Find tools and a video to help you establish the mentor-coaching relationship, navigate mentor-coaching conversations, and support mentees in their journey of growth and transformational change.
Online Tools for Movement and Growth
There are 17 tools divided into three major categories. Select a category to navigate to that section.
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Beginning the Mentor-Coaching Process
In your initial conversations with the mentee, use these tools to help establish a strong learning relationship and framework for the mentor-coaching process.
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Navigating One Conversation at a Time
Each mentor-coaching conversation is inquiry-based and involves expanding awareness and possibilities as well as designing intentional action regarding the agenda identified by the mentee. These tools can help support the conversation.
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Supporting the Mentee in Building Capacity
These tools help you to extend the depth and breadth of key components of the capacity-building process.
Beginning the Mentor-Coaching Process
1: The Mentor-Coaching Approach for Building Capacity: An Overview
Find a distillation of the mentor-coaching frame, process, and relationship to share with the mentee and to provide clarity regarding the orientation and intentionality of the learning partnership.
Download2: Areas of Focus for the Mentee’s Learning Journey: Attention and Intention
This worksheet supports you and the mentee in working together to clarify areas of focus for the mentor-coaching process (desired change, learning, growth).
Download3: Spotlight on the Mentee as Learner
Read initial questions that invite the mentee to explore their experience and understanding of themselves as a learner.
Download4: Learning Goals and Intention-Setting Worksheet
Use this worksheet to support an initial discussion with the mentee regarding his or her long-term learning intentions and goals.
DownloadSupporting the Mentee in Building Capacity
A. Maximizing Potential; Minimizing Interference
10: Enhancing Performance
This tool provides a series of questions and strategies that can help the mentee maximize performance. Use it with the mentee early on, in support of learning and growth, as well as when interference compromises the mentee’s potential and performance. You can also use it to maximize your own performance.
Download11: Life-Sustaining Metaphors
This exercise invites you and the mentee to remember and share metaphors that have sustained you on life’s journeys. Together, explore the symbolic nature, power, and impact of the metaphors and how they can help us understand complex experiences, feelings, challenges, and behaviours.
Download12: Four Steps for Taming the Inner Critic and Recruiting the Inner Ally
The nature and persistence of internal conversations, showing up either as interference or support, is a vital area in working with the mentee. This tool outlines a process that can help mentees manage their inner critic and recruit their inner ally. The process builds the mentees’ capacities to 1) identify, 2) recall, 3) notice, and 4) choose which internal voices they will listen to.
Download13: Recruiting the Storyteller: Old Stories, New Stories
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves have a profound influence on how we see ourselves and how we show up in the world. Use this exercise to invite the mentee to notice the stories they are telling and to support them in expanding their awareness of the impact the stories have on themselves, the learning journey, and their life.
DownloadB. New Awareness and Clarity Regarding Strengths, Gifts, Values, Purpose, Vision, and Mindset
14: Awareness of Strengths and Gifts
It is important to find ways to support the mentee in identifying and embracing their core strengths. This tool provides a series of questions and a link to the VIA Institute on Character Strengths survey—a free, scientifically validated, online survey to identify character strengths and gifts.
Download15: Clarifying Our Values
Try this exercise early on with the mentee. Becoming clear about what they value helps the mentee to better understand themselves and creates meaningful synergy between personal and collective or organizational values.
Download16: Exploring Vision and Purpose
This tool invites the mentee to create a vision or purpose board using images, words, colours, card decks, drawings, objects, or metaphors. (It is important that the mentee choose the modalities that resonate most for them.) Clearly articulating and creating a visual representation of personal purpose or vision helps to deepen determination and resolve—key resources for change or growth.
Download17: Mindset: Noticing and Choosing
Our view of our own potential, possibilities, strengths, limitations, successes, and failures frames all that we see and do. In this tool, two sets of questions help to uncover the mindset that the mentee is operating from as leader or learner and its impact on him or her and the situation at hand.
DownloadC. Feedback: Self and Others
18: Offering and Receiving Feedback
Hattie and Timperley (2007) suggest that effective feedback for learners must answer the following three major questions in a holistic manner:
- “Feed up: Where am I going?”
- “Feed back: How am I going?”
- “Feed forward: Where to next?”
This tool serves as a simple frame for those questions.
Download19: Scaling: Self-Calibration PREMIUM
(For course participants only) This activity provides the mentee with an opportunity to assess their perceived level of competence or learning and growth. Before the mentee does this internal assessment, it is important to help them remember that it is not how they think others might perceive them, but rather how they perceive their own competence.
Mentor-Coaching Conversation Demonstration
What does a mentor-coaching conversation look like and sound like? In this video, authors Kate Sharpe and Jeanie Nishimura provide a demonstration. Watch how Jeanie inhabits the mentor-coach stance to hold the space for Kate, the mentee, to do the work.
Transcript