After attending a recent mentor coffee and listening to the
other mentors discuss their challenges with mentoring, I had a brainstorm that
I immediately shared with Shelley. She asked me to delve a little deeper in
order to share my thoughts in this months’ blog. Enjoy!
In both my personal and professional life, I’ve worked with
personality and strengths-finder testing instruments. I’ve come to understand
that our personalities as mentors and mentees can shape what we expect or want
out of the mentoring relationship. For
example, I suspect that those who want to focus on setting and reaching goals
have a highly “conscientious and scheduling” personality (i.e. goal-oriented),
whereas a person who has “low conscientiousness”, but has a highly “agreeable
and intellectually or artistically inclined personality” style (i.e relational)
will be more interested in understanding, connecting, and learning about the
other person in the relationship. What a mentor defines as a healthy
mentor-mentee relationship may be different from how the mentee defines it
based on their different personality types. Mentors and mentees may want to
learn about each other’s personalities to reach a deeper level of understanding.
Some of the following ideas illustrate this point.
·
“People don’t care what you know until they know
that you care.” –John Maxwell. As
mentors, we know it’s important to build trust in the relationship. For some
people, trust comes from getting to know the other person as a friend, and for
other people trust comes from staying true to your commitments: we don’t know
how the other person views trust or the mentor-mentee relationship until the
relationship unfolds.
·
Mentorship doesn’t always come in a formal goal
setting environment. When I transitioned from growing up in a poor neighborhood
to going to college working as a research assistant at a university, I learned
a lot of things about life, culture, and society just by hanging out and
talking with co-workers. Simply spending time with these individuals helped me
to grow and transition.
·
Research shows that having a good and positive
relationship with someone can dramatically boost our mood and self-esteem (personalityresearch.org).
It has also become apparent that when a
person gets lifted out of generational poverty, they almost always have a key
person in their life who encouraged them (Devol, Payne, & Dressui Smith,
2006).
·
When mentors and mentees understand each other and
communicate, they will discover what the other person thinks the relationship
should look like. But, it is important for people who have a
"goal-setting" personality to realize that even when a session doesn’t
involve the exact discussion of goals, as a mentor you may be helping the mentee
more than you realize by just being a listening friend. You are learning valuable mentoring lessons from
each other just by observing and learning by example from the behaviors,
language and world-view of the other person during casual friendship
conversations.
Patrick Monahan is an
Associate Professor at Indiana University and is a Trusted Mentor.
http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/clark.htmlDevol, P., Payne, R. and Dreussi Smith, T. (2006) Bridges out of Poverty: Strategies for Professionals and Communities. USA: aha! Process, Inc.
