I’ve been working for years on learning about the theory behind what makes us want to mentor. The journey began a couple of decades ago, before anyone was talking about mentorship. My book, The Mentorship Edge, helps readers understand how to get maximum impact from mentorship – hierarchical and lateral.

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“For years, I’d worked with older adults in psychiatric hospitals, Nursing homes, and home health care. Pathology was the norm in what I was researching and seeing daily. I had to wrench myself away from that focus and return to my developmental psychology roots, which look at norms and what we should look forward to in life rather than pathology. The field was a treasure trove of hope and positivity that wasn’t talked about in the popular research at the time: Alzheimer’s, Depression, and frailty. This wasn’t what I wanted to look forward to. No wonder everyone ran away from me at cocktail parties!  

I got excited by the work of Erik Erikson, whose theory of adult development had been around for decades and was groundbreaking but not a mainstream focus in Aging. Erikson’s theory posits stages in our lives that go beyond puberty, where most development theories end. The middle and older adult stages fascinated me. They offered emotional treasures that can befall all of us: meaning, value, and fulfillment. These emotional aspects of aging are almost never discussed. The emotional Growth that occurs even while our physical decline is taking place. I spoke with Dr. Dan McAdams, a psychologist and professor at Northwestern University, who is essentially the demigod of Erikson’s stage of Generativity, a point in our lives we reach in midlife where we want to give back without expecting anything in return. After talking with Dan, I pivoted from focusing on the negative aspects of aging to the positives we can look forward to as we grow older.  

I dove head first into studying how we develop past puberty. Our physical trajectory looks like a mountain — a steep incline beginning at birth, peaking in our 20s, followed by a steady decline for the remainder of our lives. It is essentially an inverted U. But what I’d never noticed and was keen to focus on was the emotional trajectory we all have. And it takes place at the same time as our physical trajectory. It is a slow, steady incline that never declines as we age. It is a straight line. This explains why most people become happier as they grow older, not depressed. Even when they can’t run as fast or need glasses for reading. Mid-lifers don’t generally care that they can’t run as fast as they could when they were 20. But they like having close Relationships with friends and family, skills and expertise they’ve amassed over time. Finding this was striking gold. I felt like we’d been wasting our most precious natural resources. Us! We cast ourselves away as worthless as our value increases. I wanted to share this newfound treasure with everyone.  

Midlife and Generativity are the life stages I really glommed onto. This is when we emotionally come into our own with expertise, values, skills, and knowledge. Generativity encompasses three areas: mentorship, Volunteering, and Philanthropy, and it offers us a way to put back into the world that we’ve honed over time in a way that has our stamp on it. It is a Legacy and a way to make our mark on the world. I decided that I needed to look at one aspect of Generativity rather than all three because that would be overwhelming. I thought, “Well, okay, two of those are free. You can be anybody and volunteer or mentor. Not everyone can donate funds.” So, I took philanthropy off the list. Then, “volunteering is something many of us desire to do, but it generally involves tagging onto someone else’s passion or idea. Whether volunteering in a soup kitchen or a docent at a zoo, volunteering may not have everyone’s personal passion attached to it. 

Mentoring, on the other hand, is tailored to the mentor. It is a way to give back what we’ve been spending decades amassing: our expertise, skills, and values. Whether we are passing on leadership skills or how to make the best chicken soup, it is a way we can leave our footprint and have a lasting legacy. Volunteering comes close, but we work on someone else’s dream or initiative when volunteering. Mentoring is a way to pass a piece of ourselves on, making us immortal. This is how religion has been passed down for centuries. This is how we’ve made so much progress in Technology and why we don’t have to keep reinventing it. We can build on what we already know and grow from that.  

I was so fascinated by what mentoring offers us that I interviewed about 40 people in midlife, from a four-star general to a stay-at-home grandma, to see how and why they mentor. As it turns out, they all mentor the same way. They all have a purpose in mind. They all have their values in mind. They all have meaningful connections in mind. And these core principles really motivate them because the desire to give back is an intrinsic motivation. No one gets paid to do it. Like reading a best-selling book or putting together a puzzle, we do it because we want to. Everyone engaged in mentoring in the same way, even though they all had very different life experiences. 

The fantastic thing is that mentoring doesn’t end with the emotional upswing we get when passing information and skills to others. The meaningful connections we cultivate in mentorship make mentors live longer, healthier, happier lives. It’s not just something we do because we want to leave a legacy; it helps us live better and happier.”

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Originally Published on https://deborahheiserphd.substack.com/

Deborah Heiser, PhD The Right Side of 40

Deborah Heiser, PhD is an Applied Developmental Psychologist with a specialty in Aging. I'm a researcher, TEDx speaker, contributor for Psychology Today, Substack blogger, CEO of The Mentor Project, and adjunct professor of Psychology.