Course 1. Personal awareness

Main ideas

1. Mentoring, an indispensable part of entrepreneurship, helps the mentee to benefit from the experiences and knowledge of the mentor and contributes greatly to its success.
2. Knowing the roles and responsibilities of a mentor and mentee helps both sides to have a fruitful and smooth mentoring relationship.
3. Understanding the principles, dynamics, and strategies of relational skills in mentoring helps making better decisions, solving problems, and learning new skills.
4. Effective communication skills provide an exchange of experience and perspective to gain personal insight and affect the success of the mentoring reciprocally.
5. Knowing how to manage conflict can have many benefits both to mentor and mentee like valuing how diverse they are, the richness of their different viewpoints, background, and experience: then they can learn a great deal more from each other.

Aims of the course

Self-awareness is a key-competence in mentoring. A good mentor should have the ability to recognise and understand their own strengths and limits. This ability helps mentors guiding mentees gain awareness of their own self-worth and general capabilities.

Dimension 1 aims to:

• Provide the learner with essential knowledge about mentoring theories, including mentoring models.
• Provide information on the relevant characteristics that define a good mentor: developing capabilities, inspiring, providing corrective feedback, managing risks and opening doors.
• Emphasize the abilities expected from a mentee: acquiring mentors, active learning, initiative taking, follow through and managing the relationship.
• Lead learners into assessing and practising their own relational skills, as mentors and mentees: the ability to establish and maintain relationships, to foster a sense of belonging and trust, and to develop networking.
• Lead learners into assessing and practising their own communication skills: the ability to engage in active listening, to questioning effectively (inquisitiveness), to actively provide feedback, to give encouragement (reinforcement), and to reflect.
• Lead learners into assessing and practising their own resolution skills: to effectively manage conflicts and disagreements, and to negotiate (effective problem solving).