
Mentoring

... giving you the confidence to be a memorable mentor
There are many definitions of mentoring, not one accepted definition. It used to be considered that mentoring was about tutelage by a more senior person. That came from the derivation of the term mentoring being based on Greek mythology. It is said that when the King went to war, he asked his friend Mentor to guide and develop his son Telemachus who would be the next King. So it prevailed that the term mentoring came to be known as being developed for a role by a wise and experienced person.
These days, mentoring takes on many guises and does not need to be a senior person, a formal arrangement or to be developed for a specific role.
Here’s what I know.
Mentoring is about people It’s about trust. And it’s about learning.
Mentoring has to take place in the context of a relationship. Two people come together. Now two people come together often but it usually isn’t a mentoring relationship. So, what makes it a mentoring relationship? The fact that one of those two wishes to gain value from the other. It could even be the case that each gains value from the other as in peer mentoring.
Now, in a formal arrangement such as a mentoring program, the coming together is ‘manufactured’ in the sense that there is a defined purpose and structure. It may be that the mentor is assigned or the mentor may be selected from a pool of possible mentors or a person may seek their own mentor – however the program decrees.
In an organic mentoring process, the mentoring may well go unsaid. The relationship may never be labelled as mentoring. This relationship occurs naturally. A person finds someone whom they believe (consciously or unconsciously) they can learn from and so they spend time together or find opportunities to interact.
When I ask people in my training programs, who do they consider to have been a mentor, invariably they identify:
That’s not to say mentors do not occur in other areas of life but these tend to be the most common responses. And these are situations where people are generally placed in each others path by circumstance. By being exposed to each other either one considers they see potential in the other and help to guide them, or, the other sees things in the other which gives them a guidepost.
A mentor can be self-appointed but if the other party does not see that person as a mentor, there will be no mentoring!
What enables one to consider another as a mentor?
Trust. Trust on so many levels.
Without trust, the relationship will falter if it gets off the ground at all. And it’s worth bearing in mind that it takes time to develop trust but can be lost in an instant.
Like trust, if there is no learning, I would argue that there is no mentoring taking place.
That learning may, as I said earlier, be conscious or unconscious. When I look back on mentors in my life, the ones I value are the ones I learnt most from. Let em give you two examples.
Everyone has someone in their life who stands out as a shining example of how NOT to be or behave. A mentor is remembered as someone from whom you learnt a positive experience. It may be how to do something, how to behave, how to approach something, a way of being, an attitude, how to navigate politics in your career, how to broaden your thinking or views, any number of lessons can be learned. From a mentor you often don’t just learn the lesson but you consciously apply it and hold them up as a guiding beacon to remind you.
So, back to our question ‘what is mentoring?’. Let me turn it around…
What is mentoring to you? Drop your thoughts in the comments section below. I’m keen to hear your ideas.