5 Steps to bring out the best in your mentee and yourself

A lot of mentors are focused on the problems. What went wrong and why? Using a Solution Focused Approach means that you as a mentor are aware of the problems and focus on everything that can help to avoid the problems, overcome them or learn how to “live with them”.

You can easily notice the difference in problem focused mentoring and solution focused mentoring.

The keywords are: energy and hope.

How much energy is there to be found in a Mentee when her mentor is mainly discussing all of her shortcomings and failures? Where is the energy to be found when the conversation is about all the things that didn’t work? Most of them don’t need to be pointed out. With what kind of energy and hope will a Mentee make new efforts in trying to make progress towards her goal?

What if you, Mentor and Mentee, had a conversation about everything that did work? (even if they only happened once), what if you talked about it in detail?

A conversation about the resources which are already there will help to achieve your Mentee’s goal. Does your Mentee need to look for energy? Does she possess the hope that her goal can be reached? Does she have a desire to work on her goal and make new efforts?

There is a huge difference between problem focused and solution (strength and resources ) focused mentoring.

In the second case, because you know your Mentee’s goal in detail, you know exactly where to look. You are focused on what each resource feeds you.

You can smell a resource coming from the most unusual place; from miles away; from years ago!

As a Solution Focused Mentor you see opportunities and look for exceptions. You ask about former successes. A beautiful way of enlightening the competence of your Mentee is by asking:

“What would others say that you are good at?” 

Questions about obtaining details about (pre-) successes:

• “What happened?”
• “Were you surprised it happened?”
• “When did it occur?”
• “Where did it happen?”
• “How did it happen?”

Questions about useful qualities contributing to the (pre-) successes:

• “What is it about you that …?”
• “What would others say it is about you that …?”
• “Are there other situations in your life in which this quality has played a role?”

If your Mentee loves to cook, you may hear answers like:

“They would say I’m good at planning, good at finding the most special ingredients, good at using the right amount of ingredients (use my intuition and experience, not just doing what the recipe says), making use of utilities (sometimes in a creative way), I’m very clean and I’m organized.” Etc.

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I am sure you can find useful resources for organisations in all sorts of people: managers, students, artists… Let them tell you more about the detail of “their good planning ability”. More detail about “using their experience”. More detail about “finding special ingredients through alertness and perseverance” Etc.

My eBook introduces you to mentoring cases as well as theory, such as: tasks combined with value, attitude and skills descriptions. It is fun to read and fun to learn from!

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