5 Essentials of Effective Mentoring
We are not sure where we first heard this advice about the type of men that every man needs in his life, but it was more than thirty years ago. We have shared it with numerous preachers through the years to encourage more ministers to become mentors.
Our motivation is that we believe everyone needs mentors. We need men like Paul. Ministers need older men in their lives who have been where they are and can pour the wisdom of experience into their lives. These will not be perfect men, but they will be men who will share their life experiences in a way that will help.
We need men like Barnabas. We need men our age who are in a similar life-stage who will call us to accountability and with whom we can let our hair down. These men will encourage and challenge us because they can relate to what we are experiencing.
We need men like Timothy. These are younger men into whom we can pour our own experiences. As well, these men will reenergize us and give us hope for the future. They will also help keep us fresh.
Most would probably acknowledge the need for a mentor and the need to mentor others, but doing it may be another matter. Here are some essentials to effective mentoring.
- Availability: Most of those you mentor will not ask you too and if you ask them for permission, it is doubtful they’d give it. Access is gained through your being there for them. You caring for them. You being available as a listening ear when they are facing a new or challenging situation. It all begins with your availability. And. we might add, you can’t just be available when it’s convenient for you and your schedule.
- Acceptance: There will be plenty of well-meaning people in and outside the Church who will be skeptical. There are always people who will take a wait and see posture. You remember, those who say you prove your worth, then we’ll accept you. Young preachers desperately need some people in their lives who will accept them for who they are in the Lord.
- Accountability: This skill works in two ways. First, you must allow yourself to be held to accountability. Just because you are a mentor does not mean you have arrived. In a mentoring relationship, you too should grow. Effective mentors also need to be able to gently call those they are mentoring to accountability. Caution: Not done with gentleness, you will destroy your effectiveness.
- Advice: One of the superpowers of the highly effective mentor is the ability to give advice and not be angered or show disapproval when the person you are pouring your energies into does not follow that advice. Mentoring is not simple. It takes a large measure of maturity to continue to work with one who has ignored your advice. But a mentor is not a parent, they are a trusted advisor.
- An abundance of humility. We can talk about how we are not humble men, or we can downplay the importance of humility, but the fact remains, “God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” In a mentoring relationship, the mentor needs to find the balance between giving the mentoree personal life examples that may help, and boasting about all that he has accomplished in life. The most effective way for us to teach humility is to model it rather than just talking about it.
NOTE: To learn more about TJI 222/Mentoring visit here.