Mentors and Mentoring

What mentors do…

Good mentors teach you the tacit wisdom embedded in any craft. Things that cannot be taught from formulaic rules and books. They teach you practical knowledge acquired through living life and reflecting on it. Experience gained only in practice.

When we talk about practical knowledge, we tend to use bodily metaphors… touch, feel, taste. “That person has a natural feel for things. They have good taste. She’s got the touch.”

When an expert is using their practical knowledge, they aren’t thinking more. They’re thinking less.

With a built up repertoire of skills, experts extend the number of tasks they can perform without conscious awareness.  This sort of knowledge is experience based.

It is best passed along through shared experience. Ideally, by a mentor who lets you come alongside and participate in a thousand situations, side by side. This sharing is personal, friendly, and future oriented. Conversational in tone, it’s more caught than taught.

The mentee is soaking up all the experiences, adding it to their own book of life. So while textbooks can teach you the fundamentals, a mentor shows you how to think.

Becoming an expert is an arduous task and not for the faint of heart. To do well and to maintain yourself as a whole human being, you’re going to come at this from three angles… your head, heart and gut. It is a calling that requires steady dedication, reflection, and moments of sacrifice.

It is an honorable, even noble, profession. We create safe places We create houses that become homes. To make a life out of this is to fiercely love the combination of craft and humanity.

We build for other human beings, with all their faults and foibles. Hopefully, their humanity blends with ours. When it doesn’t, we have to recognize that ultimately we are building for ourselves.

Not in a headlong rush towards profit, although we certainly deserve and have earned that. No, we are building for ourselves.

So that at the end of the day, we know we did the best we could, that our approval is met by ourselves, from our own inner being. Then we sleep well, having encountered excellence face to face, each and every day.

Those daily encounters teach humility. That there is always something to learn. Mentors show us how to deal with error and to own our mistakes.

With experience, we get better at recognizing our mistakes earlier. We learn to observe, learn, correct, forgive, and move on. Forgiveness is key. "To err is human; to forgive is divine." 

As a young carpenter, one mentor explained to me, “Bruce, the best carpenter is not the fastest one. The best carpenter is the one who can most elegantly work their way out of a mistake.” And then he left me to work my way out of my mistake.

Mentors show us how to embrace the struggle, that the struggle is the good part. While we complain about the struggles we face, intuitively we know it’s the struggle that provides inspiration.

William James said, “Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its utmost and on the rack, yet getting through it alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another challenge more rare and arduous still – This is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us.”

Finally, the last thing a mentor does is send you out into the world. At some point, you have to let go. You’ve got to navigate your own way through life, utilizing our profession as a metaphor for what we value… Resilience, strength, integrity, and heart.