Ghosted by my mentee
How the person I was mentoring for a year went AWOL
As the case is with most people, during quarantine I picked up a hobby. It wasn’t so much a hobby as quite an emotionally taxing activity but you know same same.
Deciding to mentor someone was encouraged by colleagues and friends as I did a lot of adhoc pastoral managing in my team so why not make it official?! I found a specific mentorship programme focusing in my area of work and was assigned a young woman who was wanting to work in my sector.
She and I would meet via zoom every week and discuss the job search, how to maximise her resume and do mock interviews. All things that had she paid a professional would have cost her a LOT of money. With all the useful gems I was laying down I should have become a paid content creator on Tiktok as that is a legitimate career path these days.
When I tell you the relationship took work, I’m not lying. I spent hours trying to engage her and work on the way she presented herself. Building a rapport literally took months and months.
Red flags are often deemed a dating thing but in my professional opinion - they are everywhere in every relationship. And from the moment I met my mentee, I knew we were the wrong fit but kept at it because I wanted to do some good in the world.
Then in June, I went on a 3 week long holiday that I had already scheduled and I went through calendar invites of our meetings and adapted them to work accordingly. On my return, I waited on zoom meetings for her to turn up and she never did. Then when I emailed to see if she was ok, she’d email back to say how busy she was and that she didn’t think these meetings were in her calendar anymore. Finally, I decided to bite the bullet and ask if she wanted to still meet up. And I kid you not, I didn’t get a response.
That was a month ago now and I am as baffled as you. How do you go from meeting weekly to not even giving a courtesy reply when I legitimately gave her an out?!
As the case is with most relationships these days, I internet stalked her which just involved going onto her LinkedIn to see if she had actually got herself a job in my sector. She had.