Mentoring Future Leaders

Mentoring Future Leaders
Reflecting Feelings
• Helps the mentee to feel understood
by the mentor;
• Makes it easier to accept the feelings
as normal;
• Helps the mentee to take control of
the feelings;
• Helps the mentee to see a situation
more objectively.
Reflecting feelings involves feeding back in your own words the underlying
attitudes and significant feelings expressed by the mentee, to demonstrate
that you understand how the person is feeling. Reflecting feelings
encourages the speaker to clarify the reasons for the feelings, conveys
acceptance, builds trust and facilitates deeper understanding. Make your
responses brief and tentative. For example: ‘I seem to be picking up
a feeling of …’ ‘So you feel as if …’, ‘You feel … because …’
Because most people don’t trust their feelings and are not used to express
how they feel, they often say what they think, even when asked how they
feel! By learning to express feelings, the mentee gets the fog out of the
way and can see a situation more clearly. Thus, clarifying feelings leads to
the clarification of the underlying ideas and experience.
The mentor can also share his/her own feelings to model how to express
feelings, e.g. ‘I get angry when you allow people to walk over you’.
Application
Work in pairs: Person A tells person B about something where there was
strong feelings (his/her own) involved. Person B has to reflect the feelings
he/she picks up. Reverse roles afterwards.
© Learning Link International
April 2005
Module 4 - Mentoring Skills Page ! 1