Mentoring & Coaching

Mentoring and Coaching

“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
Wayne Dyer

Coaching and mentoring both unlock potential within people, but in different ways, Alistair delivers both coaching and mentoring, it is however wise to understand the difference:

Mentoring
It’s lonely at the top! I know because I have previously been the leader and owner of a business. In the corporate world I have also managed a multi-million dollar international project with 13 direct reports and over 100 full-time and part-time team members.

Entrepreneurial business leaders are regularly having to make decisions, some of those decisions can make or break their business, a mentor is someone, who can help you because they have been there, done it and got the T-shirt, using their own personal experience, including their own ‘mistakes’ (I have made my fair share of mistakes in my time) which often at the time, were highly costly, but became highly valuable lessons both to me and the mentees I have worked with.
A good mentor can ensure that their mentee avoids a lot of costly mistakes, despite this some mistakes will be made which is fine as ‘mistakes’ are a necessary part of making progress!  Many years ago, when I was struggling to grow a small business, I read that Richard Branson, one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time, would typically be working with up to 5 mentors at a time, he spoke about how his vision of Virgin Airlines would never have happened had he not been mentored by Freddie Laker, who had both succeeded and then failed with the first independent airline to challenge the established mainstream airlines, ‘Laker Airways’.
A mentor can provide advice and highlight opportunities and risks that often are only fully understood by someone who has been there and done it.  To provide effective advice and input a mentor will need their mentee to provide good qaulity feedback data and information like the dashboard in the cockpit of a plane.  Ultimately a mentor provides the essential intrinsic belief that an entrepreneur is on the right path to succeed and that they are not alone.

Coaching
‘The quality of your life’ and ‘the quality of your business reality’ are based on ‘the quality of the questions you ask.’. Unlike a mentor, the role of a coach is not to ‘know the answers’ or even to ‘have some good ideas about the answers’, but through listening, understanding, sharing metaphors, using processes and tools, to help their client find ‘the highest quality questions’. When you ask a really high quality question, the answer inevitably and often very swiftly emerges.

The gateway to unlocking a person’s fullest potential and expanding their awareness comes when they ‘consider different perspectives’ and are ask themselves a question that is of such high quality that the answer and what they need to do or not do is obvious!
If you are blocked in achieving your potential, a coach will help you to identify what is blocking you, if it is a mental or emotional block the client can proceed to move beyond or let go of the block and it may be appropriate for the coach or someone else to help deal with the blockage.

I have learned numerous leading edge ‘mindset tools’ having previously worked for 5 years as an NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) trainer, followed by 16 years as one of Dr John Demartini’s senior facilitators, faciliatating at over 30 of his reknowned ‘break through experience’ events around the world helping thousands of people to break through the greatest mental and emotional challenges and blockages of their lives!