The People Who Shape Us

A few weeks ago, I attended a lecture by Jeremy King in Primrose Hill.

Among the many stories he shared that evening, there's one that made me think relentlessly about mentorship, relationships and attention.

Early in his career, he found himself looking for a mentor. Someone to guide him, someone to learn from, someone whose judgement he could trust while his own was still taking shape. At some point, a colleague suggested that perhaps he should stop looking for a mentor and start teaching himself instead.

That anecdote followed me home. Not because I immediately agreed with it, but because it forced me to ask a question I had never really considered before.

What exactly is a mentor?

The more I reflected on it, the less certain I became that the answer was as straightforward as I had assumed.

Unlike a doctor, a teacher or a manager, a mentor is not a role we apply for, qualify towards or appoint ourselves to. In fact, I am no longer convinced that anyone can decide to become a mentor at all. That title seems to belong entirely to somebody else.

The mentee decides, often years later, sometimes after decades, and occasionally without the mentor ever knowing.

Looking back over my own career, I realised that the people who shaped me most did not resemble one another. Some were generous, some were demanding, some I admired deeply, and others I respected without ever wishing to become like them.

One manager in particular taught me an enormous amount about standards, discipline and accountability. Still, he also taught me, quite unintentionally, that all of those things could be achieved while remaining a decent human being. I did not learn only from what he did well. I learned just as much from what I hoped to do differently.

Years later, I found myself listening to Jeremy King and recognising something entirely different. Not another set of standards, but another way of inhabiting hospitality. We have never met. He has no idea I exist. Yet it would feel dishonest not to acknowledge the influence that one evening had on the way I think about my profession.

Perhaps that is when I realised that mentorship has very little to do with imitation. We do not become copies of our mentors; instead, something about the way they see the world becomes part of how we see the world.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that my search had never really been for someone to give me answers. Maybe that's where it started, but what I was really looking for was something much harder to describe. I was looking for reassurance that there was a place in hospitality for someone like me.

Someone quiet, someone who thinks before speaking, someone who is more comfortable observing than performing.

For a long time, I assumed that hospitality naturally belonged to extroverts, that to welcome people well, you somehow had to become someone else.

The irony is that the more experience I gained, the less true that assumption became. Hospitality is not performance, at least, not for long.

Like every craft, it may begin as conscious practice. At first, we learn the standards, follow the procedures, remember the sequence of service, and ask ourselves what to say and when to say it. It can feel almost theatrical. But knowledge slowly becomes confidence. Confidence gradually becomes judgment. And judgment does something remarkable: it frees our attention.

Instead of worrying about ourselves, we begin to notice someone else. The guest looks cold. The couple have fallen unusually quiet. Someone keeps glancing at the door. The family seem to be celebrating something.

The guest is no longer a cover; they become a person. That, I think, is where hospitality begins.

The procedures were never the destination; they simply created the conditions that allowed our attention to move away from ourselves.

Perhaps mentorship follows the same pattern.

The people who shape us do not simply give us knowledge. They help us become more fully ourselves. Sometimes through encouragement, through challenge, admiration, and contradiction. Sometimes, without ever knowing they have done so.

Looking back over my own path, I realise that I have always tried to leave my teams more independent than I found them. The objective was never to make myself indispensable. Quite the opposite. I wanted them to acquire enough knowledge to become confident, enough confidence to trust their judgement, and enough judgement to stop needing mine.

Whether that is mentorship or not is not for me to decide. Perhaps it never is. Perhaps mentorship is always recognised retrospectively because transformation itself can only be recognised retrospectively.

We understand who shaped us only after we have been shaped.

I speak about looking after strangers as though they were loved ones, and people sometimes hear that as a metaphor. I have never meant it as one. It is simply a way of directing attention. A way to enter the relationship.

The more natural attention becomes, the less hospitality feels like something we perform and the more it becomes part of who we are; perhaps mentorship works in much the same way.

The best mentors rarely draw attention to themselves. Their attention rests elsewhere. And somehow, quietly, it leaves traces.

Attention leaves traces without drawing attention to itself.

There is something profoundly hospitable about that.

Perhaps that is why we spend so much time searching for mentors, only to discover, years later, that what we were really searching for was permission to become ourselves.