A therapist will explore what is stopping you driving your car.
A counsellor will listen to your anxieties about the car.
A mentor will share tips from his or her own experience of driving cars. [Emphasis mine - TS]
A consultant will advise you on how to drive the car.
A coach will encourage and support you in driving the car. [Emphasis mine - TS]
- From Excellence in Coaching edited by Jonathan Passmore
I don't remember how the idea to complement my new private business of coaching with mentoring occurred to me for the first time. Unlike coaching, which I studied systematically in three coach training programs, I've never studied mentoring in any formal setting. Actually, I'm not sure if mentoring is a skill one can learn formally unlike coaching. So after reading a few professional books on the theory and practice of mentoring I decided to jump into water. I spent the last four weeks mentoring three volunteers as an experiment. We had agreed to set as the goal finding their respective life missions on the basis of Hasidis life wisdom.
One of the major difficulties I've been experiencing as a new life coach is to resist the temptation of sharing my life experiences with my clients. In mentoring this is not only permissible but even desirable. Of course, this doesn't mean that I don't believe in the power of coaching, but having coached several people, I've also realized that there is a limit to what clients can attain through questions from the coach - they can't make a quantum leap from their present level of consciousness that has produced their problems to a much higher level of consciousness to solve them. In such a situation all they have to do in mentoring is to receive advice from their mentor who has experienced the same or similar problems and solved them.
To make a long story short, I seem to enjoy mentoring much more than coaching. I feel that the shift from teaching to mentoring is much smoother than that from teaching to coaching. After all, I had spent almost 30 years though in academic settings. I also feel that mentoring is more in tune with my personality than coaching.
But just as coaching has its limit, mentoring has its limit, too, though a different one. In order to benefit from mentoring clients must be prepared to understand and absorb what their mentor shares with them. Coaching, or at least the kind of coaching I offer, which is based on the teachings of Hasidism, is an excellent way to prepare them for the kind of mentoring I offer - to make them become aware, probably for the first time in their life, that they are not what they think they are and their life has been controlled by this illusion about themselves.