The New Mentor's Handbook

You've been asked to mentor someone. Before your first session, answer these:

What will you actually say in the first meeting, after "nice to meet you"?
How will you turn "I want to grow" into a goal your mentee can act on?
What's your move when they go quiet for three weeks and the emails stop?
And how will you end the relationship so it feels finished, not faded?

If you hesitated on any of these, you're not failing - you were simply never taught. Being good at your own job is a different skill from growing someone else's career, and nobody hands you the second one. So most new mentors improvise, and the relationship rises or falls on luck.

This handbook replaces luck with structure. It walks through the whole arc - understanding what mentoring is, matching and preparing, the first meeting, the agreement, running sessions, pushing through the flat patches, and ending well - with the exact words and one-page tools for each stage. Fifty-four templates, every one printed on the page:

• First-Meeting Agenda - what to do in the opening session
• Mentoring Agreement - turn expectations into a signed contract
• GROW Session Worksheet - a session that runs itself
• Developmental Question Bank - ask instead of tell
• Three-Step Feedback Script - feedback that lands, not wounds
• Progress-Meeting Agenda - the repeatable working session
• Stall Diagnostic - what to do when momentum fades
• Closing-Meeting Agenda - end on a finish line
• Scenario Field Manual - eight situations you'll actually face

No email walls. No downloads. Every template is on the page, ready to use in the session itself.

Other mentoring books cost about the same and stop at theory; a single hour with a mentoring coach typically costs $150-$300. This book is the whole system, with the tools included, for less than the price of dinner.

Written by Mike Pritula, who built mentoring programs across companies and trained more than 150,000 students through Mike Pritula Academy.

Stop improvising with someone's career. Read this before your first session, and walk in with a plan.