Mentor Or Tormentor?

by Nichole Turgeon

After more than sixteen years working in the field of youth mentoring, my antennae are highly attuned to pop culture references to mentoring. The references are plentiful. Some are cringe worthy and some are delightfully accurate.

Like many, I spent time during the final week of 2021 consuming content I had missed out on earlier in the year. Namely, for me, that was the second season of Ted Lasso. Imagine my delight when the inimitable Dr. Sharon Fieldstone talked about being a mentor!

When Dr. Fieldstone said,

“Well, I can’t be your mentor without occasionally being your tormentor.”

It really got the wheels spinning in my head.

I thought, “Is that true?”

I decided that perhaps it is true in professional mentoring relationships but probably not a quote we would want to start throwing around in the field of youth mentoring. After all, mentors pushing us to surpass what we think is possible is critical, but the term “tormenter” is just not one that should be used when talking about kids.

Once I settled that for myself, curiosity got to me and I had to know if this was an established saying that I had just never heard.

I turned to Google to satisfy my curiosity and found mostly references to the quote in Ted Lasso. However, I did find a related quote from Dr. Andy Hargreaves, a professor, an author, and a speaker on the topic of education. Dr. Hargreaves has written extensively about mentoring in the field of education and has said, “Mentors turn into tormentors if they believe they are always right.”

That quote encapsulates one of the most significant lessons I have learned as a mentor myself and as a youth mentoring professional. The way I typically talk about this lesson is to say,

“Mentoring is a two-way street.”

The mentors at Big Brothers Big Sisters consistently report getting as much out of their relationship with their Little (mentee) as they give, if not more. While, as adults, we do have some wisdom to impart and we are eager to help the young people in our lives avoid some of the pitfalls we have made ourselves, we are kidding ourselves if think we hold all the answers and that we don’t have anything to learn from the person we are mentoring.

Sometimes the lessons are simple. Maybe your mentee teaches you how to make a Tik Tok video or maybe they show you how to delight in the simple pleasures and see through the eyes of a kid again. Other times, the lessons are more complex, and maybe a bit uncomfortable. Such as seeing your mentee treated differently than you because of their race, religion, or gender and, seeing how unremarkable that treatment is to them, because it is their daily experience.

It is important for the mentor in any relationship to enter into that relationship believing that they too will learn and grow from the relationship. Whether the relationship is with a young person or with an early career colleague, you must be prepared to learn a thing or two yourself.

After all, who wants a relationship of any kind with someone who thinks they know everything?

In a mentoring relationship, both the mentor and the mentee have much to gain from each other. The relationship is an opportunity for all involved to see the world from a different perspective and ask questions of someone who has a different lived experience.

I have always viewed one of the greatest gifts of mentoring to be the connections it creates across a community. A formal mentoring relationship can take the mentor and mentee, quite literally, to places they might not otherwise visit.

We have all seen the devastating results of an increasingly divisive culture in this country and throughout much of the world. Most formal mentoring creates relationships that wouldn’t naturally exist. As such, mentoring will likely connect two people with different backgrounds. Mentoring provides an incredible opportunity to truly and deeply connect with someone with a worldview that is not like your own. When two people from different circumstances interact through mentoring, it sparks a greater understanding of our common humanity.

Not only do the mentor and mentee in the relationship learn from each other and grow to understand each other’s differing views, but they strengthen their muscles to help them in their encounters with others of differing backgrounds. We need more of this in our local communities and around the globe. 

We can only conquer the challenges of 2022 and beyond by capitalizing on all of our collective strengths.