Expert Q&A · Ask the Consultant · 5 min read
My mentor is genuinely brilliant, and I catch myself copying how they work, how they speak in meetings, even their career moves. Is that what I’m supposed to be doing, or am I getting mentoring wrong?
Short Answer
You’re getting the admiration right and the method wrong. A mentor’s job is to amplify your natural talent, to see what you specifically bring and help it grow sharper and more visible, not to produce a second copy of themselves. Learn from how they think; don’t audition to become them. The version of you that copies your mentor tops out as an imitation. The version they amplify has no ceiling.
Some early imitation is natural and even useful, borrowing a technique for running a meeting or structuring a decision is how craft gets transmitted. The problem starts when imitation becomes the goal rather than a temporary scaffold, because a career built on someone else’s strengths quietly abandons your own. And it shows: the imitated version reads as slightly off to everyone watching, while the amplified version reads as someone growing into themselves, which is the difference people are actually promoted on.
It’s also worth understanding why the pull towards imitation is so strong, because it isn’t a personal weakness. A good mentor is often the first person whose working life you’ve seen up close and admired, which makes their way of operating feel like the definition of doing it well rather than one way among many. Organisations quietly reinforce this too: familiar patterns read as safe, so echoing a respected senior person earns early approval. Both forces are real, and neither changes the fact that imitation has a ceiling exactly where your mentor’s strengths diverge from yours.
Four distinctions separate mentoring that amplifies from mentoring that photocopies:
Their Path Worked Because It Was Theirs
The moves that worked for your mentor worked because of who they are and when they moved: their strengths, their moment, their trade-offs. Copying the route without their raw material produces worse results and a persistent feeling of acting a part. The transferable asset is how they read situations and made decisions, not the specific choices those decisions produced.
What a Good Mentor Is Actually Watching
Strong mentors study their mentee, not their own reflection. They’re asking where your instincts are already good, what you do easily that others find hard, and what’s blocking more of that from showing. If your sessions are mostly about replicating their approach, steer them back towards your specifics.
Borrow Methods, Keep Your Voice
Take their frameworks, their questions, their standards, tools are meant to travel. But when their style contradicts your grain, a reserved person forcing their mentor’s charisma, the copy costs more than it earns. Adopt what strengthens your own way of operating and drop what erases it.
Disagreement Is a Feature
The moment you can push back on your mentor with a reasoned position of your own is the moment mentoring is working. A mentee who only ever agrees is being duplicated, not developed, and most experienced mentors are relieved when the pushback starts.
What amplification looks like in practice is easiest to see from the mentor’s side. The same accomplished mentor, working with two different mentees, should produce two different results: the analytical one becomes known for the rigour of their thinking, the relational one becomes the person who can carry a difficult room. Same mentor, same frameworks, opposite outcomes, because the raw material differed and the mentor worked with it rather than over it. That’s the model working as intended, and it’s why the right mentor for your journey matters more than the most impressive mentor available.
A practical test for your own relationship: after a season of mentoring, list what’s changed about how you work. If the list reads like a description of your mentor, recalibrate. If it reads like a sharper, more confident version of things you already half-did before you met them, the mentoring is doing exactly what it should.
And if you’re choosing a mentor now, listen for how they talk about past mentees. The ones worth having describe people who became more distinctly themselves, in different fields, with different styles. The pattern to avoid is a mentor whose proudest examples all sound suspiciously alike.
Bottom LineLearn how your mentor thinks, never who they are: the whole point of mentoring is amplifying your natural talent, and imitation is the one way to waste it.