Coaching Vs Mentoring

I wrote this email about coaching vs mentoring to my Artistic Journey newsletter list, but I wanted to share it here as well because it’s something I often get asked about.

Here it goes:

Hello!

Today I wanted to pop in your inbox to chat about the difference between mentoring and coaching.

A lot of people use these terms interchangeably including me until I took a coaching course with RD1st last year.

When I was studying to get accredited to be a coach I discovered that mentoring and coaching are different in their approaches. Maybe I’m slow, but I think so many people use them incorrectly that I honestly didn’t know the difference.

But there is a difference. Each delivers something unique.

Mentoring is based around the sharing of knowledge. It might be knowledge around how to set up an exhibition, hold an open studio, or talk and write about your artwork.

Coaching is based around gaining clarity with your thoughts. It might be to address limiting beliefs around not being a “real” artist, what is success, or money matters. It can also be used to help narrow down your goals or a project into manageable steps.

Of course at the heart of each is the desire to help others move forward in their life or art practice.

For me over the years I’ve had a lot of mentoring and more recently a lot of coaching. I value both in my life. They have helped move me forward as an artist while also helping me feel a little bit less lonely and better understood along the way.

Within the Artistic Journey membership I plan to use group mentoring as a place to allow people to share their work, practice speaking with confidence about their work and what they do, dive deep into the overall intentions of their art practice as well as focussed intentions around their artwork, plus we’ll address any issues that arise that people feel would be good to learn more about.

With the private coaching this is more personal to each person. It’s a chance for you to  come to a session with an idea, goal or topic that you’d like to address. Then through a series of question and answer I help you untangle and navigate your thoughts.

For coaching I mainly use a GROW model which is based around:

Goals - what do you want to achieve with the session? what do you want to sort out?

Reality - We look at the reality around your thoughts and beliefs in context of what you’d like to achieve.

Options - We explore various possibilities.

Will - We close the session by checking what steps you’ll take next, when you’ll do them and what might stop you from doing them.

All of this is done in a non-judgemental or pressurised way. The good thing with monthly coaching though is that there’s regular gentle accountability. This is because I know that by following through (or even partly following through) you’ll move forward as an artist.

If you have any questions about the membership, coaching or mentoring, send me an email and I’ll do my best to answer.

As always, Thanks for reading!

Sasha

P.S. I wrote a blog about what “digging deeper” means to me. This is something I’ll be talking about more in the future because I think it’s the most important part of any long term art practice. Digging deeper will look very different for everyone, but in the blog I include a few examples of what it is for me. Let me know what you think if you read it. Are you already doing this? Or would you like to do more of this?