Techniques, models, exercises, checklists, how-to guides
If you are not able to join a mentoring programme in your own organisation or profession, you can still find a mentor informally. The starting point is to think through what you want a mentor for. Once you are clear about this, you can move on to thinking about what sort of person would make...
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In essence, all coaching and mentoring are about helping people achieve change. When change is incremental, planned and about progress towards a desirable objective, and the coachee/ mentee feels reasonably in control and not under threat, then coaching or mentoring task is relatively straightforward. But when change is unexpected, threatening or involves significant perceived loss,...
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Identifying strengths is just the first part of a strengths-based approach to personal development. There are numerous self-completion questionnaires to help with the process, but these should come with a health warning – you have to have a relatively high level of self-awareness and emotional intelligence to see yourself accurately. More effective is to add...
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Read More Building on personal strengths – beyond the basics
Building rapport is the first step in creating a successful relationship. Investing time in the early meetings to get to know each other, establish common ground, share personal stories and start to think how you will work together is time well spent. Establishing rapport is essential in, for example, mentoring coaching relationships, because it allows...
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Career pathing is a useful process for helping someone learn from their previous career moves and apply that learning to future career choices. Its about moving from allowing careers broadly happen to you, to taking greater control of your career; about creating choices rather than waiting for them to come to you. Some of the...
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We all have concerns in our lives; concerns could be around home life, health, finance, family, friends, the environment, violence, oppression, starvation, the environment – the list goes on. We are not always able to influence all of our concerns. So, we have a choice about where we choose to focus our attention, time and...
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Generation gaps aren’t what they were. It used to be a reasonable assumption that each younger generation was simply going through the growing pains of its predecessors; that the experience of an older generation was, by and large, directly relevant to them. Much of mentoring theory is based on this assumption. Yet the evidence has (more…)
Coaching textbooks are full of advice for coaches to develop their skills of empathy. It might seem to make common sense, but this advice doesn’t seem to be based on any credible evidence. In fact, the contrary may be true — empathy may be a dangerous and unhealthy addiction for the coach and an unhelpful...
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Read More Empathy versus compassion in coaching and mentoring
Ethical mentoring is a fairly new term, but it’s likely to be one we are going to hear a lot more of. The concept comes from a recognition that unethical and illegal behaviour in organizations rarely happens because an individual or group of people set out to do wrong. Rather, it starts with small breaches...
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Levels of meaning are like the layers of an onion: each layer conceals another, deeper, layer of information. Goodman (2002) identifies four levels of meaning that can give structure to exploring an issue in a coaching or mentoring conversation. These are: In using this approach, it’s important to give sufficient time to understanding each layer...
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Read More Getting to the heart of a problem or issue, using levels of meaning
