I’ll bet that you are where you are today because of mentors who have significantly influenced your life.  And if I take it a bit further, odds are good that you have achieved your status as an optometrist because of an optometry mentor.  It’s likely that there is significant mentoring in other professions and careers, too, but optometry mentors are typically very special people.

I have had my share of optometry mentors.  A couple of optometrists were friends of my dad and they advised me to attend a great little optometry college in the Windy City.  Another OD was the one that gave me the vision correction in middle school that showed me the power of the diopter (or two!)

I had great instructors at optometry school.  I’ve met a lot of ODs in the last twenty years who learned from legends who shaped their careers.   The influence of teachers can push both ways because there are times when a student clinician learns how to be outstanding, but there are others that teach one how to not care for patients.

I had “mentor” experiences in my student career that taught me tremendous lessons about the type of doctor that I did not want to be.  One was an ophthalmologist who would ask elderly glaucoma patients who reported medication non-compliance if they wanted to select the color of their seeing-eye dog before they went blind.  Another was an optometrist for whom I worked in a clinic, who treated his staff as though they were never meeting his standards for patient care.

But more importantly, I have had tremendous mentors that were positive influences.  I consider them all to be important people in my life.  One of my mentors recently lost his life in a battle with cancer that he fought valiantly.  I didn’t know Mike extremely well, but he was the optometrist in the hometown of one of my optometry school buddies and he became an optometry colleague during my career.

In my first experience, he opened his office to us before we took a state board licensing exam.  It was probably not a big deal to him, but to us it felt like we were being treated like princes.  Later, after I had become an optometry volunteer, I learned about how a person can lead without having to gain attention.  He served optometry and his patients well and unassumingly.  And he paid me the ultimate compliment - he referred his best friend to me as a patient.

I had a chance to thank him when he said goodbye to me the last time we were together, but it bears repeating:  Thanks, Mike.  I’ll commit to being like Mike, and I hope you do, too.

Do you have a great story about the outcome of your effort to mentor?  Let us hear it.