Finding clarity in your safe harbour A mentor can add value to you, your career or your business in so many ways.
In this series, we are exploring key ways in which you might want to work with your mentor to make the most of your mentoring relationship. That way you achieve the mentoring success that you want. It shows the value any organisation can gain for their people, profits and priorities through mentoring programmes too.
The area we are discussing today is clarity. When you have clarity through mentoring you will be able to:
- Make great decisions.
- Understand yourself better.
- Be more resilient.
- Build better relationships.
- Be more productive.
A great mentor and a great mentoring programme will help you achieve this through a mixture of support, positive challenge and signposting to help you succeed the way you want to.
So let’s look at clarity some more and I’m going to use the example of water here to hopefully bring the value of mentoring to life for you!
Surfing Waves through Mentoring
You want to get somewhere. You might be looking at career, professional or business success. You are working hard. However, you keep getting knocked back by waves of change or waves of circumstances. These waves can additionally come from within through waves of low confidence, low resilience or even waves of unhelpful thinking patterns and behaviours. A mentor will help you make sense of your setbacks to help you, as a mentee, learn from them and then get to your calm waters again.
Managing Currents through Mentoring
You’re in a situation (business or professional) where there is so much change you’ve lost your direction. You may have even got caught in a rip current taking you far away from where you were, leaving you feeling very tired and confused. A mentor will help you find the clarity of what’s really important to you now your circumstances have changed. You can explore why the change had really unsettled you and strategies for coping with change better next time. A good mentoring programme here will support your mentoring relationship over the longer term. This is to ensure that clarity stays with you through the transition and through to your new circumstances.
Removing Blocks through Mentoring
You’re getting along really well with your goals and have great clarity on them. However, small setbacks are irritating and distracting you. Small blocks or debris bobbing up in the water confuse you. These blocks can then seem much bigger and more important than they really are. That’s where our name ‘Leapfrog Mountain’ came from, as so many clients told us their mentoring or their mentoring programme had made them feel they could leap mountains! A mentor in these circumstances will help you really focus, understand what the blocks really mean to you and help you set the best priorities for you. The mentor will then help you find your tools for you to better manage distractions like this. You, as a mentee, can then achieve calm focussed success.
Managing Storms through Mentoring
If you feel you are in a storm, it’s very likely you are in a stress response. If you’re in this space sadly you are very unlikely to be making the best decisions. A stress response usually diminishes your capability to listen, to understand and to think creatively – all vital to make good decisions. Clarity therefore often gets lost unless you had exceptional clarity to start with over what’s important to you. Mentoring will create a safe space for you to make sense of your priorities. Mentoring will give the perspective on the storm and see it for what it really is – intense maybe but only a passing storm not a permanent state. Mentoring can additionally help highlight there is a stress issue and then a mentor can help by signposting to specialist support.
Seeing Clear Paths through Mentoring
Sometimes we think we know where we are heading and suddenly things just get a bit cloudy for us. That can make us feel lost, confused and tired. This wastes valuable time and energy. It often means we focus on low value tasks just because we feel like at least we are doing something. This strategy is really unhelpful. A mentor will help you find clear water again. Just by investing your time as a mentee in taking that mentoring relationship seriously in itself often gives clarity. Time out is really time invested in, as mentoring gives so much back for results and productivity for mentees.
Finding Your Direction through Mentoring
If you haven’t got clarity over which direction to head in, then a mentor can add real value here for you. A mentor can’t make that decision for you though as it’s you, as a mentee, that needs to decide your way forward. A mentor will help you see the pros and cons of each option. You then jointly explore this and see if your assumptions are valid and the impacts of each of those options. Often by doing this more possibilities become available, as your breadth of thinking is expanded. As a mentee, this will help you gain the clarity to make the right decision for you.
Creating Your Safe Harbour through Mentoring
A great mentor will add amazing value to you, as a mentee, by helping you find your own safe harbour. A safe harbour means you have total clarity on what’s important to you and why. You understand yourself better. You recognise the drivers for your thoughts and behaviours. You manage yourself better to achieve the right outcomes. This is the really valuable space where you develop, through mentoring, the clarity and focus to build on your own definition of success. In other words, you have nailed it!
How We Can Help You
If you want clarity and success for your team, we would love to support your organisation’s mentoring programme plans. We help create, design and deliver mentoring programmes and mentor training solutions.
If you would like us to support your individual mentoring, either as a mentor or mentee, we have flexible leadership and mentoring programme support for you, so please just get in touch.
Happy mentoring! 😊
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