Mentoring Philosophy as a Guide to Navigate Challenges From the Lens of Certified Mental Performance Consultant Mentors

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show how philosophies and guiding theoretical models have helped develop the mentoring practices of a master’s degree program with students seeking to become Certified Mental Performance Consultants. We present a series of challenges that we have encountered as mentors in this program. These challenges center around the consulting student, coach interactions, situations that have warranted a need for referrals, and mentor burnout. In each challenge, we discuss how our philosophy and models of supervision helped guide our decisions and the lessons learned from these various situations. Ultimately, these challenges and experiences helped us improve the program through changes in our mentorship structure and general logistics. We hope that our lessons, ideas for program improvement, and the rationale of how our mentoring philosophy supported our decision making at the time may be useful to mentors who oversee graduate-level programs.