The Mentor Who Didn't Know She Was Mentoring Me
She probably figured the coffee runs were just filler between meetings. I'd tag along, half-listening at first, then something she said about deadlines would land and sit with me for weeks.
Her emails were short. No fluff. She'd fire off a note after a client call that went sideways and still sound like she had it handled. That tone stuck. It made my own panicked drafts look ridiculous, so I started trimming them too.
Offhand remarks that rewired things
One afternoon she mentioned rereading old notes from a failed pitch. Not to dwell, just to spot what she'd skipped. I tried it later with a project that stalled. The pattern jumped out faster than I expected. No drama, just clarity.
She never framed it as advice. It was more like she was thinking out loud and I happened to be there. Those moments piled up. They shaped how I handle feedback now, especially the kind that stings but isn't personal.
Pop culture helped frame it too. Think the quiet persistence in a Taylor Swift re-record cycle, or the way Fleabag keeps circling back to the same mess until it clicks. Informal lessons travel like that.
Reading women figuring it out in public later showed me this wasn't rare. Plenty of people absorb direction from someone who never signed up to give it.
"Just send the thing. Worst case you fix it after."
That line from her became the filter for my own hesitation loops. I'd draft something, hear it in my head, hit send anyway. The results weren't perfect, but they moved.
She posted once about tweaking her morning walk because it cleared her head before the screen lit up. I copied the habit without mentioning it. small shifts in daily routines add up when you aren't labeling them as strategy.
Another time she laughed off a networking event that went nowhere. The honesty landed harder than any polished success story. It matched what I saw on owning your early mistakes threads, where people admitted the awkward pivots without the highlight reel.
We never had a formal check-in. She moved teams eventually. I kept the notebook from those coffee chats though, the one with her random observations scribbled on the margins. It still beats most structured mentoring sessions I've sat through since.
Tech spaces especially reward this kind of osmosis. Someone drops an unscripted path in a Slack thread and it ripples. unscripted paths in tech often start exactly there, without the mentor realizing the chain reaction.
Years later the pattern repeats. I catch myself repeating her phrasing to someone newer. They nod like it's obvious. Maybe it is. The influence travels without permission slips or titles attached.
That's the part that lingers. You end up carrying pieces of people who never knew they handed them over.