Embracing change can be a daunting prospect, even if you are encouraged by your line manager to do so; those first few tremulous steps towards a promotion or new project can be fraught with hesitation and self-doubt. The challenge of finding support from someone within your own institution that is truly a trusted and experienced adviser can be a minefield.
I remember my first mentoring experience was, frankly terrible. If there was a ‘tick-box’ for doing the wrong thing, my mentor ticked ALL those boxes. Push your own agenda, tick! Advise what you should do & tell mentee why their way is wrong, tick! Erode their self-confidence, tick, tick, TICK! At least I can view it as a learning experience as what not to ask for in a mentor! Fortunately, my current mentor doesn’t do ANY of those things – so what does she do? She listens and laughs and asks me what I think. She demonstrates and guides and supports and genuinely makes me feel as if I truly am in charge of my own destiny.
Mentoring is like an art form, it should be fluid yet static – learning takes many different forms and yet the objectives should remain at the heart of it. It should be about empowering someone to have confidence in making their own decisions, being a sounding-board to practice this; and having the skill to flip questions back to the mentee, to let them arrive at their own wisdom in their own time.
I’m incredibly lucky to work for such an empowering organisation that quietly promotes what is embedded in my own heart. PraxisAuril has been running a mentoring programme since mid-January 2018 which was inspired through our merger with AURIL. Sitting neatly underneath the Professional Development banner, we offer to promote, develop and connect our wider KE community in a wonderful way. If you trust us to provide quality training (which we have been doing for the past 15 years) then put your trust in us to deliver a mentoring programme that ticks all the right boxes.
Let us help connect you with the right people with the right experience to support you properly. Drop me an email georgina.wark@praxisauril.org.uk if you’d like to feel, or help people to feel supported, empowered and confident by joining our Mentor Programme.