3

Assessing Your Mentoring Talents

A Self-Check Scale

He who knows others is learned; he who knows himself is wise.

Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching

Self-assessment: does the term make you think of navel gazing? Perhaps you’ve had enough of the joys of testing, performance reviews, exams, and the like. For many, testing feels more about masochism than mastery! However, drawing a finer bead on our gifts and blind spots is a precursor to improvement and growth—and that, after all, is what mentoring is all about.

The Mentor Scale is a painless way to determine what personal attributes you bring to the mentoring relationship. The goal is not to judge, evaluate, or criticize you as a person; there are no right or wrong answers. The objective is to offer you a picture of your gifts and your potential blind spots. For example, if a person knows he or she has a tendency to procrastinate, that person can take steps to counter that tendency, to break the habit of putting things off until the last minute.

At this point, you may be thinking of zipping past this chapter. Please resist the temptation. We encourage you to work through the self-assessment. There will be many references to it throughout the rest of the book. If you haven’t done it, you will miss out on some potentially powerful mentoring insights. You do not have to put your answers in the book; simply write them on a separate sheet of paper. This way you can easily review your answers as we revisit the Mentor Scale at various points throughout the book.

Now, pencil ready? Here goes …