Think about the women, and men, who have shaped you. Not necessarily the ones with formal titles or scheduled calls, but the friend who talked you down from a bad decision at 11pm, the colleague who told you honestly that you were worth more than you were asking for, the person a decade ahead of you in their career who said the thing nobody else would. Chances are you haven't called any of them mentors. But that is exactly what they are.

Mentorship has an image problem. It conjures formal programmes, matched pairs, monthly meetings with agendas. And while that version exists and works for many people, it is only one version. In reality, mentorship is far more fluid, more instinctive and more present in most of our lives than we tend to recognise. It is also rarely singular. The people who navigate their careers with most confidence tend not to have one mentor but a constellation of them, each offering something different at different moments. The friend who has walked the same path. The senior colleague, male or female, who lends their perspective without agenda. The peer who reflects back what you can't quite see in yourself. Some of these relationships last decades. Others serve a specific season and naturally evolve into something else, or simply conclude. You might hold several at once, or return to someone years later when the timing finally makes sense. Both are valid. The mistake is waiting for a formal arrangement before you allow yourself to receive, or offer, that kind of support.

What the relationships below have in common is not seniority, structure or even intention in every case. They are simply people who showed up for each other, consistently and honestly, and changed the course of what was possible as a result.

Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey

Even Oprah had a mentor. The question of who could possibly be qualified to guide someone of Winfrey's stature answers itself when the mentor in question is Maya Angelou, poet, author and civil rights activist, whose influence on Oprah spanned decades and shaped, in Oprah's own words, some of the most important years of her life. Winfrey has been unequivocal about what that relationship meant: "Mentors are important, and I don't think anybody makes it in the world without some form of mentorship." Coming from one of the most successful women of the twentieth century, that is not a throwaway line.

Meryl Streep and Viola Davis

What began as friendship became something more sustaining. Viola Davis has spoken often about the confidence she has drawn from Meryl Streep, not through grand gestures but through the ordinary, consistent way Streep shows up. "She does it all the time," Davis has said. "In a way that she doesn't even understand or think she's doing it." That observation matters. The most effective mentorship is often not formalised or even named. It is the senior woman who speaks frankly, shares her experience without ego, and models what it looks like to occupy space without apology.

Tracey Africa and Laverne Cox

This relationship is one of the clearest illustrations of why representation in mentorship is not a nice-to-have but a necessity. Tracey Africa, one of the first openly transgender models to achieve mainstream visibility, blazed a path that Laverne Cox has spoken about with explicit gratitude. "It's important to know that there's been a path blazed for me," Cox has said. Cox has since become an icon and advocate for countless others, demonstrating how the effects of a single mentoring relationship ripple outward far beyond the two people in it.

Nora Ephron and Lena Dunham

This one starts with a cold outreach, which is worth noting for anyone who has talked themselves out of making one. Nora Ephron reached out to Lena Dunham after seeing her independent film Tiny Furniture, and what followed was a year and a half of friendship, conversation and the kind of frank, generous guidance that Dunham has said informed the entirety of her life. "The opportunity to be friends with Nora in the last year of her life informs the entirety of mine," she has said. "I am so grateful." Ephron was under no obligation to reach out. She did it anyway, because she saw talent worth encouraging and took the straightforward step of saying so.

The thread running through all of these relationships is the same one running through the quieter, less celebrated versions in your own life. It is not about seniority, formal structure or even a shared professional world. It is about one person deciding that another person's growth matters to them, and showing up accordingly.

Worth sitting with, in both directions. Who in your life is already doing this for you, even if neither of you has named it? And who are you doing it for, whether you realise it or not?

Because the other thing these stories have in common is that mentorship moves. It is not a fixed relationship with fixed roles, and it does not have to be exclusive or concurrent. You might have one mentor for a specific challenge and several others for the broader arc of your career. The woman who guides you through one season may become your peer in the next, or find herself turning to you for perspective years later. The relationship that begins as a formal monthly check-in may evolve into something more occasional and more meaningful. The one that felt like friendship may, in retrospect, have been the most formative professional relationship you ever had. Men mentor women. Women mentor men. The best of these relationships ignore the boundaries we might expect them to observe.

You probably already have mentors. You may just not be calling them that. And you are probably already a mentor to someone, whether you feel qualified or not. The real opportunity is not finding the perfect arrangement. It is paying closer attention to the relationships you are already in, and where there might be space for new mentors too.