Become A Leader With Integrity And Heart

In conventional therapy and much of the coaching world, there is a code of ethics that includes the agreement not to disclose anything of personal nature.

In part to protect both client and practitioner from projection or transference (you'll learn more about those in TMT … though to what extent that works I am uncertain. And in part to create a tabula rasa, a blank space, for the client to discover their answers through reflection of their own sharings and answering questions. 

This is great, it’s certainly what we aim to do here when we are mentoring people too… however. Most people carry some kind of shame, fear of appearing stupid for having made certain choices and mistakes, are incredibly judgemental of themselves or fear judgement from others and so very often stay stuck in an area because they fail to forgive themselves, acknowledge their humanness, have self-compassion and let that thing go so they can keep moving forward with their lives. This is where you come in.

It can be insanely transformative, supportive, helpful, and life-changing if you can relate a situation your client is facing to a personal experience, that is potentially identical, or in some ways similar. 

It means that you model the level of vulnerability, openness, and self-compassion that you want to teach and offer your client. As soon as they hear that you, someone they clearly respect otherwise they wouldn’t be working with you, have also made difficult decisions and choices that ultimately were life lessons that you needed to grow and evolve as a human being, they begin to relax and open up to the potential of life beyond these challenges. 

Ultimately, it’s not what happened that keeps them stuck, but how they think about and relate to it. By offering them a personal insight or a story where this has happened to you, or you’ve been witness to, or in some kind of intimate involvement with a mirrored version of their story, their shame, fear, and judgment drop away and they become liberated and free to return to their authenticity.

This, however, is a grey area in terms of how we approach these moments to ensure that we do so with integrity and intuition. It is also where coaching and therapy really fail to connect with other humans (our clients) on a deeper level.

I want to make sure you have all these foundational pieces in place so we start working with our clients in a really ethical, well-resourced, insightful, compassionate, and trauma-informed way.

When we begin sharing pieces from our personal lives to help guide our clients to make the discovery of the answers they are seeking for themselves, we must make sure we are doing it from a place of integrity and with intuition leading the way.

INTEGRITY

Having integrity when sharing means doing so with the sole intention of supporting the client in reaching the awareness, support, insight and validation they need to take the next step. It means knowing how to hold back and listen before speaking and ensuring that your stories come from a place of strong moral principles. It means never sharing because you want to feel heard or validated or because you are potentially projecting your experience onto your client. 

Integrity is important particularly in relation to your, as the mentor, empathic understanding, unconditional positive regard, and congruence. In mentoring, empathy is a moral, not instrumental, practice that non-directively protects the self-determination of the client. It exemplifies power with others, avoiding power over others, and facilitating power from within, by providing a conduit for love, the active ingredient in mentoring. Honesty in mentoring involves the sincerity of your unconditional empathy and the transparency to be a full person in relation to a client. Integrity refers not only to the disciplined moral practice of empathy but an extensional, fully functioning maturation. And that requires tremendous self-evaluation and a strong intuition.

INTUITION

Intuition is used in mentoring to uncover what the client senses but may not be consciously aware of. As a mentor, you use your intuition in order to access this unconscious information and bring it to conscious awareness. You may want to do that through telling a personal story or narrating another perspective when you see that a client has a blind spot or is stuck on something that they cannot quite reach and you want to illustrate to make it reachable and tangible in their mind to enhance their discovery of the solutions they are looking for. Intuition always works from an energetic; mind, body, and spirit approach that assists the client to uncover, articulate, and release the source of the presenting problem.

The act of working intuitively is a very different approach to conventional therapy or coaching in so far that you as the mentor have to enter your clients' world.

As the mentor, the person who is responsible for creating and holding a safe space for your client, you can use the immediacy of feelings, for example, asking your client “What are you feeling right now?” or “What is coming up for you?” to bring attention to the client's ways of working and perceiving themselves and their circumstances, offer them reflections to those responses from their own personal lives when appropriate and in integrity and in doing so helps the client to release the emotion inside of them, possibly also clarifying why they are experiencing their presenting problem and their underlying true problem. Your love, openness, vulnerability, integrity and intuition lead them back to their own truth.

And the truth is liberating.

Using your intuition to know when to share certain personal stories, ask questions to dig deeper, reflect back to the client what they are saying, or even intuitively offer something that is coming through for you is a transformational mentoring practice. It accesses the transpersonal dimensions of the imagination of the practitioner to empathically and intuitively attune to the energetic field of another to discern the root causes of their presenting and true problem, and effect healing in the mind, body and spirit of the recipient. This transformational practice is grounded in the worldview of transpersonal psychology theories and pulls from the models of the human psyche as described by Carl Jung and Roberto Assagioli.

In order to practice this very mind-heart-intution-led mentoring method in a safe and informed way, you first have to learn emotional fluency, nervous system support and both self and co-regulation. Plus what disassociation, adaptation and projection are so you can catch them in your client interactions. Because human beings are beautiful and complex and inconsistent and magical and full of paradox and we need to be ready and able to hold the full spectrum of the human experience in our mentoring sessions.

That's why we created The Mentor Training.

So that you can learn all these tools and skills safely, consciously, and with intuition, support, lead guide, and help your clients.

You become a leader with integrity and heart.