Imagine that you are a mentor and your mentee has asked you to help him develop his speaking ability. You know that he is going to be speaking for a crowd of about three hundred people, so rather than telling him that you will be there, you slip in, find a seat at the back and listen to him speak. He is terrible. So what should you tell him the next time you meet?
The mentor should not evaluate the performance of the mentee. Consider how the mentee will react if you meet with him and say, “You did it all wrong. You looked at your notes too much. You never made eye contact. You stood too far away from the microphone. The jokes at the beginning were lame. People were asking where they got this guy.” The mentee is going to leave that meeting feeling like he can do anything right and he won’t know how he can fix it.
Do this instead. First, ask the mentee how he thought he did. If he says that he thought he did okay, ask him to put a list of things in order from the weakest to the strongest. In this case, the list would include such things as eye contact, connecting with the audience, use of notes, etc. Then take what he considers to be the weakest and discuss what he can do to make it stronger. This way, he doesn’t feel that you are telling him that he is terrible, but he see you as helping him in an area where he knows he can benefit from improvement.
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