Challenging and Confronting others is a difficult skill set that all mentors or supervisors need to have. Even our easiest and most pleasant mentees and supervisees will occasionally need to be challenged and pushed to grow. Some of the people we work with will need us to address many tough issues; confrontation may be a regular part of sessions. Either way, being able to acknowledge and embrace difficult issues within this relationship, and to take personal action, is key to successful transformation. This is exactly what we will be looking at over the next few weeks. This is an opportunity to self-reflect: how do you handle challenging your mentees? How do you prefer to confront supervisees? Are difficult conversations something you feel comfortable with? How do you go about correcting unhealthy behaviours?
Mitigating Psychosocial Hazards Within the Workplace
When working with mentees or supervisees, we often come across the concept of safety: physical, psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual. While there are many ways in which a person’s well-being can be at risk, we are often unaware of them, especially in our workplaces. Psychosocial hazards arise from or relate to the design or management of work or a work …
Three Ways Experience Shapes Our Mentoring Sessions
Every mentor or supervisor uses their own experiences to guide their mentees. It is almost impossible not to use one’s experiences and perspectives during sessions. Here are some to be aware of: Your Experience Mentors and Supervisors often enter into the role because of their personal experience. We have been pastors, coaches, teachers, leaders, and everything we have learned has …
The Key to Sustainability
Do you have a passion for lifting others? Are you a leader in the community, working in a caring profession? Maybe you’re an upcoming mentor or professional supervisor, and Verve Lead wants to help you take the first step! Mentoring and supervising can change your life and others’ lives. Most people in leadership positions struggle with creating a sustainable lifestyle …
How to Offer Constructive Feedback
Providing feedback to a mentee is one of the most crucial skills for a mentor but also one of the most difficult. It can be hard to walk the line between helpful and constructive feedback and pushy and demoralising feedback. The last thing a mentor wants is for his feedback to hurt or discourage his mentee… however, feedback is essential …
Tips and Questions to Hold Mentees accountable to Their Goals
Last week, we looked at what it means to deal with setbacks when attaining goals and how to redirect your mentee on their course of action. We looked at situations that require a mentee to put their goals on hold or change their goals… and how that is okay if the situation requires this. But what if the setback is …
Facing Setbacks With Your Mentee
With every goal and every action plan, there are almost inevitably some setbacks and unforeseen hurdles. Situations change. Attitudes change. Sometimes, these setbacks are severe and require a total recalculation of how to achieve a goal, but often there are creative solutions to work through these hardships. As a mentor, you can help your mentee by exploring new options as …
Celebrating Milestones With Your Mentee
Mentoring always begins with setting short-term and long-term goals for a mentee’s future and centres around achieving these goals over time. While the goals for each mentee will look very different for individuals, one thing is always true; the journey towards success can be long and difficult. There are always hard conversations, stumbling blocks to overcome and disappointments along the …
Three Questions to Set Goals With Your Mentee
We have all spent a session (or many) with our mentee considering their personal and professional goals, and found ourselves worried that these goals aren’t attainable or healthy. It can be harmful and wrong to support our mentees in goals that are not in their best interest or are interfering with a more important objective, but it can be difficult …
Join this Research Project and Make a Meaningful Impact on Christian Leaders’ Health.
My Message Some wonderful news: a research project on Christian Leaders Health is underway. It’s an empirical validation of the health of a Christian Leader assessment tool I developed with Dr Bob Logan and Prof Chuck Riddley. It’s based on Dr Keith Farmers’ 5 core questions. If you are interested in being healthy, take the survey. Also, pass this survey …