Are you reaping the benefits of mentoring?

If you’ve read my last couple of newsletters, you know I plan to scale back my coaching and training opportunities over the next few years and focus on mentoring instead. What does that mean for a coach?

The definition of mentoring is to advise or train someone, especially a younger colleague. It comes from Mentor, the name of the man who advises young Telemachus in Homer’s Odyssey.

Mentoring styles and expectations vary from person to person and industry to industry. In the corporate world, employers often facilitate mentoring programs as a means of nurturing up-and-coming leaders. In academia, mentoring is encouraged to assist younger staff with teaching, scholarship, service and leadership skills. Whatever the profession, the overall goal of mentoring is usually the long-term success of the “mentee.”

In the coaching world choosing a mentor usually means that you’ve decided to emulate someone informally or you’ve paid for formal one-on-one mentoring. Robert Dilts is someone I admired and emulated for years, so I considered him to be an informal mentor. Eventually, I decided to establish a formal, paid mentoring relationship with him.

Whether the connection is by family, friend or business, a mentor is someone who has stepped forward and assumed the task of educating or guiding a younger or less experienced person. As a mentor you see in someone something worth sponsoring and supporting. Mentoring requires that you know and like someone well enough that you want to support a particular type of growth.

I believe that true mentoring is a calling, and it exists because of a desire to instruct or teach. Because information and attitudes are conveyed, it requires that there be a relationship in which the mentee is open to learning and discovery. As a mentor, not only are you imparting knowledge, but you also have a close enough relationship that you can identify values and beliefs that will make learning possible. It requires more in-depth sharing than teaching.

Being successfully mentored requires you to recognize a level of learning or expertise that will be helpful for your mission and purpose. Your mentor should be someone who can help you attain something he or she has, but you don’t. When you recognize that someone has a philosophy or worldview you want to understand on a deeper level, it might be appropriate to seek a mentoring relationship with them. Mentoring involves a conscious decision to learn from someone and to emulate what they’re doing.

Even though I have not yet initiated a formal mentoring program, I have been consciously mentoring others for a long time, especially coaches. You are in a position to do the same. Know that there are others who need your support.

If you’d like to read more about this, I highly recommend From Coach to Awakener by Robert Dilts.