Mentoring As Reflective Space

On average, knowledge workers cannot usefully obtain more than 10 minutes at a time to focus without interruption on a specific task or issue. Although people are often working longer hours than a decade ago, they have less and less time to stop and think deeply. In experiments with hundreds of managers and professionals, fewer than 3 per cent claim to find their deep thinking time at work, and of these, the majority do so by coming in very early in the morning. For most people, however, deep thinking time happens on the journey to and from work, in the bath or shower, taking exercise, doing the ironing, lying awake at night, or in other parts of their ‘free' time.

Deep, reflective thinking is as essential to the effectiveness of our conscious brain as REM sleep is to our unconscious. In both cases we become dysfunctional if our minds do not carry out the essential task of analysing, structuring, organising and storing. When we allow ourselves to enter personal reflective space (PRS), we put the world around us largely on hold. (Even if we are doing a complex physical movement, like jogging, or driving the car, we allow our internal autopilot to take over. ) Often unbidden, although with practice it is possible to control the process, one issue of concern rises to the surface of our consciousness and we start to examine it with a depth and clarity we have not previously been able to apply to it. There are many comparisons for this process - I like the analogy of the mine disposal engineer gingerly examining a sea mine washed ashore.

Another analogy is peering through the windows of a doll's house before gradually disassembling it.

Whatever metaphor you use, the process is the same: you ask yourself questions about the issue in an attempt to better understand it and its impact on you. The more questions you ask from different perspectives, the more likely you are to achieve some level of insight which allows you to position the issue very differently and consider new ways of dealing with it. For me, a remarkably high proportion of excursions into reflective space result in being able to combine two difficult and until then separate situations in a way that achieves a positive outcome for both. Some people find that PRS takes them to a better understanding of the dynamics of their situation and gives them the confidence to take actions they had been avoiding. Possibly everyone is different, but there are at least two factors common to everyone who enters PRS regularly:

• He or she emerges with renewed energy to tackle the issue he or she has been considering.

• Whether vocalised or not, the person has been having a dialogue with himself or herself. (This is not a sign of madness, I hasten to add. )

When you engage in similar dialogue with a mentor, you are in effect inviting him or her to join you in your PRS. The dialogue becomes a trialogue, the mentor asking you similar questions, but more rigorously, more objectively, from a wider range of perspectives, and more intensively. The effective mentor therefore takes you down the path from analysis, through understanding and insight, to plans for action in a faster, more thorough manner.

An example

The owner/manager of a 65-employee company was forced by a minor but significant health warning to consider throttling back on his hours and responsibilities. He was frustrated, however, by a complete failure to delegate key tasks to his three direct reports. After a while he gave up - until the next heart twinge brought the issue back to the fore. This time he sought help, asking a mentor to help him think the issues through. The mentor asked the kinds of question that put the behaviours of both sides into perspective - a set of unconscious collusions that would always result in problems being passed up to the boss. Whatever the conscious expectations the owner and his managers had of each other, the unconscious ones were those driving both sides' behaviour. Teasing these expectations into the open allowed the owner to design and implement a whole new range of tactics, which broke the fixed, negative cycle of behaviour and changed the relationship with two out of the three managers. (You can't win all the time!) One solution was to stop getting angry when the managers asked him to take a decision within their authority. Instead, he now patiently explained what they should do. When they arrived back at their offices, however, they found an invoice ‘For doing your job' and an appropriate sum deducted from their departmental budgets!