Working with SUIs (Significant Unresolved Issues)

The concept of Significant Unresolved Issues arose from David Clutterbuck’s unpublished research in the 1990s on what issues mentees brought to their mentors for discussion. Participants in workshops were asked to write down and reflect upon all the issues, about which they felt a level of anxiety that they had not resolved them, or found...

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Cross mentoring – Mentoring between companies

Most formal mentoring takes place between people within the same organisation, but this isn’t the only possibility. It is hard, for example, to create effective mentoring relationships within small national branch offices – people are often too close and the choice of mentor is too limited. While distance mentoring, using mentors from the same company...

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How to recognise and help a coachee/ mentee manage loneliness

It’s a common misconception that loneliness is about isolation from or lack of contact with other people. In reality, people differ greatly in how they respond to being on their own. Loneliness is a feeling of being socially isolated that can and often does occur even when someone is surrounded by and has frequent contact...

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Team coaching virtual teams

Virtual teams have a number of differences compared with co-located teams. On the plus side, their geographical dispersion means that they can draw upon a wider and more diverse pool of talent. It is also easier to maintain 24-hour oversight of issues, if people are in multiple time zones. There is also some evidence that...

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Wise words create wise thinking

One of the greatest gifts between cultures is that of new words. Our awareness of concepts is tightly bound with having words to describe them. (For example, the concept of mathematics is alien to some remote tribes, who are limited in vocabulary to one, two and many.) In no culture have I found so many...

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Control or let go

People often struggle to get the right balance between doing things themselves and delegating to others. Here are some simple questions to manage the conversation about this: For each answer, ask also: A useful analogy lies in Spring cleaning. Imagine you have a whole week to de-clutter your home. Starting with any room and working...

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Having a good talk with myself

Walking down the street 25 years ago, the sight of someone talking to themselves would probably make you want to cross the road to avoid them. Nowadays, it is nothing strange – we assume that they are on their mobile phone. But the idea that inner conversations should not be vocalised is a vestige of...

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What’s the conversation you need to have

We all have conversations we avoid. We can wall these conversations off to the extent that we are not even aware we are avoiding them. In helping someone get to know themselves, a coach or mentor can encourage them to acknowledge and explore these conversations. Some of the most common include: Useful questions to help...

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The linguistic origins of mentoring

An eminent US scholar in mentoring recently said at a conference “There is no such word as mentee!”, arguing instead for the word protégé. By the same logic, of course, there is no such word as protégé (French, from which it might be presumed to have originated, has a verb, protégér, from which come protecteur...

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What if the coachee or mentee appears delusional

Although only one person in 500 is receiving treatment for a delusional disorder at any time, the rest of us are much more susceptible to bizarre and irrational beliefs than we like to admit. A recent study asking people about 17 delusional beliefs (for example: Do you ever feel there is a conspiracy against you?...

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