12 Strategies for Effective Mentoring

 1.      Positive attitude:  Encourage the fellow to approach life and goals with enthusiasm and to be accepting of self and others

2.      Valuing:  Encourage a person to examine beliefs and ideals in an effort to establish personal values and goals.

3.      Open-mindedness:  Encourage a person to keep an open mind to ideas.

4.      Interrelations:  The interactions between mentor and fellow should be situations of sharing, caring, and empathizing.

5.      Creative problem solving:  Encourage the fellow to use a creative problem solving process.

6.      Effective communication:  Encourage a person to be an attentive listener and an assertive questioner.

7.      Discovery:  Encourage the fellow to be an independent thinker.

8.      Strengths and uniqueness:  Encourage a person to recognize individual strengths and uniqueness and to build on them.

9.      Confidence:  Assist a person in developing self-confidence.

10.  Awareness:  Stress that an individual be aware of the environment, be intuitive, be problem sensitive, and be ready to make the most of opportunities.

11.  Risk-taking:  Encourage a person to be a risk-taker and an active participant, not a spectator.

12.  Flexibility:  Share with a fellow the importance of being flexible and adaptable in attitudes and actions, looking for alternatives, and seeing situations/persons from different perspectives.

Noller.  1982.  Mentoring: A renaissance of apprenticeship.  The Journal of Creative Behavior