Looking for a Mentor?

I recently finished a course at Fuller on mentoring.  Before this course when it came to mentoring, I often felt like a fish removed from water.  Like many friends and acquaintances, I was looking for a mentor.  That ideal person that could mentor me on multiple levels and issues.  From whom I could glean life lessons and wisdom and slowly be shaped and grown.  The problem was these types of mentors are far and few between.  Those that find them (or are found by them) truly have a jewel, but what about the rest of us? 

            That is the question that I was asking in my search for a mentor when I picked up the first text for my class, Connecting: the Mentoring Relationships You Need to Succeed in Life, by Paul Stanley and Robert Clinton.  What I discovered in this book as well as in the other materials in the class was a broadened understanding of mentoring.  I also realized that there were mentors all around that if I just intentionally saw conversations with these people as mentoring opportunities, my desire for mentoring would be more than filled.  

            In Connecting, Clinton and Stanley define mentoring as a relational experience in which the mentor empowers the mentoree by a transfer of resources.  Empowerment may include such things as new habits, knowledge, skills, desires, values, connections to resources for growth and development of potential.  However, it is Clinton’s breakdown of mentors into nine types that really affected my understanding and broadened my perspective.  Clinton’s nine mentor types are:

·         Discipler

·         Spiritual Guide

·         Coach

·         Counselor

·         Teacher

·         Sponsor

·         Contemporary Model

·         Historical Model

·         Divine Contact

By breaking down my perception of the “ideal mentor” into nine mentor types, Clinton helped me see the mentors around me.  I realized that I have friends and co-workers that are coaches, teachers, contemporary models, sponsors.  I also realized where my giftedness fell as a mentor.  I found myself in conversations acting as a coach, teacher, counselor, and spiritual guide.  Reading took new meaning also.  As I read books by Newbigin, Merton, Bosch, I realized that I was being mentored.  It became very clear what type of mentoring I was missing and was able to intentionally search for that type of mentoring in a way that I had never been able to before.

This new perspective on mentoring that Clinton had introduced me to combined with a model that Stanley developed called the “Constellation model”, helped me quickly evaluate where I was in terms of mentoring currently, reflect on my past in light of the new information I was learning, and project for the future.  Stanley writes that four kinds of mentoring relationships need to be present over a lifetime:

• Upward Help: leaders more experienced in life that help grow, give needed perspective, as well as help the mentored be accountable for growth.
• Lateral Help (External & Internal): peers that share, care, and relate
• Downward Help: emerging leaders who he/she can mentor

 

Clinton and Stanley write that upward mentors offer strategic accountability and perspective to a relationship.  Internal peer mentoring is a mentoring relationship with someone in the same organization or someone coming from the same background as you.  External peer mentoring is a relationship with some one from a very different background and ministry experience.  This mentoring relationship can bring objectivity.  Downward mentoring are the people that you are intentionally mentoring out of your giftedness. 

Each of the nine mentoring types can fit into any of the quadrants of Stanley’s Constellation Model.  A person will not necessarily have mentoring relationships in all the quadrants at once, and mentoring relationships that fill the four quadrants are usually limited in time and not permanent.  They happen, meet a need, and then end after the empowerment.  However, over a lifetime mentoring in each of the quadrants brings balance.

            Are you looking for a mentor?  I was and then I realized that God had blessed me with more than just one mentor.  The mentors that I need are all around, sure, there are some that I have to specifically seek out, but most I have contact with each week.  The richness of these relationships has taken new meaning as my understanding of mentoring has broadened.  Clinton and Stanley set out to teach me about mentoring, and succeeded, but in the process, they also taught me about community and the rich dynamic of relationship.  

P.S. A great book on Spiritual Mentoring is: Spiritual Mentoring: A Guide for Seeking and Giving Direction