I am a mentor, and my work is to mediate my clients’ development process. Finding oneself and understanding the different roles and the impacts of oneself on other people and of other people on oneself is part of this journey.

The beauty of a mentor’s journey is following the account, understanding the story and looking at the world through the eyes of the person in front of me. A delicate mission, involving deep respect and reverence for the different moments of the person’s life.

I have a clear sense of the privilege and power of this mission. I am abducted by this extraordinary world and am aware of its breadth. In the relational field of development, my clients and I tend to make our frames of reference flexible, and development depends on that. Without knowing and recognizing, there is little to expand.

However, becoming flexible opens the doors of people’s vulnerabilities in the dialogic field of mentoring. In this potential emotional risk, relevant, carefully hidden content may come to the surface and needs careful welcome and deep respect.

As a mentor, I can only mediate the process of the person I serve, supporting the overcoming of ignored aspects, if I myself permanently overcome my own inner impasses.

I cannot share what I have not lived. I cannot teach what I do not know. I cannot encourage if fear or arrogance hides the world from my attentive gaze.

I need to be aware that I need to know, but knowing is not just talking, because words are carried off by the wind. The development encounter is life in motion, and each person’s life will give meaning, or not, to what is communicated.

The practice adopted in the contact will communicate more than the most spectacular speech. Pragmatic respect will make room for questions, doubts, inspirations, fears, angers.

In this cared-for space, people will be able to draw back the curtains and unveil aspects of themselves in the world, with the safety of the mentor’s attentive, attuned presence at their side. The development journey will unfold through a sequence of experiments and small discoveries.

There is a visible learning curve, which each person travels at their own pace. At first it is more structured, until the knowledge is known or recognized. In a second moment, when the person converts the new repertoires into practice, it is up to the one guiding to observe and correct course, until the new skills are tested and installed.

The autonomous flight will be planned and, now and then, an exchange of perceptions will enrich the flying. It is the last stage. Ready for farewell, people change the contracts of coexistence to occasional encounters that nurture the relational field.

The process will not succeed if the person being guided becomes a clone of the mentor. Developing is starting from one’s own repertoires and updating them. Doing so with support cannot mean not honoring them: at some moments, honoring and letting go; at others, incorporating unprecedented repertoires. The one guiding qualifies and encourages wings. There will be a time when admiring the flight is all that needs to be done.

And Jiminy Cricket?

He comes as a constant signal, whispering in my ear: “Stay alert and prepared, take care of yourself so you have room for the other people who seek your company on the development journey. Keep studying: many aspects, once known, seem less threatening. Keep in touch with the people who care about you, because unconditional love will be required and your stock will need constant replenishing. And, when lucidity moves away, seek, without shame, the help of the people who share life with you. Listening without judgment can be a gift.”