The MASSIVE difference between mentoring someone and coaching someone

“Will you mentor me?”

As a senior manager in the banking world, I was asked this question all of the time. I would normally follow up this question with a bunch of follow up questions to gain more clarity. I was also asked the following question:

“Will you coach me?”

Guess what? I thought they were asking the same thing! Again, I would ask them a bunch of questions to follow up on what they were needing coaching on to gain more clarity.

What I had no clue about was that there is a MASSIVE difference between mentoring someone and coaching someone.

Just as most lump leading and managing together (a different topic for another post), most lump coaching and mentoring together.

Unfortunately, there is so much confusion around mentoring/coaching and no one is really creating clarity.

Don’t worry, that’s what I’m here for. Once you gain clarity around coaching and mentoring, you can effectively know when to ask for either and what specifically you’ll get.

As mentioned, in the world today, mentoring and coaching are interchanged all of the time. Combining these two roles into one is causing massive amounts of confusion. Most people who call themselves “coaches” are actually mentors. Let’s take a moment and dive into each role and when you might need to call on either in your career/life.

MENTOR

• A good mentor is someone who has done or is doing what you’d like to do and will share with you precisely what THEY did to get there. They may even share with you best practices in the industry with tools and resources to help you move a long faster.
• A mentor will, in essence, say “do what I tell you to do and you’ll have success.”

That is not a good coach.

COACH

1. The answers to life's greatest questions are already deep within you. If you're going after something huge in life, you probably won't know how to do it. So you'll need to dig deep within to find those answers. The “best way” to achieve quantum results in your life are locked up in YOU (not in someone else).
2. A good coach will ask you really thought provoking questions to help you dig deep on your “how.” A good mentor will tell you precisely what they did. A good coach will never tell you what to do. They will simply keep asking questions until you find the answer.

The biggest problem I see in the coaching world is there are too many coaches that aren’t coaching, they’re mentoring. They call themselves “coaches” but haven’t learned the art of helping people dig past their self-limits to find their own answers.

Coaching is an art and skill. It is something that is learned and taught. When determining if you need a coach, it is imperative to understand the difference between a coach and mentor. To determine whether you have a good coach or not, ask for a complimentary session and see how many questions they ask.

Coaching is powerful, if you truly have one in your corner.