Mentoring – Where Will It Take You?

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Last week I had the wonderful experience of flying to Karatha, Western Australia to work with science teachers. From Perth the flight path was north over the desert. I had no idea it was so beautiful! It’s up there with the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef, both of which I have been fortunate enough to view from the air. Stunning beauty and an unexpected bonus led me to thinking … you never know what amazing things you’ll discover on a journey … mentoring takes you places you’ve never been before. That’s my experience with mentoring conversations too. So today’s feature article is: Mentoring – Where Will It Take You?

Serendipity, dictionary.com tells me, is an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident. One of the reasons I love to travel is that you never know what amazing things you’ll discover on a journey and I think it’s the same with mentoring because it takes you places and allows you to make discoveries – often accidentally.

In my workshops for mentors I like to have them apply the mentoring techniques that they learn in a real life conversation. Not a role play, this activity asks each person to share a goal, an issue or decision that is real for them with a participant who will practice the mentoring process. They then reverse roles. The topic of the conversation is not important, it need not be work related because the objective is to experience the process from the point of view of both mentor and mentoree, then reflect and draw insight from it. So it must be real, not made up. We debrief as a group after the activity, respecting the confidentiality of the content of the conversation but discussing the process, the experience, outcomes, insights and learning.

Not so long ago, in a workshop that had an uneven number in the group, I partnered with a participant for this activity. I was caught short in terms of a topic for our conversation so I pulled a random thought that had been rattling around my mind for a while – should I get a cat as a pet? My mentor had great listening skills, asking good questions to explore the issue, empathetic but neutral, really facilitating my thinking as I explained the pros and cons of bringing a pet into my life. At one point she offered an observation. It was a short comment phrased as a question and I don’t remember exactly what she said but suddenly my thinking shifted. She must have seen it in my body language and she let the silence be, as I went inside my head. She didn’t need to know what I discovered there, although we both realized that my issue was not only about a cat. There was something much more important. In fact in hindsight, I was able to see something that had been troubling me for nearly a year. As the time for the activity expired, I thanked her and parked the newly discovered issue for later review and ran the rest of the workshop.

I came back to the issue with fresh eyes a few times in the next few days and gradually gained a new understanding of the causes and effects of a past event. The result was some kind of catharsis. Emotional tension that I had been hanging on to was released and my attitude and behavior in a current situation changed for the better.

I was so pleased when I ran into my participant-mentor a couple of months later and let her know just how powerful and beneficial that 15 minute practice session had been for me!

People have told me before that their practice conversation has been “life changing”. You wouldn’t think mere minutes of mentoring could be so productive but it’s true. Mentoring is a leap of faith, you never know where a mentoring conversation will take you. As a mentor you don’t always find out the depth of change or amazing discoveries you facilitate but believe me, that is how mentoring works.