Mentoring Mindshift

Buffer

Email

Print

Mentoring is about helping people achieve their goals. Mentors help mentorees articulate what they want and plan how they might attain it. But great mentors go beyond goals and actions, they explore why the mentoree feels drawn to their goal in the first place. They elicit the values and beliefs that inspire our dreams and aspirations.

What we want (or think we want) is a product of our mind. As we think or speak about goals and plans we’re coming from our rational brain – the pre-frontal cortex, the executive brain that is concerned with what we do and how we do it. The problem is, our motivation comes from our emotional brain – the limbic system, the part that really controls our decision-making and behavior. Some call it the heart, the soul or gut feeling. Because the limbic system does not have language, our desire comes to us as a feeling or instinct. This is where our true values and beliefs reside, often below the surface of our awareness, in the subconscious mind.

In conversations where we feel safe to talk about our past, present and future with people who cause us to reflect and enable us to examine our innermost feelings and instinctive drives, our values and beliefs can bubble up to the surface. What we had no words for can emerge as a flash of insight or a slower dawning realisaton. Depending on personality, we may blurt out new-formed thoughts or process them in silence.

A great mentor does not rush to fill the silence or pounce on our first utterance. S/he waits. Eventually, with reflective statements like “It sounds like …” or “What I’m getting is …” the mentor helps us clarify our thinking so that it makes sense to our rational brain. Then, we can begin to figure out a goal and plan that aligns with a purpose true to our values and beliefs.

Alignment to purpose is extremely important because:

• The passion of purpose energises and allows us to persist in spite of obstacles.
• A goal that is not aligned to purpose will fail to make us happy. When we achieve it we feel dissatisfied despite success.
• If plans derail due to circumstances we can’t control (someone else gets the job we wanted, the product we launched fails etc.) we have no plan B, we’re obsessed with the goal not the true desire that spawned it.

Goals are really a means to an end, a way of living our beliefs and meeting our values. The mentoring mindshift means looking beyond the goal and finding the “why” of what we want.