The Ching on Mentoring

30 The Clinging, Fire
Guiding, Directing (an Ideology)
From guidance comes direction






Today's I Ching fling swing with added interpretation: "LI : glowing light, spreading in all directions; light-giving, discriminating, articulating; divide and arrange in order; the power of consciousness. The ideogram: bird and weird, the magical fire-bird with brilliant plumage."

From guidance comes direction
This is what one looks for in a mentoring relationship - "guidance" - the sage advice from a veteran, a fillip of insider info, a dash of mystery so that the mentee can proceed with her own decision, just enough withheld to make the mentee's own knowledge, experience, gut the motivating cause.

Guidance is soaked in an alchemy of the subjective and objective. It's that "glowing light." It proceeds from the mentor's wealth, her possession of data and circumference, the holistic eye that is both shrewd and compassionate. It cancels out self interest and focuses on the mentee's best interest. It is "discriminating." It acts to arrange, to suggest best arrangements in light of the mentee's capacity, drive and most importantly, desires.

A relationship means reciprocity. So what obligations fall on the mentee?

The mentee is charged with claiming a need, asking for guidance, billeting her deficits, showing her strengths. She presents herself to the mentor in a revelatory series of moments, tears away facade and lets go of dissembling. This kind of exposure reveals more than the cold stuff: intellect and achievement and bluster. It slips away from hierarchal taboos. This revelation defeats shame and can only occur when the mentor accepts the whole person.

The mentor cannot guide without first having an inclusive understanding of her mentee. She can't guide without a goodwill investment. She can't guide without a load of accurately targeted insight. She can't guide without the mentee's revelatory information. She can't divine a direction if the mentee does not paint a map of her ambition.

The mentee's responsibility is akin to taking the first step off a cliff and hoping the next step or the one after or the one after, will land her on fertile ground. She takes that first step when she chooses to trust her mentor. As a mentee, she is obligated to peel away the blemishes and embarrassment, and to shine a light on her accomplishments.

Is this an inherently one-sided relationship while presenting itself as mutual? Both parties give and receive. And yet, in her delivery, the mentee becomes an open chest - all the soiled and sacred, the queasy and the quests - are presented to the mentor in a gift of unilateral proportion. Does the mentor deliver the same to her mentee? Of course not! To be human is to be fallible. And to be a mentor requires a persona of infallibility, a quantity and quality of wealth that the mentee presumably does not possess. Or has not actuated. To be a mentor also demands a certain aloofness. That separation is what sustains the mentee's trust in her mentor's aura of superiority: a superiority in skills and wisdom rather than in any other human trait.

But that trust is where the mentoring relationship exhibits one-sidedness.

Here are a few definitions for "trust":

1. [n] the trait of trusting; of believing in the honesty and reliability of others.
2. [n] complete confidence in a person or plan etc.
3. [v] allow without fear

Notice how trust, whether a noun or verb, is predicated on such absolutes. The mentee must have "complete confidence" in the mentor. "Honesty" is essential. Again, in extending trust, the mentee takes the precarious step into the void. That step will find either solid ground or a steep fall. One step is not enough though. Trust derives from a succession of steps, a repeatable experience in the honesty and reliability of the mentor.

The mentor doesn't engage in trust so much as in presenting herself as trustworthy.

Yet, how is that proven? Especially how is that demonstrated to a mentee whose nature turns on the opposite edges of faith and doubt? There has to be a composition, a tangible piece of craftwork that turns visions into substance. It could be as simple as a plan, an outline of objectives, something that demonstrates continuity and progression. This is not about assuaging the fear of the mentee - well yes it is - but by using practical tools. The visible beats out the assumed. Monsters are put to sleep not with prayers but by the conclusive fable, with the finality of the nursery rhyme. Prayers are another form of trust. They do not prove reliability.

At what point does this mentoring relationship conclude?

It can last for years, building and evolving into transformations. It can last up to the moment of an achieved objective. It can disintegrate when reciprocity disappears. It goes away when the mentor loses faith or the mentee loses trust.

A mentoring relationship with vitality is a protracted blend of the amorphous and the perceivable.