealth - A Simple Formula for Financial Security (affiliate). I'm halfway through. He offers some direct tough love about the subject of becoming financially secure and determining what that looks like for you, but what's been interesting to me is the list of books he references within his own work are many of the titles on my recommended reading list.  

Action You Can Take To Engage in Mentorship:
If you're interested in gaining knowledge and improving through mentorship but feel like you don't have a lot of access to mentors, here's a multi-pronged approach you can use...

1. Start reading books, regularly...like...always
2. Network across LinkedIn to connect with and have Zoom intro chats with as many professionals in and around your field as you can fit in each week. Be sure to ask them about what has made them successful in their role (a little bit of a mentorship moment)
3. Introduce people you meet in your Zoom intro chats to others in your network where it makes sense (this is just good networking and encourages others to introduce their contacts to you - lead by example).
4. If you get the chance, in your networking conversations, share some of what you have learned from others and the books you've read -- the more you reiterate the lessons you've learned the more you deepen your comprehension of those lessons.

The Result:
You're proactively finding mentorship for yourself, growing your network to gain a diversity of ideas from others, and participating in a larger (though remote) professional community that provides potentially greater resources than what you can obtain solo and siloed.