Having the humility to put down our own agendas for the good of our mentee is vitally important in successful mentoring. It’s all too easy to slip into planning-based mentoring based around how we think mentees should change. Sometimes we end up trying too hard to lead them to learning points we think they should arrive at, channelling them in certain directions that reflect out agenda …or worse, our (often unconscious) personal biases. To what extent do you allow your mentee to set the pace, depth, direction and content of the relationship? If they don’t feel ownership over where it is all headed they might emotionally opt out.
Mentoring is less about driving the oars and more about steering the rudder: less a sat nav, more a compass. Christian mentoring is about listening to the Holy Spirit and listening to every form of communication coming from your mentee. How well do you ‘listen’ to your own mentoring? How well do you flex your ‘self-awareness’ muscles in what you guide and influence your mentee with and what you are offering them? There are at least three levels to listening skills:
- Basic listening: you hear what is said and react to it. You are thinking about your own response and may even lose track of what they are saying as you think about what is coming next.
- Developed listening: when you focus on not only what they say, but also why they are saying it - questioning the context and motivations around what your mentee is saying, using that to deepen the mentees own understanding as well as your own.
- ‘360 degree listening’, is reading between the lines of what they really might be getting at, listening to their body language, intonation and what they are not saying…
I would also add ‘spiritual listening’: hearing God for that person - both in the moment, and also praying for them separately and feeding back prophetically. Try these exercises:
- Immediately after the session, on your own, reflect for a few minutes and write down three things your mentee ‘communicated’ but didn’t actually say.
- Challenge yourself to not formulate any comment or response until your mentee has finished speaking for an entire session.
- Before you respond to something your mentee has said, try paraphrasing it and repeating it back to them.
- During the session try to internally step back from the conversation and become aware of what God might be saying in that moment - where he might want the conversation to go or wider spiritual needs in that relationship. Give God the opportunity to use and speak through you more.
