What my mentee taught me

When I became a mentor at Toastmasters, I thought I knew what the arrangement was. I had experience. They had less. I would share what I knew, they would learn, and we would both feel good about it.

That’s not quite how it went.

I learned things from that relationship that I hadn’t expected to learn — and some of them I couldn’t have learned any other way.

Empathy is a skill, not a personality trait

Coaching someone on public speaking means working with fear. Real fear. The kind that makes your voice shake and your mind go blank in front of a room.

I had moved past that fear — enough that I’d forgotten what it felt like from the inside. My mentee reminded me. Watching someone struggle with something I now found natural forced me to slow down and remember the version of myself that had struggled with it too.

That’s empathy: not feeling sorry for someone, but genuinely understanding where they are. I had to relearn it. And once I did, I became a better communicator — not just as a mentor, but in every conversation where the other person was working through something hard.

Explaining forces understanding

There’s a difference between being able to do something and being able to explain it. For a long time I didn’t know that gap existed in me.

When my mentee asked why I did things a certain way — why I paused there, why I moved away from the podium at that moment, why I rephrased that sentence — I had to actually know. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I realized I had been doing something on instinct without ever examining it.

Those moments were uncomfortable and useful. The questions a beginner asks are the ones an expert has stopped asking. Answering them makes you understand your own practice in a way that years of experience alone never will.

Being challenged by someone who doesn’t know the rules

A mentee doesn’t know what questions they’re not supposed to ask. They haven’t learned yet which things are “just how it’s done.” That makes them surprisingly good at finding the gaps in your thinking.

More than once, a simple honest question from my mentee made me pause. Not because it was a hard question — because it was an obvious one I had never thought to ask myself. Beginners carry a kind of clarity that expertise slowly erodes. Spending time with someone at the beginning reminds you of it.

The unexpected direction

Knowledge does flow from mentor to mentee. But it also flows the other way, and most mentors don’t expect it.

If you get the chance to mentor someone — in Toastmasters, at work, anywhere — take it. Go in with the intention to teach. But stay open to what you might learn. The best mentoring relationships are less one-way transfer and more a conversation between two people at different points on the same road.

I don’t remember every session. I wish I had taken notes. But I remember what it changed in me — and that’s the part that stayed.