Metaphors for Mentoring

This exercise is designed to help you better understand each other when you are placed in a mentor or mentee role.  Such metaphors shape our expectations for a mentoring relationship.  They also reveal one’s strengths and weaknesses and roles that one adopts as mentor or mentee.

  • What metaphor(s) describe how you mentor? 
  • Keeping this metaphor in mind, what are its strengths? What are its weaknesses? 
  • What are the implications of your mentoring metaphor for how you mentor?  Are you more of a teacher? advocate? etc.