I spent an hour with the UNBOUND mentees at the halfway point of the programme, and I came out of it with a very clear view of what is working and what is about to get in the way.
Here is the short version. The relationships are good. Better than good, in most cases. What is missing is the shift from feeling better to doing something differently, and that shift will not happen on its own. It happens because you make it happen in the weeks you have left.
I have written this for anyone who is halfway through a mentoring relationship and can feel that they are getting something out of it but could not quite tell you what. There are five exercises in here. None of them takes longer than half an hour, and every one of them came out of something a mentee or a mentor actually did.
Your biggest problem is probably the diary, not the relationship
I asked everyone to describe mentoring in one word. I got clarity, reflection, insightful, informative, knowledge sharing, inspiring, and my personal favourite, “a good sat nav”. I also got challenging, twice.
Both people who said challenging meant the same thing, and it was not what I expected. Neither was talking about being stretched. They were talking about the difficulty of getting an hour in a diary. One pairing had managed a single meeting. The mentor had been unwell. Another mentee’s mentor had her email hacked, and the follow-up quietly disappeared.
When I asked the mentors the same week what could be better, one person raised one thing, and it was diary management.
So let us be honest about where the real friction sits. It is not chemistry. It is logistics, and logistics are fixable.
Two things I would say about that:
- Your mentor is hard to pin down because they are senior and busy, which is the same reason they are useful to you. The thing that makes them valuable is the thing that makes them slow.
- Chasing them is your job, not theirs. Nobody is going to run after you and wrap you in a blanket.
I called this gentle coercion in the session, and I stand by it. Here is roughly what I would send:
I have just come out of the halfway catch-up and the other mentorship stories were really inspiring. I would love to get some time with you. Here are three slots that work for me over the next fortnight, and I am happy to work around whatever suits you better.
Three named slots, no apology, no guilt. That is it.
Validation is the first thing a good mentor gives you, and it is not the last
Before anyone gets to strategy or introductions, something simpler tends to happen. Somebody senior tells you that you are not imagining it and that you are good at your job.
One mentee returned from maternity leave in April. “I was very much in the period of, oh good Lord, I’m going back to a career and now I’m a mum,” she said. Her mentor, a head of product in a large organisation, handed all of it straight back to her: your gut is right, you are a product manager, you can do it, you have done it. Her summary was one of the best lines of the session. “It’s easy to get stuck in your own head, isn’t it?”
Another mentee had jumped both industry and department and was privately convinced she had made a terrible mistake. Her mentor described the zigzag of her own career. “I’ve done the same, and I’ve still made it.”
This is the part of mentoring nobody puts in the brochure, and it matters. A consistent thread across everybody I have ever coached is that they do not see themselves through the eyes of others. A good mentor brings a mirror into the room so that eventually you can.
I also want to name something, because several mentees did and I think it needs saying out loud. Confidence does not disappear for tidy reasons. It goes with the menopause. It goes after years of being passed over. It goes when you stop being the person who speaks up in the senior meeting. There are things that happen to us hormonally, personally and outside of work that affect our confidence, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
But here is the bit I want you to hold on to.
“We can learn the theory by talking. We only create change through action.”
Validation fills the cup. It is not the same as moving.
Exercise one: write down every project you have worked on
This was the single most practical thing anyone shared, and it came from a mentee with twelve years across IT, fintech, insurance and payments.
Her mentor asked her to list every project she had worked on. All of them. Twelve years’ worth.
“When he said that, I was like, oh my God, this again, one more tedious task,” she told me. “However, when I started writing those things down, I started feeling good, because I could trace back and I was like, okay, this is what I learned in this role, this is what I learned from this project.”
He read it, told her she had worked on genuinely good projects, and the two of them are now using the list as the blueprint for her CV. “I’ve never spoken like this with anybody before.”
I have used a version of this in my coaching practice for years. Someone once came to me after failing an important exam, convinced she was a failure. I gave her two sheets of paper. One for everything she had failed, one for everything she had achieved. The failure sheet had a single line on it. The achievement sheet ran and ran. Passed my driving test first time. Bought a home. Qualified as a solicitor.
So which is the truth? That you are a failure who has achieved nothing, or that you have achieved a great deal and have simply never taken the time to look at it?
How to do it:
Open a blank document. Give yourself twenty minutes and no editing.
List every project, product, launch, migration, hire or fix you have been part of. Order does not matter.
Next to each one, write one line on what you learned and one line on what changed because you were there.
Send it to your mentor before your next session and ask them what stands out to them, not to you.
Step four is the one people skip, and it is where the value is. You cannot read your own list properly. Somebody else can.
Exercise two: swap “we did” for “I did”
One mentee has a mentor who does not do gentle. He has held C-level roles in cybersecurity, which she said is rare for her to come across at all. Their first session was, in her words, tough love.
“He was just saying, I don’t want to listen to what your company does. I want to listen to what you did for the company.”
She had not noticed she was doing it. Like most of us, she described her work in the collective. We delivered. We transformed. He pushed her into the first person, session after session, and it has become a habit at work.
Her goal for the programme was to build executive presence after being passed over for promotion. His reframe was simple: do not picture yourself in a room of other managers, picture yourself with five people, a CFO, a CEO and a COO. How do you show up then?
“He was being blunt to the point where I was like, I don’t think this is going to work,” she said. “But I like feedback like that. It’s helping me get that electric shock and get my own self back into gear.”
How to do it: take the last three updates you sent at work, in writing or out loud. Count the times you said we and the times you said I. Rewrite one of them. Then use the rewritten version in your next team meeting and notice what happens in the room.
Exercise three: check whether your original goal is still your goal
At the halfway point, the goal you started with is usually not the goal you have. That is a feature, not a failure.
I used a slightly ridiculous analogy in the session, so I will use it again. You picked the sparkly festival outfit because you thought that was what you wore to a festival. You have worn it for a bit, you have looked in the mirror, and it would look great on somebody else. Is it actually you, or is it you cosplaying as somebody else?
This matters more than it sounds, because you cannot push back on a suggestion until you know what you want. There is a real difference between being guided and being led. Your mentor knows a path inside out because they have walked it. Sometimes the version of that path that suits you is a slightly different one, and only you can say so.
Four questions, fifteen minutes:
- What did I write on the application form when I signed up?
- What has changed since then, in my job, my life or my head?
- What do I want to be true by the time this programme finishes?
- What am I now fairly sure I do not want?
That last one is not a consolation prize. One mentor on this programme has spent his sessions deliberately sending his mentee to find out what she does not want to do, and she now knows. That is real progress.
Exercise four: ask for the network, not just the advice
This is the ask I most want you to make in the second half, and the one I see people avoid.
Your mentor has a network. They go to events. They know people you will never meet through a job advert. They would, in my experience, be glad to have another woman in the room to have a glass of prosecco or a Diet Coke with, because these spaces are still overwhelmingly male and networking is awkward for almost everyone in them.
Things you are allowed to ask for:
- An introduction to one specific person, named, with a sentence on why
- To be brought along to an event they are already attending
- Who they follow and read, so you can follow the source rather than the summary
- Their honest read on where your part of the market is going
- What they would do next if they were you, and what they would not
One mentee, a technology change manager with twenty years in IT, had already been given exactly this advice: go and talk to leaders in your area, internally and on LinkedIn, and ask them what their journey looked like. She said the confidence to do it is coming back.
If the fear of asking is what is stopping you, I use the same question on myself. What is the worst that is going to happen? I try to message someone on LinkedIn and they ignore me. Fine. I will go and find somebody else.
On the day of the session I had to ring my CEO and tell him I was not sure about something, and ask him to give it to me with both barrels. I walked round the block first. I panicked. And I did it anyway, because whatever he said was never going to be worse than lying awake with the whirly brain, feeling like I might be sick.
He thanked me. He said that kind of challenge was exactly what he needed to see from me as a leader.
That is the other kind of validation we need. Not just being told we are great, but being told we have stepped into a different zone.
Exercise five: use the space between sessions
When I start coaching someone, they often want to meet every week. We can. But at some point I need the power to transfer back to you, and constant contact makes that harder, not easier.
The first proper conversation with a mentor opens something like a Pandora’s box. Suddenly everything feels possible and available at once. That is exhilarating, and it is also where overwhelm lives. The two travel together.
The gap between sessions is not dead time. It is the digestion. It is where you work out which of those options is actually yours, and what you are going to do about one of them.
How to use it: pick one thing from your last conversation. Not five. One. Do it before you meet again, and open the next session by telling them what happened. You will get better advice, because they will be advising the person you are becoming rather than the person who turned up in month one.
Your homework before your next session
I said in the session that I would not be checking, because it is not up to me. It is not. But here it is in one place:
- Revisit your goal. Fifteen minutes, four questions, above.
- Work out what you have not told your mentor. Where have you not been as transparent as you would like to be? What are you protecting? Say the thing.
- Name your actions. What will take you from where you are now to where you want to be in the sessions you have left? Write down two, with dates.
- Book the time. Three slots, no apology.
Nobody else can do this bit for you. I cannot do it for you and your mentor cannot do it for you. They can feed into it, but you are the only one who can turn it into action, and the action is what makes it powerful.
You have had the affirmation. Now go and turn it into action.