Mentoring has a great deal of benefits, from developing skills and improving performance to providing a fantastic stepping-stone to helping you become the person you want to be. Both satisfying and rewarding, mentoring can be a tool to boost your career either as a mentor or a mentee and is a legitimate form of CPD. Find out more to support you on your mentoring journey.
What is mentoring?
The following webinar, hosted by the iO’s Head of Professional Development Matthew Rogers, introduces mentoring, the benefits to you and the osteopathic profession as well providing you with useful tools and frameworks to help get you started.
Download the Osteopathic Mentoring Toolkit
The mentoring toolkit has been designed to support the video above and details the difference that mentoring can make to you and the care you provide to your patients. You will also find useful links to further reading materials and reflective tools that can help you to develop a successful mentoring relationship. It is available to download HERE. You can also download the mentoring templates as editable word documents HERE
Find your mentor…
You can now search online for a mentor by signing up to the iO’s dedicated mentoring platform. Specifically designed to facilitate and promote mentoring within our profession, the mentors on the platform have undergone extensive mentor training. The platform provides you with access to a host of experienced osteopaths signed up ready to share their experience and knowledge with you to support you in the next phase of your career. Explore the platform today to find the right mentor for you.
Glynis’ top ten tips for mentoring:
iO Council member and osteopath, Glynis Fox, shares her top tips for any osteopath embarking on their mentoring journey.
- Set ground rules – Establishing a framework that you (mentor and mentee) are both happy with is important. This helps to then set expectations.
- Be practical – How often will you meet? For how long? It’s crucial that you are on the same page about administration.
- Maintaining confidentiality – Anything that happens within the session remains confidential. We still have a responsibility to protect the public.
- How will you deal with conflict? – If you’re meeting someone for the first time, you are stepping into an arrangement or a relationship with someone you haven’t met before.
- Have safeguards and checks in place to make sure you are safe – End it in the most amicable way possible. Sometimes two people just aren’t a good fit, so if the mentoring arrangement isn’t working out, end it in the best way possible.
- Work with set goals – The mentee sets their goals and actions for themselves. The two of you discuss how achievable the goals and actions are.
- Be focused – The mentee should be the person driving the interactions and the goal setting. The role of the mentor is to listen, to encourage and to impart knowledge.
- Reach out to other people and seek wider osteopathic connections – You are a sounding board and mode of encouragement to help take them to where they want to be in their practice.
- The mentor is the resource – It can be difficult for someone to reach out for help, so start with a small question. Discussing something small first can help take some of the fear away, rather than expecting them to leap in and ask for help straight away.
- Provide suggestions and creative alternatives – As mentor, if you don’t know an answer to a question, think Can I go and ask someone else that?
Useful articles
- Power of mentoring – In this month’s edition of OT we speak with four mentees, Joss Barratt, Zoë Clark, Emily Coombes and Benjamin East, who have used mentors to help navigate their careers and transform their practice.
- Mentoring for osteopaths off to a good start for 2020 iO initiative – The iO hosted a complimentary “Introduction to mentoring for osteopaths” day of training for the first round of mentors. Read more about it here. [N.B. due to the pandemic, the events referenced within this article were cancelled and are currently postponed for the foreseeable. We will advise of any future events via the iO website accordingly].
Share your mentoring experience…
We encourage our members to get involved in supporting us in spreading the word throughout the osteopathic community and welcome any suggested resources or articles that you would like to share with us to support the mentoring initiative. Please email us Mentoring@iOsteopathy.org with your suggestions, or post them on our Let’s Talk Osteopathy Community Facebook group.
Have you found your peer?
As part of the new CPD scheme introduced in 2018, all osteopaths will need to undertake a review discussion of their CPD with a peer. To support osteopaths to find their peer, we have launched an online ‘Peer’ directory on which you can search and identify a peer with whom you can conduct your peer review discussion.
Visit the iO peer matching platform HERE.
“The new platform is designed to make it easier for osteopaths to find a suitable peer and is free to access by all registered osteopaths, not just iO members. The platform is easy to use. Once you have entered your details, it usually takes five working days to activate your profile, at which point you will be able to search for your match and connect with your peer. “Our intention is that this iO Peer Directory will help to bring the profession together to support each other and enhance patient care.”