Being Mentored by Someone Who Believed in Me More Than I Did

I had been working in architectural design in Chandigarh for two years when I was introduced to an architect who had been in practice for thirty years and who agreed, through a mutual connection, to meet with me monthly for informal mentoring. I had expected wisdom and technical guidance.

I had not expected someone who would refuse to accept my account of my own limitations. At our third meeting I described, as part of explaining a project I had been working on, a creative direction I had considered and set aside as beyond my current capability.

He stopped me at that point and asked me to describe what I meant by beyond my current capability. I described it in terms of my experience level and my technical confidence.

He said he did not recognise what I was describing in the work I had shown him, and that what I was calling a limitation appeared to him to be a decision not to try something that would have required me to fail at it several times before succeeding at it.

The distinction was one I had not made and that changed how I understood the phrase. Over the following eighteen months he held a vision of my capability that was consistently ahead of where I was standing, and the specific experience of working with someone who had a more accurate picture of my potential than I did was one of the stranger and more demanding of my professional experiences.

There is a specific discomfort in being believed in beyond your own belief in yourself - a pressure that is not unkind but that is real, because the belief creates an expectation that you then have to decide whether to grow toward or decline. I grew toward it.

Not because he told me to but because his clarity made declining feel like a choice I was making against evidence rather than a realistic assessment of my limits.