These are the types of questions that we have all had, at one point or another. The answers are tricky and multi-faceted, but boil down to the same thing, learning.

Transmitting knowledge from someone else who has the experience and information we need to move forward. This form of learning is referred to as mentoring.

1. What is the difference between mentoring and coaching?

Put simply, a coach is someone who guides and advises their coach-ee to help them maximize the impact of their own abilities.

John Whitmore in Coaching for Performance put it like this

“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance.”

Really,it is helping them to learn rather than teaching them. A mentor, on the other hand, is really a teacher, Someone who has domain expertise and can use that knowledge to help them.

2. How to find a mentor

This week on the UX Coffee + Code podcast, Jason and I shared a coffee with ADPList founder, Felix Lee.

If you’re not familiar with the platform, here’s how Felix describes it.

ADPList is really a marketplace networking community, if you will, that allows you to come if you want to contribute as a mentor and if you don’t, and you just want to learn from people, you can come here and find someone that you admire book them for a call… It’s free, it’s open for everyone.

ADPList is focused on mentor match-making for the design, product, marketing, and engineering industries.

Along with his talented team, he has put together one of the world’s best mentor/mentee communities. This community is available for free for anyone to use, and cuts through the noise to give its users access to some of the best knowledge and experience that exists.

The platform launched initially in January 2021, and in the short time since has grown to feature over 6000 mentors across 90 different countries. With 10,000 sessions and bookings every single month, Felix let us know that in just three months last year they recorded over 1,000,000 mentoring minutes. Wow.

3. Felix’s top mentoring tips

Throughout the session, Felix dropped some top tips for getting the most out of a mentoring relationship. Here’s what we learned from our coffee with Felix.

1. 80% of mentoring arrangements are cross-border. Take the opportunity of a remote call to learn from someone overseas
2. Learning takes a lot of time and we only have 24 hours in a day. Use mentoring as an opportunity to accelerate learning and leverage from someone else’s 24 hours
3. Don’t worry about one-off mentor sessions. Finding a mentor is like dating and it takes time to find the right mentor for you. Take time to build the right relationship
4. Mentoring is for all levels of the career scale, we never stop learning. For more experienced folks, becoming a mentor is a great way of consolidating all that built up knowledge and experience. When we teach, we strengthen those lessons for ourselves.
5. Mentor’s don’t need to be senior to you. Peer mentors can be an invaluable source of honest feedback and a helpful way to get a gut check on your decisions or ways of thinking.

Join Jason Haritou andMark Boyes-Smith each week as they share a coffee with industry experts on all things Design and Technology.

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