A Guide to Coaching and Mentoring
What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
This is such a good question. Both are important but they are very different and each does a specific job.
If you were to think of people in your life who have been great mentors to you, you will probably picture people more experienced and perhaps older than you, People you look up to. People who are currently living the life that you want to lead or working in the positions that you aspire to be working in yourself.
Mentors are wonderful at giving us signposts and a step up to where we want to be. We can learn from their own journeys and use their knowledge to help shape our own. We can learn from their wisdom, the mistakes that they made, and the decisions which shaped them, to inform us when taking the next step in our own life or career journey.
Mentors are there to ask questions and to give suggestions. We can learn from the advice they give and apply it to our own lives. They are forward facing and help us in our quest to be better. Their experiences and their suggestions are useful when we don’t have the answers ourselves.
While mentors may ask questions and unleash some realisations in you, the basic assumption is that you are there to learn from them. Mentoring is incredibly helpful, but it only goes so far, because we are not the same person as our mentor. We have different personalities, strengths, values, experiences, connections, qualifications and opportunities. Having a mentor is incredibly useful, but it will only get you so far.
Coaching is completely different. With a coach, you are there to learn more about yourself. You will consider your strengths, values, weaknesses, assumptions and will learn where you can be your own biggest advocate and where you might be getting in your own way.
A coach is not judgemental and they do not lead, advise, suggest or share their own experience. Instead, they are curious and they listen, notice, reflect and ask. In coaching it is the thinker who does the work. There is a lot of silence in a coaching conversation. It can feel uncomfortable. This is where the stretch is, where the work is being done, where the learning takes place.
The assumption is that it is the thinker, the coachee, who holds the knowledge and the answers. A coach’s role is to support the thinker in unlocking new thinking, creating awareness of the situation and building self-awareness so that the thinker can create new possibilities.
Both mentoring and coaching are about self improvement but they are to be used for different reasons.
Possible reasons to speak with a mentor
To find out how to take the next step
To consider which routes are open to you
To understand what steps they took and what your next steps could be
To learn from their experiences, successes and mistakes
To garner their advice on what you could do
Possible reasons to work with a coach:
To learn what is really important to you
To develop empathy and different perspectives
To question your assumptions and biases
To see life in a different way
To create and evaluate new solutions
We all need coaches and mentors, but for different scenarios, at different times on our journeys. So a question for you to consider: which would be more useful to you right now?
