Why coaches and mentors shouldn’t beat themselves up when client change doesn’t happen

Every beginner coach or mentor goes through a phase of questioning their own competence, based upon a sense that they could (or should) have had so much more impact. Even very experienced coaches and mentors sometimes feel that they have “failed” their client. While there are some professional coaches and mentors, who think they are...

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When to refer a coachee or mentee for professional counselling or therapy

Suggesting to someone else that they need counselling takes courage. As a coach or mentor, you will in most cases not be a qualified therapist – and even if you were, there are potential conflicts of role between mentoring/coaching and therapy. The two key questions here are: What to watch out for Signs that the...

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Parallel processing in coaching and mentoring

Parallel processing happens when a coach, mentor or therapist reproduces a behaviour or emotion within their client, or more subtly, when they conflate the client’s experiences and issues with their own. It can distort the coaching or mentoring conversation, so that it focuses – usually unconsciously – on the coach or mentor’s agenda, rather than...

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Helping your coachee develop resilience

In challenging working environments, resilience is increasingly an essential competence. People, who are resilient, are better able to cope with unexpected change, with setbacks and disappointments, with high stress environments and with periods of excessive workload. The signs of low resilience are generally easy to spot. They include inability to make decisions, frequent minor physical...

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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The concept of Significant Unresolved Issues arose from David Clutterbuck’s unpublished research in the 1990s on what issues mentees brought to their mentors for discussion.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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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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