Mentoring and Modelling
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed…[1]
The Greek goddess Athena had many roles. One was offering support and guidance — a mentor. Mentoring can help people to achieve their potential; to “risk being disturbed and changed”. According to David Clutterbuck, a well-known mentor and coach, “effective mentors…recognise the greatest value to the mentee is to develop his or her wisdom”.
As yoga teachers, we definitely need support and guidance. When I started teaching yoga in 2001, mentoring was rarely mentioned. But being mentored helps us to deal with the inevitable difficulties that we encounter as teachers. Which might be…
• no-one turns up to a class that you are teaching this week (and the following week)
• a friend attends your class and is disruptive
• your people pleasing tendencies mean that you find it hard to say ‘No’
• how to teach when injured (notice ‘when’ rather than ‘if’)
• the imposter syndrome keeps undermining you
• how to teach in-person when your training was online
• a yoga studio where you have worked for several years suddenly stops your classes
• a yoga training teacher responds to questions about sexual abuse with the words “it’s all political and I don’t want to discuss that”
In contemporary yoga, the siren songs of individual branding, competitive prosperity and pyramid selling can be seductive, undermining, overwhelming. Demands such as “have the courage to say yes”, beliefs such as “the universe offering you the motivation”, shallow statements such as “add affirmations to squelch your own limiting thoughts” often cause despair and frustration when their magical thinking fails to help. And then there is the reality that yoga teacher trainings just cannot fully equip participants with enough thorough skills to be effective and good teachers. Nor do many of these trainings emphasise how helpful being mentored could be for teachers.
Difficult Situations
Mentoring can help participants to work their way through these and other difficult situations. Mentoring can help participants to get clearer about their values, their motivators, their directions; to be more aware of the insecurities and anxieties that we all have as human beings. Expressing these human characteristics in a confidential and empathetic space, such as that provided by good mentoring, can be both insightful and freeing. This could then help teachers to develop greater confidence and assist in making appropriate choices, such as ‘where do I want to go as a person and a teacher?’. One person who mentors in the corporate world wrote: “A mentor is not an agony aunt or a miracle cure for all problems. We are simply people who have probably experienced similar situations in the past.”[2]
Tools from mentoring can help us to be more observing of our experiences and our emotions, so learning the powers of pause (and lessening common reactivity and frequent catastrophising). Mentoring is to engage in self-study with others where questions are asked, like ‘What could be done (or not done) that makes our work more do-able?’. Where we can examine our comfort zones and make ourselves accountable to others.
As yoga teachers, we are models — and to some extent mentors — to those who come to our classes. At least some class participants place teachers upon pedestals. Being adored can be intoxicatingly powerful drugs for those standing at the front in the teachers’ role. Appropriate behaviours and good modelling is essential. This can be as simple as reliability: starting and finishing classes on time; neither late arriving (which can mean making sure that there is plenty of time to get to class) nor (the not uncommon) over-running. This can be as challenging as modelling good boundaries. Plus modelling continual learning, willingness to change, getting support. As Nadia Gilani wrote in The Yoga Manifesto, “real yoga is a serious practice, and nothing to do with smoothies or branded leggings on social media”.[3]
Back to Athena… In the stories of her mentoring, she used wisdom to stimulate the growth of the other person. This stimulating took different forms: listening, stretching, nourishing, challenging, encouraging. Athena was at once supportively nurturing and a fierce warrior. David Clutterbuck suggests that good mentors speak for less than 20% of the session time. Reading that was a sharp reminder for myself that often it is better to be quiet and listen rather than fill gaps with advice. He quotes an example of unskilful mentoring: “I’d been summoned to the great man’s presence…he’d talk at me solidly for over an hour. Finally, he’d ask if I’d found it useful. I never had the courage to tell him the truth.”[4]
Ways of Sustaining
The need to learn and the need to help are strong drives for many people. Mentoring can help fulfil these drives. Through this process, participants become more self-aware and more able to cultivate skills. From the perspective of a mentee: “I do try to have conversations with you in my thoughts…Occasionally, it sort of works, because I start to see things from the point of view I envisage you might take…make me consider other perspectives.”[5] To be a good mentor requires depth of caring as well as significant levels of experience in the mentee’s field of work.
Mentoring can be an element in the process of moving away from authority, lineage, control and towards community, empowerment, permission. Mentoring might be a place where a person is more heard. When this happens, it can be deeply moving. Crucial in the mentoring process is building a safe container (see Appendix 1 for a contract that I use in both individual mentoring and mentor groups); this is the foundation for trust, openness and honesty. Creating this container can help participants to accept feedback and suggestions because within this vessel, there can be feelings of inclusion, being seen and safety. This is one of the reasons that I restrict numbers in mentoring groups to five.
To me, what is important is sustainability of ourselves as practitioners and teachers. These words from Nadia Gilani will resonate with many yoga teachers: “working at a wellness company had left me feeling unwell”.[6] Mentoring does play a part in our sustaining. Mentoring is not a situation where we are fixed, rescued, saved; it is more a place of support, feeding, challenge. Mentoring is an investment in ourselves. Whether we do this individually or in a group, these spaces can potentially enhance our abilities of teaching yoga as well as deepen our awareness of how to move more freely and skilfully in the world.[7] Mentoring is about becoming better resourced and thus more resilient.
It is common that time constraints and full diaries are obstacles to mentoring — but prioritising self-care is an essential element for growth and sustainability. Mentoring can be a valuable building block for our self-care. One person wrote: “Making the commitment to meet every month is hugely motivational. Having time for mentoring allows me to recharge my batteries and forces me to reflect on good practice.”[8]
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love
To postpone my dream no longer,
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.[9]
Norman Blair
13 September 2022
I run mentoring groups and also individual mentoring. For more details, go to
https://www.yogawithnorman.co.uk/mentoring
This article was substantially inspired by David Clutterbuck’s book Everyone Needs A Mentor (CIPD, 2014). Two other books that have influenced this article are Theo Wildcroft’s Post-Lineage Yoga: From Guru to MeToo (Equinox, 2020) and Nadia Gilani’s The Yoga Manifesto: How Yoga Helped Me and Why It Needs to Save Itself (Bluebird, 2021).
In my view, every yoga teacher can greatly benefit from reading Jess Glenny’s The Yoga Teacher Mentor (Singing Dragon, 2020) and Tori Lunden’s How NOT To Teach Yoga (self-published, 2021).
Appendix 1
This is the contract that I use for mentoring.
➤ Closed
➤ Confidential
➤ A safe container for expression and exploring
➤ Commitment: mine and yours
➤ Looking after ourselves in this process
o Pause – Soften – Open: listen deeply and speak the truth
o A working alliance to improve abilities and deepen skills
Appendix 2
Inspired by David Clutterbuck, here is an acronym for mentors.
M motivating
E exploring
N nurturing
T teaching
O offering
R relationship
Footnotes
[1] The author of those lines, John O’Donohue, was an Irish poet. This is ‘A Morning Offering’ from his book Benedictus: A Book of Blessings (Bantam, 2008).
[2] Clutterbuck 34.
[3] Gilani 247.
[4] Clutterbuck 48.
[5] Clutterbuck 34.
[6] Gilani 198.
[7] Personally, I see a supervisor and we meet once every 6-8 weeks. I am very grateful to her for the advice and support that she has given me over the years.
[8] Clutterbuck 178.
[9] See note 1.
