The People Who Helped Me See
I used to post about my mentoring sessions quite a lot.
There would be homework.
Notes.
Things I needed to work on.
And, apparently, brightly coloured slides about risk mitigation.
At the time, I was trying to run growing businesses, lead a team, make decisions I had never made before, and figure out what kind of leader I wanted to become.
So I asked people who knew more than I did.
One of those people was Pak Roy.
After one particularly difficult session, I wrote:
“One of the toughest sessions we've had in a while (for me personally), but definitely much needed.”
We talked about prioritisation.
Risk mitigation.
Client servicing.
Situational leadership.
And one reminder stayed with me:
“Only control what you can control.”
(Of courseeeee I made it into a cute post)
Looking through these old posts now, though, what strikes me isn't any individual piece of advice.
It's the fact that I kept seeking it.... (even if sometimes it was brutal)
I didn't think I was supposed to know everything simply because I was the one building the company.
When I didn't know, I asked.
When I was stuck, I found someone whose perspective I trusted.
When someone challenged the way I was thinking, I wrote it down.
And then, usually, I did something with it.
Learning was rarely just learning
I seem to have had a habit of turning lessons into things.
Sometimes they changed the way I worked.
Sometimes they became something my team could learn from too ... like DAEL Learns From Professionals.
And sometimes they became experiments.
One of those experiments was called Hell Week.
Some of the things I was learning about leadership - prioritisation, resilience, difficult decisions, working through uncertainty — aren't particularly useful if they remain sentences in a notebook.
You have to experience them.
So we created an environment where people had to work through challenges, support one another, keep going when things became difficult, and discover what they were capable of along the way.
And then I found this.
Thalia wrote this after completing Hell Week in 2022.
What I love about finding it now is that these aren't my words about what I hoped the experience would do.
They're hers.
She wrote about expectations, rejection, doubts and uncertainty. About working hard. About people helping one another through the difficulties.
And at the end, she called herself a:
“hell week succeeder.”
I think that's the part of mentorship I've carried with me most.
A good lesson shouldn't end with the person who received it.
You learn something.
You try it.
You make it your own.
And sometimes, you create the conditions for someone else to discover something too.
Some people are mirrors. Some are lighthouses.
Years later, I still have mentors.
Some have known me long enough to remember versions of me I've almost forgotten myself.
Pak Nino has known me since the days I didn't yet know what I was building - only that I had fire.
When we finally sat down together again after a long time, he told me:
“It physically hurts me to see your fire not fully lit.”
I remember that because it wasn't advice.
He wasn't telling me what to build next or giving me a strategy.
He was noticing me.
Sometimes that's what the right mentor does.
They remember something about you that you've temporarily stopped seeing.
After that conversation, I wrote:
“Some people come into your life as mirrors, some as lighthouses.”
I think that's still the best way I know how to describe mentorship.
From the archive
This piece draws from posts and notes from my early years building DAEL or RHAIONA, alongside reflections from the mentors who continued to shape how I think about work, leadership and becoming.
