Coaching and mentoring are important aspects of personal and professional development. Working with a mentor or coach can provide you with the opportunity to explore topics to enhance your personal effectiveness and career progression.
Coaching is a series of purposeful conversations that unlocks a person’s ‘potential to maximise their own performance’ (John Whitmore, 2003). It helps individuals learn and grow through a collaborative, solution focused, result-orientated process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of work performance, life experience and self-directed learning. Coaching therefore is goal orientated. There is an assumption that the individual already know the answer, but might need to hear the question differently.
Mentoring is ‘traditionally’ a relationship that has a focus on the extensive experience or expertise of the mentor. The expectation is that the knowledge and influence of the mentor will assist the mentee in achieving their objectives (these could be personal or task orientated). There are many different types of mentoring relationships, such as, peer-to-peer, reciprocal and reverse, or group. But they all involve some kind of knowledge exchange.
