MENTOR-COACHING TOOLKIT

As part of the Mentor-Coaching Institute training, we provide tools to help establish the mentor-coaching relationship, navigate the mentor-coaching conversations, and support mentees in their journey of growth and transformational change. There are 17 tools divided into 3 major categories:

1. Beginning the Mentor-Coaching Process
   In your initial conversations with the mentee, use these tools to help establish a strong learning relationship and framework for the mentor-coaching process.
2. Navigating One Conversation at a Time
   Each mentor-coaching conversation is inquiry-based and involves expanding awareness and possibilities as well as designing intentional action regarding the agenda identified by the mentee. These tools can help support the conversation.
3. Supporting the Mentee in Building Capacity
   These tools help you to extend the depth and breadth of key components of the capacity-building process.

1. The Mentor-Coaching Approach for Building Capacity: An Overview

Find a distillation of the mentor-coaching frame, process, and relationship to share with the mentee and to provide clarity regarding the orientation and intentionality of the learning partnership. 2 pages.

2. Areas of Focus for the Mentee’s Learning Journey: Attention and Intention

This worksheet supports you and the mentee in working together to clarify areas of focus for the mentor-coaching process (desired change, learning, growth). 2 pages.

3. Spotlight on the Mentee as Learner

Read initial questions that invite the mentee to explore their experience and understanding of themselves as a learner. 1 page.

4. Learning Goals and Intention-Setting Worksheet

Use this worksheet to support an initial discussion with the mentee regarding his or her long-term learning intentions and goals. 5 pages.

5. Mentor-Coaching: Inquiry-Based Conversations

We provide a diagram (adapted from Gallwey, 2000) to share with the mentee what happens when powerful questions sit at the centre of each mentor-coaching conversation. 4 pages.

6. Attunements: Starting by Stopping

Providing an attunement at the beginning of each conversation helps to support you and the mentee in being fully present and on purpose regarding the relationship, the conversation, and the ongoing focus on learning and growth. 2 pages.

7. Navigating the Mentor-Coaching Conversation

This digital version of the model for navigating the mentor-coaching conversation can be shared with the mentee so they become of aware of layers of a conversation and the key words that outline them. The tool includes key questions for each layer.

For course participants only. For more information on obtaining Tool #7, contact us at: info@mentor-coachinginstitute.com

8. Agenda-Setting Worksheet

This worksheet helps you and the mentee to define the territory of the conversation. 2 pages.

9. Completing the Conversation

Each conversation has a specific focus and intention, and evolves through new awareness and putting possibilities into action. This tool helps you to close the conversation in an honouring and purposeful way. 2 pages.

10. Enhancing Performance

This tool provides a series of questions and strategies that can help the mentee maximize performance. Use it with the mentee early on, in support of learning and growth, as well as when interference compromises the mentee’s potential and performance. You can also use it to maximize your own performance. 4 pages.

11. Life-Sustaining Metaphors

This exercise invites you and the mentee to remember and share metaphors that have sustained you on life’s journeys. Together, explore the symbolic nature, power, and impact of the metaphors and how they can help us understand complex experiences, feelings, challenges, and behaviours. 2 pages.

12. Four Steps for Taming the Inner Critic and Recruiting the Inner Ally

The nature and persistence of internal conversations, showing up either as interference or support, is a vital area in working with the mentee. This tool outlines a process that can help mentees manage their inner critic and recruit their inner ally. The process builds the mentees’ capacities to 1) identify, 2) recall, 3) notice, and 4) choose which internal voices they will listen to. 2 pages.

13. Recruiting the Storyteller: Old Stories, New Stories

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves have a profound influence on how we see ourselves and how we show up in the world. Use this exercise to invite the mentee to notice the stories they are telling and to support them in expanding their awareness of the impact the stories have on themselves, the learning journey, and their life. 3 pages.

14. Awareness of Strengths and Gifts

It is important to find ways to support the mentee in identifying and embracing their core strengths. This tool provides a series of questions and a link to the VIA Institute on Character Strengths survey—a free, scientifically validated, online survey to identify character strengths and gifts. 2 pages.

15. Clarifying Our Values

It is important to find ways to support the mentee in identifying and embracing their core strengths. This tool provides a series of questions and a link to the VIA Institute on Character Strengths survey—a free, scientifically validated, online survey to identify character strengths and gifts. 4 pages.

16. Exploring Vision and Purpose

This tool invites the mentee to create a vision or purpose board using images, words, colours, card decks, drawings, objects, or metaphors. (It is important that the mentee choose the modalities that resonate most for them.) Clearly articulating and creating a visual representation of personal purpose or vision helps to deepen determination and resolve—key resources for change or growth. 2 pages.

17. Mindset: Noticing and Choosing

Our view of our own potential, possibilities, strengths, limitations, successes, and failures frames all that we see and do. In this tool, two sets of questions help to uncover the mindset that the mentee is operating from as leader or learner and its impact on him or her and the situation at hand. 4 pages.

18. Offering and Receiving Feedback

Hattie and Timperley (2007) suggest that effective feedback for learners must answer the following three major questions in a holistic manner:

• “Feed up: Where am I going?”
• “Feed back: How am I going?”
• “Feed forward: Where to next?”

This tool serves as a simple frame for those questions. 1 page.