No one can build a successful, fulfilling career completely on her own. It takes the experience of those who have navigated the seas of success to guide us along the way. There will no doubt come a time in your career when you need to take the next step - or a brand new step - and you won't want to do it without some guidance from someone who has been in that situation before. You will need a mentor.

In what areas could mentors benefit your career? Kathy Korman Frey, Entrepreneur in Residence at The George Washington University School of Business, CFEE, provides some insight and advice for women who may experience difficulty envisioning the areas where mentors could help. Kathy says, "At the Hot Mommas Project and in my Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Class I tell women to think of mentors as sitting around a table. I call them “a personal board of advisors.” If you are struggling with work-life balance, you may have a seat for a woman you know who works a lot, but also seems to have a happy family life, and doesn’t seem frazzled all the time. It could be as simple as that. You may want to start your own business, or grow your business. You need an “entrepreneur” seat at the table. Let’s say you have a particular area where you want to make connections and learn: Fundraising, tech, health care. That is a seat at your table. If you are not high on the “self-insight” category, you might want to sit down with a friend and talk this through to help figure out what the seats at your table should be. I recommend between three and eight seats at the table."

Once she is satisfied that there are areas where mentoring could be beneficial to her career and life, how can a woman identify suitable mentors for herself? Kathy suggests the following strategy:

• Identify the seats at your Personal Board of Advisors (PBA) “table.”

• Keep your ear to the ground for those people as you’re living your life (at work, in the community, at events). If you want to be an over-achiever about it, start Googling people for each seat, and asking friends about referrals.

• Try to meet these people at some point. If they are well-known and or/uber-busy, attend talks where they are speaking. If they are “normal” people, call and email them. Say you want to ask them about their career path, or that you’re going through the Hot Mommas Project mentoring checklist and would love to ask them a couple of questions.

• Do you like the person? Would you like to talk to them again? Did they express an interest in you? If so, you have a good candidate for a mentor.

Now that you've determined those areas of your career and life in which mentoring can help you and you've identified likely mentors, how do you actually embark on a mentoring relationship? Kathy explains, "It’s important to note that this is all about relationship management. I get a surprising amount of questions about basic social skills and relationship management. For instance, “Here is someone I would like to be my mentor. How should I approach them?” In my class and outside of class, with professionals already in the workforce, the questions in this area is on the rise. I speculate there might be a loss of skills around face-to-face and phone interactions in the wake of email, Twitter and Facebook (all of which I’m on, and addicted to, so I’m not judging here). There is a lot of anxiety around how to approach people, and what to say. My message is “Try it!” When you have a positive experience, you’ll be fueled to keep filling your table over time. Also, keep your social skills honed. Use email, Twitter and Facebook as an “and” along WITH verbal interpersonal communication, not as an “or” in place of verbal and face-to-face communication. I predict a type of Darwinian social skills shake-out where, at some point, people who have employed the “and” strategy will triumph markedly over those who have employed the “or” strategy."

Here we've broken down the process into three "hows" in relation to mentoring: How to decide what you need, how to decide who you need and how to begin a mentoring relationship. Kathy assures us that it's not such a foreign concept to seek out those who can help us find our way to greater success and fulfillment in work and life. It's important to keep our minds open to the possibility that there are potential mentors and mentoring opportunities all around us and take advantage of them when we can.

How could you benefit from a mentor? Where could you find him or her? How can you begin that relationship?