The magic of mentors

Finding your just-right teacher

There are in life a few miraculous moments when the right person is there to tell you what you need to hear, and you are still open enough, impressionable enough, to take it in. — Ann Patchett

There is a special kind of helping that extends beyond the boundaries of the standard models of education, therapy and coaching. It is more of a full-person modeling and identification process that we call mentoring.

Learners (apprentices) grow in skill by studying with experts (masters). There is a special chemistry, near alchemy, whereby an expert becomes a mentor for the novice learner. Many of us can look back over our lives and careers and identify the special people who stepped into that vital role and impacted our development at a foundational level of identity and values as well as practice. Those who have missed out on that deep experience of learning-by-identification have missed a lot.

People who can serve successfully as mentors embody two fundamental characteristics as perceived by the learner, and both seem to be necessary for the magic to happen:

• I admire this person and wish to be like them some day

• This person cares about me and my development

As these perceptions are a function of the unique characteristics of the learner as well as the teacher, it is not really possible to “assign” mentors by any mechanistic or beaurocratic means. We can assign teachers, supervisors and coaches, but not mentors. The mentor is a unique creation at the interface of the learner and the teacher, and as such defies any practice of standardization or prescription. We stumble upon our mentors (if we are lucky).

I can recall two people who served as important mentors for me in my career, and I am forever grateful to them.

My First Mentor

Douglas Heath PhD was a psychology professor at Haverford College. He was a Quaker and a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He distinguished himself during his alternative military service by refusing to address any of his superior officers as “Sir”. He was annoyed if we called him Dr. Heath, insisting that “My name is Doug”.

He was a radical egalitarian and believed in granting maximum freedom to all people. As chair of the Psychology department, he decided to remove the requirement to take the dreaded Psychology 101 as a prerequisite for any other courses in his department. I probably would not have become a psychologist if I had been required to learn about rats in mazes (I was going to be a language major), so Doug’s removal of that control gate had an impact on my professional development before I ever met him.

When I attended his seminar on student alienation (how’s that for relevant!), he turned to us at the start of the first class and asked:

So, what would you like to learn?

I was frankly stunned and confused by this question that no teacher had ever asked me before (and few thereafter). Looking back on that incident more than 50 years ago, I can see clearly what a radical act that was. Doug was confronting the powerful and omnipresent assumptions that (a) teachers know what students should learn and (b) students should simply learn it, a pair of beliefs that dominate nearly every classroom and are, I believe, a root cause of the failure of most schools to engage the majority of their students in the learning enterprise.

I have continued to study the ways in which people in positions of authority act, and how they often fail to meet the legitimate needs of the people in their organization. Doug Heath was a person I admired and wanted to be like someday and who cared about me and my development, and I do the work I have chosen in the way I do it in no small part because of his influence.

My Last Mentor

John Gunderson MD was a Harvard psychiatrist who was one of my supervisors during my internship. John was a charismatic and provocative figure due to his unwillingness to parrot the conventional wisdom of the day. In addition to being an excellent clinician, he was a research scientist who believed in testing the beliefs and practices of his profession.

Back in the 1970’s, Freudian psychoanalysis was the dominant theory in psychiatry, and patients with severe mental illness, including schizophrenia, were treated with that school of talk therapy (which was quite costly in terms of both time and money). Even though John was a senior psychoanalyst, he decided to launch a major study to determine whether in fact schizophrenic patients benefited from psychoanalysis. After many years, the results of the study came in and (horrors!) showed that these patients received no more benefit from psychoanalysis than they did from less intensive and expensive treatments.

I was especially impressed when John presented the findings of this research project at an academic teaching conference, and in particular by two statements he made there. The first was that he was deeply distressed and saddened to discover that so much of what he had learned and believed was not in fact true. He then declared that he would no longer treat schizophrenic patients with psychoanalysis, and encouraged his colleagues to follow his example.

This was an example of intellectual courage and humility that deeply impressed me and had a profound and enduring effect on my thinking. As a teacher, John encouraged me to have the strength of my convictions and to take intelligent risks, advice I had never received before and which has been enormously helpful to me over the years. I admired John’s intelligence, integrity and courage and wanted to be like him someday. He was a central figure in my early professional life.

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When I learned of the deaths of these two men, I felt a deep sadness even though I had not seen them in decades. My grief reminded me of how important they were, and are, to me.

Can you identify people in your life and career who served as a mentor for you? Can you see how they impacted you for the better in both the short and longer term? Then take the opportunity now to reach out and thank them for the precious gift they gave you. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

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For a beautiful portrayal of the human reality and deep impact of dedicated mentoring, watch these scenes from “The Queen’s Gambit”