Mentoring

#womeninconstruction

Oft, we confuse the terms of mentoring and teaching. I look at it this way. There is the help desk, where it is a quick burst of sudden knowledge passing from one to the other. The information is starkly colored, black and white.

Then there’s teaching and or training, or whatever you want to call it. This is the long, winded monologue designed (with a power point) to explain plainly the black and the white of things. The receiver goes and grabs a cup of joe and a blanket to arm themselves for the lecture to begin. In the end, the teacher expects the trainee to have brain muscle memory of whatever they just spent the last hour discussing. Only to use it, making one accountable for the learning that did or didn’t take place. 

And my favorite; Mentoring. Think Jedi Master and a Padawan, a veteran who knows the way around the galaxy and the force and a youngling who has passed the required training but is still trying to sort out that “gray” area of application. It’s Socratic in nature, because at this point the Padawan is doing most of the reasoning and thinking. They answer the Why, the When, the How and the What if’s. 

The mentor relationship expounds on the emotional intelligence that inherently resides within us all. The Jedi Master doesn’t necessarily tell you how to do it directly, but guides and inspires you to do the right thing for the right reason based on similar values you both share. They narrow the tunnel of the goal focus and illuminate the key points to grasp. Still it’s structured like teaching and it allows the Padawan to be the master of their own destiny - so it’s easy to intertwine the two. The personal approach of mentoring establishes trust and an enduring positive benefit that neither one never forgets.