The reluctant mentor

I avoided the word “mentor”

I spent years avoiding the word mentor. Not because people hadn’t asked — they had, many times. But every time, a small voice said: careful, don’t call this mentoring. Mentoring sounded too formal, too grand, too official. It felt like a status that should require a certificate, a methodology, a recognised qualification, someone else’s permission. So I did what a lot of experienced people do. I discounted nearly forty years of evidence because I didn’t have the right label for it.

The contradiction was sitting in plain sight. People had been treating me as a mentor for years. The work was already happening. At some point I had to sit with a more uncomfortable question: what if I wasn’t being modest? What if I was simply being reluctant?

The imposter script: “What do I know?”

Most reluctant mentors run a version of the same internal script. What do I know? Who am I to advise senior leaders? I’m not a professional mentor. I’ve no coaching qualification. What gives me the right? It sounds like conscientiousness, and partly it is. But it’s worth noticing what the script does: it counts us out before anyone else gets the chance to.

This is how imposter syndrome works in experienced people. It rarely shows up as obvious self-doubt. It shows up as deflection — “I’m just doing my job, there’s nothing special about that” — and as a constant comparison with people who have the accredited title we don’t. The people who never doubt themselves aren’t always the ones you’d want guiding someone through a hard patch. The doubt, in moderation, is a feature, not a fault.

The evidence I discounted

When I finally looked at the experience I’d been dismissing, it was not a CV so much as a body of evidence. Careers navigated across electronics, the military, IT, commerce and consultancy. Helping run and grow a multi-million-pound business. Board-level and chairing experience. Founding and building my own company — the brand, the systems, the products. Inclusion, HR, culture and change work people pay for. A global speaking practice. And the Inclusion Bites podcast — well over two hundred recorded conversations that turned out to be far more than podcasting. They were an apprenticeship in listening, leadership, identity, courage, belonging and change.

Alongside the professional, the human: parenting, caring for elderly parents through the care system, bereavement, transition, reinvention. None of it arrived with a badge. As I came to put it: sometimes your authority is not one thing — it is the compound interest of many things. My credibility was never built in one lane. It was built at the intersection of leadership, lived experience, listening, enterprise, speaking and reinvention.

Credentials versus credibility

Here is the distinction the whole thing turns on. Mentoring is not always a certificate, a methodology or a title bestowed by someone else. Sometimes it is pattern recognition; lived experience; commercial scars; emotional intelligence; being two chapters ahead and willing to share what the road looks like; helping someone unlock a door you’ve already learned how to open.

I thought I was reluctant because I was being humble. But perhaps I was reluctant because I had confused certification with permission. Nobody had appointed me as a mentor — but people had been treating me as one for years. Formal training matters and is worth having; it simply isn’t the only source of value. If you’d like to go deeper on this, it has its own guide: credentials vs credibility.

When reluctance is fear in respectable clothes

It’s worth being honest about what keeps good people on the sidelines, because it’s rarely a genuine lack of something to offer. It’s imposter feelings and perfectionism. It’s the fear of overclaiming, and the comparison with accredited coaches. It’s the gendered and class-bound assumptions about who gets to be called an expert — and the way marginalised professionals are so often conditioned to underclaim. It’s the fear of visibility, of criticism, of responsibility. And it’s modesty curdling, quietly, into self-erasure.

The cost is real and it runs both ways. The reluctant person loses income, impact, positioning, confidence and influence. But someone else loses too — they lose guidance, perspective, challenge, encouragement, a door-opener, a map. As I’ve come to say it: if we keep calling our wisdom “nothing special”, we don’t become humble — we simply become less useful.

What mentoring actually requires

Mentoring doesn’t require having all the answers. It requires having been somewhere the other person hasn’t — and being willing to share it honestly, including the mistakes. The mistakes are often the most useful part. Anyone can describe the polished version of how things went; what people really learn from is the wrong turns and what you did next.

Nobody teaches you how to be a mentor — it’s a completely different role from the one you do day to day. So of course it feels unfamiliar at first. You can be excellent at your job and still feel clumsy the first time you sit across from someone and try to help them think. That clumsiness isn’t a lack of qualification; it’s just newness, and newness fades with practice. If you want to dig into where this differs from coaching, read mentoring vs coaching.

The MAP: mirror, anchor, permission

Stripped back, most of the mentoring I do comes down to three things. I help people see more clearly, steady themselves, and move. I call it the MAP.

• Mirror. Helping people see themselves, their situation and their options more clearly than they can from the inside.
• Anchor. Offering grounded perspective drawn from experience, not theory alone — something steady to hold on to.
• Permission. Helping them take the next step they often already know they need to take.

It’s a deliberately small framework, because the role is smaller and more human than the word “mentor” makes it sound. I’m not there to be anyone’s guru — I’m there to be a useful mirror, a steady hand, and occasionally the person who says: stop overthinking it, you already know what needs to happen next. There’s a fuller guide on the framework here: mirror, anchor, permission.

Standing beside, not above

The image many people carry of mentoring is the wise elder dispensing advice from a great height. I find that picture unhelpful and a little off-putting. Mentoring is standing beside someone with perspective, not above them. It can be a mirror, an anchor, a permission slip, a challenge, a shortcut, a reality check, a route map — but it is never a pedestal. Mentoring is not a crown. It is a responsibility.

Held that way, the role is something you can do without overclaiming it. It asks for honesty, perspective, boundaries, usefulness and care — not perfection, and not guru status. If the people you’re helping are under-represented or navigating systems that weren’t built for them, you may find the line between mentoring and advocacy matters; the guide on mentorship vs sponsorship picks up that thread.

The question worth sitting with

I am still cautious with the word mentor — and I think that caution is healthy, because mentoring should never be about ego, status, or creating dependency. But I am learning that reluctance is not always humility. Sometimes it is fear wearing respectable clothes: fear of being found out, of overclaiming, of stepping into a role before someone has given us permission. The invitation is to look again at the experience we have been dismissing — the careers navigated, crises survived, businesses built, rooms sat in, mistakes made, people supported, losses carried, reinventions lived. Not because any of it makes us perfect — it does not — but because someone else may be standing at a door we have already learned how to open. If we keep calling our wisdom “nothing special”, we do not become humble; we simply become less useful. So maybe the better question is not “Am I qualified to be a mentor?” but “Who needs me to stop pretending I have nothing to offer?”

Take it further

This guide is the companion to the keynote The Reluctant Mentor. To go deeper on the two ideas at its heart, read credentials vs credibility and mirror, anchor, permission. If you’re curious how mentoring differs from coaching, read mentoring vs coaching, or explore how I approach mentoring. Browse more guides when you’re ready.