Many, if not most, of my writing comes from experience, as it does for many scholars – either observing situations and events, being among those involved in these, and the many discussions with students and colleagues about the experiences they have gone through in many countries I have visited or worked in. This topic of mentoring and the related role of role modelling initially came to me shortly after doing my doctorate in a mentoring mode with Christopher Hodgkinson in Canada, and my ideas about this were reinforced when I was mentored in informal postdoctoral work with Wolfgang Mommsen in Germany in the 1990s.