Hello Friends,
Greetings from Barcelona☀️where I am launching the Breakthrough Facilitation course today🚀More on that below.
🙌Many thanks for reading The Quest. A special shoutout to Dom in Amsterdam, Caroline in London, Michaele & Barry in Bracebridge, Connie in Toronto, Caroline and Monica in Barcelona.
If you are joining for the first time, welcome to our exploration of creativity, facilitation, and learning.
You can catch up on the last edition 🧰5 Free Toolkits I Can’t Live Without and all past editions here.
I was thrilled to be invited recently to serve as a mentor for the WISE Emerging Leaders Program.
It got me thinking about how fortunate I’ve been to have had outstanding mentors in my life.
- They have helped me grow personally and professionally.
- They have helped me move through complex challenges.
- They have helped spark new ways of thinking about things when I have felt stuck.
I learned that the best mentors all shared a set of skills and sensibilities that made our mentoring relationship work.
It turns out that good mentors are a lot like good facilitators. Mentors and facilitators listen well, ask good questions, and guide a process to a successful outcome.
So how can we all become outstanding mentors?
That’s our Quest for this week🔎
👉 What the Best Mentors Do
👉 3 Essential Elements for a Successful Mentoring Relationship
👉 Plus: Registration for the Breakthrough Facilitation is now open. Get 50% off if you register before September 10. Sign up today with the registration link.
Let’s dive right in!
🤝What the Best Mentors Do
An article by venture capitalist Anthony Tjan in the Harvard Business Review.
Tjan interviewed over 100 leaders to come up with some common principles that outstanding mentors share.
He discovered that the best leaders practice a form of leadership that is less about creating followers and more about creating other leaders.
How do they do that? Here’s what Tjan noticed:
- They put the relationship before the mentorship. There needs to be a baseline chemistry between a mentor and a mentee for it to work.
- They focus on character rather than competency. The best mentors focus on helping shape other people’s character, values, self-awareness, empathy, and capacity for respect.
- They shout loudly with their optimism. They consider why an idea is good before dismissing it.
Read the full article here. (HBR gives you access to 3 free articles/mo).
What do you think the best mentors do?
Mentoring Matters: 3 Essential Elements for Success
A Forbes article by career coach Mary Abbajay.
Abbajay offers advice for mentors and mentees about how to set a mentoring relationship up for success.
She says:
“A good mentor must have the disposition and desire to develop other people. It requires a willingness to reflect on and share one’s own experiences, including one’s failures.”
That’s why one of the key skills of a good mentor is being able to share stories that include personal anecdotes, case examples, and honest insight.
Read the full article here.
What has made mentoring relationships successful for you?
🚀Registration is now open!
If you lead online groups, and you are determined to sharpen your virtual facilitation skills I invite you to join me for Breakthrough Facilitation this fall👇
Here are the headlines:
👥The course is for professionals who lead online groups: online course creators, educators, team leaders, teachers, professors, trainers, changemakers, and more.
📅The course will run for 4-weeks in October.
💻The live sessions will take place Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:00 – 7:30 pm CET each week starting Tuesday, October 5th and ending Thursday, October 28th. There will be a community kick-off session on October 4th.
🕒I estimate that the time commitment will be approx. 4-6 hrs/week.
- Two 90-min live sessions / week
- Three 1-hr guest speaker sessions (dates & times TBC)
- 1-2 short assignments / week
- Optional Friday office hours where you can access additional support
🐤Early bird registration opens today (August 30th). The full price for the course is US$1500. We are offering a special one-time 50% early bird discount for cohort 1 if you register before September 10. Registration will be capped at 30 participants.
💡Join a free Breakthrough Facilitation demo session on Wednesday, September 8th at 6pm CET. You’ll meet the Breakthrough Facilitation team. You’ll get a mini taster of the course. And you’ll have an opportunity to ask questions. Sign up here.
👉For more information and to register visit the Breakthrough Facilitation course page.
I hope you’ll join us for cohort 1! If you have any questions – big or small – don’t hesitate to contact me by hitting reply to this email.
Questions? Please feel free to reach out to me by hitting reply to this email.
😀I’d be grateful if you could share the course information with your networks on Twitter, LinkedIn, or by forwarding this email to a friend.
📷Just for Fun
I celebrated my birthday last week🎂. Here’s to taking the leap into 50!
💌Thanks for reading The Quest
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Creatively yours,
