“A mentor is someone whose hindsight can become your foresight.”
Every person needs mentoring at some point in life. It helps as a motivating factor to do better and excel at work as well as in personal life. Sometimes, these mentoring relationships become invaluable when there is a need to generate solutions to critical challenges that people experience at home or work.
Many online communities that offer mentoring services have mushroomed all over the web and some of them are very professional and include several mentors, each specializing in a field. This ensures the users get expert advice on every problem.
These communities provide users an area to discuss on a wide variety of topics, from how to set up a business to how to deal with a suspicious spouse. People are encouraged to discuss every aspect of their life. If someone is going through a bad phase, it helps to talk to someone who has been in their shoes before and has faced a similar situation.
This need to share is prevalent in most human beings, but often the fear that the other person may not understand, makes them bottle it all up and this is not good for health. Bottling up things may have an adverse affect on the emotional and the physical health of a person.
These community sites are specifically aimed at providing clean and good service that is of benefit to the users, where meaningful interchanges are possible.
With the physical geographic communities breaking down, people are creating communities based on interests. Many such websites have sprung up recently all over the web and the phenomenon could become more important as time passes, as other sources of help or assistance that people usually approach, such as the church or other unions, already started to lose their attraction in certain countries. The comfort of sitting in the comfort of the home and talking to someone in privately, cannot be surpassed.
Creating low pressure environments where people can interact with one another based on their expertise also helps. The best part is that it is totally acceptable here to approach people for help without feeling odd about it.
Users are allowed to post profiles and examples of their work, so that the potential mentor can make a qualified decision on whether the user needs advice or not.
Some people need different pieces of advice from different people, such as a musician looking for advice would need someone who understands music and he may also need some legal advice, where he has to approach a mentor who can advise him on all legal aspects.
There are free sites as well as paid community sites and some sites offer both; so it is basically up to the user to see what suits him best, after reading the site policies. They are many mentors who are volunteers and wish to give back a part of themselves to others.
Online community networks provide individuals worldwide with the information, support and understanding they seek. The internet overcomes the barriers of time and distance and helps to overall improve the quality of our lives. This process can be rewarding to both the mentor as well as the user, as sharing is said to enrich both lives.