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Get mentoring support online or in-person
It's difficult to see the complete picture when you're inside the frame. Sometimes, the hardest thing to do is to choose what really matters. Mentoring provides increased objectivity, enhanced self-perception, clearer insights, self-understanding, and sound frameworks for methodical self-development.
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What mentoring is
Mentoring is confidential personalised support from an experienced and trustworthy adviser, guide or tutor, especially for methodical self-development. Usually, a mentor is someone outside of your organisation, unit or team and chosen by you.
A mentor clarifies and gently challenges, offers oversight, insight and expertise, provides conceptual frameworks, feedback, progress monitoring, opportunities to enhance your professional or personal growth, and supportive follow-up.
The mentoring process helps you reflect on and learn from your current real-life experiences to gain real-life realisations. Its focus is your needs, issues, challenges, hopes and dreams, development goals and plans. You decide what is to be addressed, and when.
Coaching is a similar process. When provided from within an organisation, the coach is most often appointed rather than chosen.
Open online discussion with Tom Watkins.
Mentoring for personal development
Distinctions between what is "work" and what is "personal" often blur, in mentoring. Whether for personal or professional development, mentoring can help you:
- See what you may not yet see about yourself
- Better understand your own functioning and avoid or limit self-defeating patterns
- Become more self-directed and actively engaged in your own development
- Clarify and reactivate your sense of purpose
- Learn to collaborate over problems and challenges, to find creative solutions
- Increase your resilience to stress, setbacks and adversity
- Make constructive choices that work well for you
- Find ways to work smarter, not harder
- Celebrate personal progress - especially the stuff not usually seen and acknowledged
- Understand the connection between your thinking, feelings, behaviours and their effects
- Develop your existing competencies and transfer new learning into your everyday life
- Release more of your potential for work, colleagueship, management, leadership, and for enjoying friendships and other personal relationships
- Find support for your progress plans.
Open online discussion with Tom Watkins.
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Mentoring for work-related development
Mentoring for work-related development is designed to:
- Get the job done better
- Increase the organisation's capacity for its primary task
- Grow people, by putting as its focus the development of the individual for these purposes.
When chosen as a key strategy of organisation development, mentoring can develop people who:
- Work to increased challenge, capacity and personal authority
- Are inner-directed and take increased initiative in their roles and with their own work
- Self-monitor their immediate work, performance and long-term plans
- Experience work and the workplace as contributing directly to their personal and professional development aspirations
These effects lead to reductions in pressure on managers, which in turn releases more of the organisation's capacity and energy for the strategic purpose.
For a discussion of surprising research outcomes into the return on investment of executive mentoring, see this Metrix Global case study.
How and where mentoring happens
We specialise in providing our services online via email, internet-based documents and voice contact. Long-distance phone charges can sometimes be avoided by accessing Skype, a free internet-based voice contact programme.
Mentoring by telephone or via Skype involves scheduled discussions over whatever period of time is convenient and affordable.
In-person mentoring is provided by arrangement within New Zealand. Appointments are usually of 90 - 120 minutes duration.
Open online discussion with Tom Watkins.
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The focus of mentoring
We start with whatever are your presenting issues: the need for routine maintenance, determination to improve, a clearly-defined challenge, a troublesome crisis, vague sense of unease or that "things could be better". We may advise the use of our assessment and appraisal processes to establish fundamental reference-points for monitoring progress and evaluating results. We help you locate whatever are the 20% of causes generating 80% of the challenges you face.
Throughout this we encourage a parallel focus on successes and strengths, both as a source of inspiration for addressing current or future challenges and to help you keep a balanced perspective.
We help you monitor progress at regular intervals.
Open online discussion with Tom Watkins.
How much mentoring is necessary?
This depends on your needs and is a matter for your decision. We will make clear recommendations.
You are not required to commit yourself to any number of sessions or to any length of session and may stop the process at any point without penalty.
Face-to-face appointments in person usually last 90 minutes. Sometimes 6 - 10 or more sessions distributed over 12 months are advisable. Often, much can be achieved in less.
Online mentoring involves email correspondence and the exchange of e-documents at your own convenience, over whatever period of time is convenient and affordable.
In certain circumstances fees may be charged if you cancel firm arrangements at short notice.
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Mentoring outcomes
Mentoring processes can break the isolation associated with many social and workplace roles, in which asking for help may be seen as a sign of weakness or incompetence. They can also help you maintain focus and progress when necessary support is not sufficiently available from your colleagues, leaders, managers or from within personal relationships. Mentoring can do much to alleviate the following common experiences:
- Recurring, unsolved problems
- High levels of unhealthy stress
- Group, individual or team dysfunction and under-performance
- Unproductive busy-ness, unfocused anxiety, constant dissatisfaction with progress
- Being over-burdened with (often conflicting) urgent priorities
- Low tolerance for change, stress or adversity
- Lack of balance between work and other aspects of life
- A sense of purposelessness, wasted potential or of being undervalued
- Anxiety about speaking your own truth or revealing your true self
- Fear of failure and tendencies to be immobilised by perfectionism
- Defensiveness or despondency when given negative feedback or when events don't work out as planned
- Organisational and interpersonal bullying or disregard for human needs
- Difficulty in aligning values, thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
Open online discussion with Tom Watkins.
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Mentoring fees
Time is purchased in advance (2 hours minimum) at our very reasonable hourly rate.
We keep accurate records and you will be charged for mentoring and any agreed follow-up at our very reasonable hourly rates. Any unused time paid in advance is refunded promptly or credited, if you wish, to your account.
Open online discussion with Tom Watkins.
Mentor responsibilities
It is the responsibility of the mentor to:
- Work with you to create a safe and productive working alliance in your best interests
- Hear, understand and encourage clear expression of your needs, concerns, aspirations and opportunities for improvement
- Ask searching questions and provide reflective feedback
- Introduce frameworks to provide structure to your insights, changes and progress
- Enhance your learning from everyday experiences
- Model effective strategies for problem solving, planning, and professional development
- Encourage you to take self-responsibility for making progress
- Help you recognise your own values and development path, act within them and get back on track if you have diverted
- Encourage self-evaluation and celebration of progress
- Respect confidences.
Successful mentoring requires frankness, openness and trust. The skill, impartiality and objectivity of the mentor and the safety of the mentoring relationship are pivotal.
Because confidentiality plays an important role in successful mentoring, we offer a variety of routes to enhance your privacy and security.
Open online discussion with Tom Watkins.
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Client responsibilities
Responsibility for creating and managing the working alliance is shared by both parties. As a mentoring client, it is your responsibility to:
- Prepare yourself for the mentoring session
- Collaborate with the mentor to create an effective working alliance
- Provide the mentor with accurate and complete information about your personal details and situation. See also terms and conditions
- Be open to giving feedback about the sessions, to ensure they work for you
- Be open to new learning
- Carry out commitments made and keep track of your own goals and progress
- Honour agreements made concerning appointments, payment, time-frames and copyrighted materials supplied.
Open online discussion with Tom Watkins.
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