A Mentor is like an Excavator

The mentor carves out and helps to create a space where learning can occur. It has boundaries of confidentiality, structure, and guidance, but is open. It is a safe place where both can be vulnerable with their questions, struggles, emotions and doubts. There is space for ideas, curiosity, wonder, and joy. It is a space in which the mundane, the ordinary can be a container of grace. It is a space in which the mentor is given increasing permission to ask the tough questions that will penetrate the masks most of us wear. It is a space where the protégé has no fear to confess failings and progress, to entrust the secrets of his heart, and reveal all his plans.