We had an explore session last Friday to revisit and explore new engineering concepts, and it suddenly hit me that being a mentor is hard. Anyway, it was intentionally named an "explore" session instead of "sharing" to encourage our team that it's about exploring, not teaching.
At least I learned two lessons.
First, being a mentor means letting your mentee grow, which means you should put yourself in their shoes. You might know things they don't, but you can't directly show them the answer. Instead, you should provide them with clues.
So instead of saying, "You know, there's a better way to do that," we should ask, "How can we do this better?" and let them explore it themselves.
Second, you might forget that you have what's called experience bias. As mentors, we might see solutions to problems based on our experience. But that's not always the best way. In other words, we can be fooled by our experience. It takes courage to acknowledge that.