by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Aug 4, 2015 | Facilitating Learning, Making Mentoring Work For You, Mentoring Communication, Mentoring Relationships
“A story is the shortest distance between two people.”
— Pat Speith
Sharing personal stories, successes and challenges serves multiple purposes in a mentoring relationship.
- Stories build trust, keep a mentoring relationship real, create a comfort level, and give your mentee “permission” to share their own.
Hearing stories about your career and personal challenges provides a powerful impetus for mentees to take action.
- Your setbacks remind them that successful people do face and overcome roadblocks.
By sharing strategies for solving problems and dealing with adversity your mentee learns from your experience.
- According to psychologist Uri Hasson, “Anything you’ve experienced, you can get others to experience the same.” People accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode.
Telling your stories and sharing your learning demonstrates openness and respect, and builds trust.
- It creates points of connection, a shared language, and grist for ongoing conversation.
Your story motivates mentee self-reflection.
- It activates their brain cells, stimulates critical and creative thinking, and increases their self-awareness.
So, what is your story?
How can you tell it in such a way that it invites conversation, reflection and learning?
Encourage your mentees to share their stories by:
1. Sharing yours
2. Thinking, in advance, about what you really want to know about them
3. Asking specific questions to encourage them to reflect on their career path, specific experiences, previous successes, and work projects
4. Listening closely to what they say, how they say it, and the words they use to describe their experiences
5. Asking probing questions to encourage them to reflect on the lessons they have learned from their stories
by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Jun 10, 2014 | Mentoring Communication
In a recent survey conducted through our Center for Mentoring Excellence, listening emerged as the top mentoring best practice. Readers of our monthly e-letter, Mentoring Matters, also identified listening as the #1 attribute of a good mentor.
Here’s what they told us about listening:
- Listening at all levels is the most important thing that I do.
- Listening to others and helping them find their own way.
- Listen with an open mind without being judgmental.
- Truly listen so assumptions are not being made.
- Listen fully and carefully before offering your advice or opinion.
- Spend more time listening than talking.
- Listening and questioning to help my mentee reach their solutions.
- Be authentic, be warm, be honest and be an engaged listener.
- Mentors should know themselves well enough to know when their personal strengths or biases cloud the way they listen to and encourage/advise their mentee.
- Hear what is said in between the message, not just listening to what is said.
- Read, observe, listen and ask lots of questions
There is a clear message here about the importance of listening.
Listening serves many purposes in addition to letting mentees know that you care. Listening builds mentee confidence. It lets mentees know they have something meaningful to contribute. Listening encourages them to work out their thinking. Invariably, they arrive at a solution on their own. Mentors often discover that the listening skills they develop through mentoring transfers to other functions, boosting their effectiveness in their other leadership roles.
What can you do to improve your skill at listening?
- Identify the good listeners you know.
- What do they do that shows they are listening?
Make a list of those behaviors and then gauge how you measure up. - What do you need to do more of?
- What do you need to do less of?
- What is one thing you can work on right now that will help you develop and hone your listening skills?
by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Dec 8, 2010 | Mentoring Communication
It is a mentor’s artful balance between support and challenge that creates the momentum that enables the mentees to make significant progress toward achieving his or her goals. (more…)
