Rational Mentoring

Psychologists and other mental health professionals often serve as mentors to graduate students, interns and junior professionals. Mentor relationships are often long-term and emotionally complex and ideally involve provision of both career and psychosocial functions which prepare proteges for careers in the profession. Although experienced and accomplished, mentors often fall prey to a range of irrational thinking which may compromise their effectiveness in the mentor role. In this article we briefly define mentoring, describe the practices of effective mentors, highlight the irrational beliefs that most often prove troubling to mentors and outline several strategies for effectively coping with these beliefs. We hypothesize that routine and overt disputation of mentor-related irrational beliefs will enhance both the effect and enjoyment of mentoring.