| Leadership experts including
Peter Senge and Warren Bennis emphasize that you'll benefit
greatly from having a personal vision, what you want to make
of yourself and your world in the next one to five years.
In addition, one of your mentoring tasks is to help your mentees
clarify and implement their visions. This month and next you'll
learn some techniques for doing both.
- Clarify your own vision before helping your mentees
with theirs. Click on Creating or Revising Your Personal
Vision (Tool #1) for the first of two tools you
can use to work on your own vision. Print it out, work on
it in private, and share all or part with persons you trust.
- Use your completed Tool #1 as a specific example to
show your mentees, emphasizing that this is your life,
not theirs. Theirs will look very different. If you feel
comfortable, show a written copy to your mentees.
- Ask your mentees to complete Tool #1 before your
next mentoring sessions with them.
- At those meetings, ask your mentees to describe their
findings, any "Ah-hahs" they've had. Don't discourage
them from their tentative ideas.
- Use the Vision Probing Question: "If you had ______,
what would that bring you?" For example: If you had the
cabin in the mountains, what would that bring you? (Family
could be together, place to write my book, etc.)
- Don't rush your mentees. Take a few sessions to
explore and clarify what's important to them before setting
firm goals.
Important Note: Some mentees will come to you with
specific objectives and want to get right to work on these.
In other words, they won't want to explore personal visions
and long range plans for their lives. If this is the case,
you can certainly begin with the specifics they request. Weeks
or months later, when you've built trust and had a chance
to know them and their strengths, you can invite them to step
back and explore the future and their personal visions. As
a mentor, you have that unique opportunity to help mentees
with their "big picture." |
