Mentoring is method of support. It uses personalised guidance to help mentees develop their soft skills, build confidence and undertake transitions.

Through one-to-one conversations, a mentor provides a confidential space to talk and uses their own experience to provide fresh perspective and ask challenging questions.

Stay Bright Mentoring is designed to complement the work of your line manager, providing a more rounded support for you as an employee.

Mentoring can provide a number of benefits to you as an employee:

• It gives you a safe space to talk things though.
• It can build your confidence and emotional maturity.
• It can support you to build your soft skills, such as communication and team-working.
• It can help you to overcome challenges.
• It can offer a fresh perspective on what you are facing at work.
• It can improve your mental health.
• It can improve your job satisfaction and progression.

No! Mentoring isn’t about fixing you or punishing you. It’s about self-development.

Being picked for mentoring means your employer wants to support you to build your confidence and ultimately become better at your job. They want you to succeed, and feel more settled in your role.

Mentoring is a positive support model, focused on the employee’s needs, as well as the employers.

Mentoring is about having a safe space to talk. It’s a one-to-one discussion, where you can talk freely about your successes, challenges and worries within your work role.

Initially you’ll have six Stay Bright Mentoring sessions. These will take place out of the office if possible, usually in a coffee shop, or if the weather is nice, we can go for a walk.

What we talk about will be mostly set by you, allowing you to raise any aspect of your work for us to talk through. At the end of each session we’ll discuss anything you want to look at in the next session, and a date for us to meet again.

Our first session is an introductory session. A chance for us to get to know each other a bit.

For the sessions after that, what we discuss will largely be up to you. I will have some information on your role and key areas your employer wants us to look at, which we’ll bring into our conversation.

But although I’ll ask questions to get us talking, you get to drive where our sessions go.

No. Mentoring has to be a safe space for the employee or it doesn’t work.

I will share some feedback on the areas where I feel you are having success or need more help, but not any of the specifics of our discussions within that.

There are only two situations where I would speak to your employer about an aspect of our discussion:

• If you asked me to because we needed clarification on something.
• If I felt I had a duty of care to speak to them because you need more specialised support than I can provide. In this situation I would speak to you first.

If you’ve got a question, I’m more than happy to try to answer it.

Whether you are about to start your mentoring or we’ve already had a few sessions, you can drop me an email to martin@staybrightedinburgh.com and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can (usually within office hours).

If you are struggling to make a session we’ve planned or are going to be late, you can send a text/WhatsApp message or call me on 07884 016083 to let me know.

The first step is to show your line manager or employer this website, and share with them why you would like to try mentoring.

They will need to factor it into a budget ore personal development fund, so may require some time to look into it.

If you both agree you want to go ahead with the mentoring, ask your line manager to get in touch by emailing martin@staybrightedinburgh.com and we can arrange to meet and chat it through.