The Mentor You Don't Need to Perform for
A good mentor tells you something you didn't want to hear before your ten o'clock arrives.
A good mentor tells you something you didn't want to hear before your ten o'clock arrives.
Most supervision is furniture It sits in the corner looking solid and nobody tests whether it holds any weight. This note is about the mentor who holds weight, and how to tell the difference before your caseload does it for you.
Some practice sites list a mentor's name the way a bottle lists its vineyard. Somewhere sunny, apparently reputable, matured in oak.
Nobody asks the follow-up question. Has this person watched you work with a client, in the room, saying the words out loud?
A name is provenance. It's decoration, not a qualification, and your clients can't taste the difference between good stock and a label.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
A mentor's name tells you where they trained. It tells you nothing about whether they've seen you work.
A supervisor who nods at everything behaves like a smoke alarm with the battery out.
Silent through the toast, silent through the chip pan, silent right up to the point it should have gone off.
You never notice the silence, which is the whole design fault. A mentor who agrees with everything isn't reassuring you, they're just unplugged.
Test it. Say something wrong about your own practice next session and watch whether anyone flinches.
71.8% of UK therapists earn £30,000 or less a year. Plenty of them have done every bit of growth advice going, diligently, one evening a week, with a highlighter.
Somewhere in that figure sits a lot of gentle supervision and precious little honest disagreement. Kind feedback and useful feedback are two different transactions, though they're often billed at the same rate.
You can be validated weekly and still be broke annually. Both things happen in the same room, often on the same sofa.
Try this on your site this week. Read the "meet the team" page out loud and count the sentences about comfort against the sentences about skill.
Comfort is pleasant. It belongs on a sympathy card, not a shop sign.
A client reading it wants to know what you can do when things go sideways on a Tuesday afternoon. Warmth tells a client nothing true about your competence, though it photographs well.
One kind of mentor exists to make you feel better about the caseload you already have.
It's a nice job. Cosy, even, like someone plumping the cushions while the boiler makes that noise again.
Changing what you do next week is a different job entirely, and clients rarely pay extra for cushion-plumping. The second mentor asks why the boiler's making the noise. The first one turns the radio up.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
Some practices sort this themselves, dragging a trusted colleague into honest feedback sessions on top of a diary already groaning under appointments.
Others hand the business side over entirely, to a person outside the consulting room who has no stake in your feelings about it.
Both routes take real graft to keep up. A garden needs weeding, and good intentions alone leave it a jungle. You still have to turn up with the shears.
A dog groomer once told me the hardest clients aren't the nervous ones. They're the ones who've been getting away with it for years, dog and owner both.
Supervision works the same way. A mentor who lets things slide isn't being kind, they're extending the getting away with it, one gently nodded session at a time.
Eventually the matting has to come out somehow. Better a mentor mentions it early than a client mentions it in a review.
Letting something slide for a decade doesn't make it smaller. It makes it matted.
Notice which page of your website took longest to write, and which one took five minutes flat.
The five-minute page is usually the one you believe without a second thought, dashed off between appointments.
Worth testing this week whether a client agrees with it.
The pages that cost you the most agony are often the ones nobody reads twice, and the throwaway line is the one they quote back at you in month four.
My own five-minute page was a single sentence about not minding tears in the first session. Turns out that's the only line anyone's ever repeated to me.
Find the mentor who tells you the truth before your ten o'clock arrives, not after your accountant does. Find the mentor you need
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