I say this line often enough that it risks sounding like a slogan: a mentor is not someone who tells you what to do. A mentor brings the perspective of having been there before, listens, challenges assumptions, and acts as a sounding board. Mentor and mentee create the path together.
It started as a correction to my own instinct. When Kerr University began, most of my sessions were English lessons. Then the questions changed. A student would finish a grammar point and ask what I thought about leaving a job, or starting a company, or a conversation with their father they had been avoiding for a year. My first instinct, every time, was to answer like a consultant: here is what I would do.
01
The instinct to answer is not the same as the instinct to help
Consulting and mentoring look similar from the outside. Both involve someone with more experience talking to someone with less. But a consultant is hired to produce an answer. A mentor is there for something slower: helping another person build the judgment to produce their own answers, including the ones that will come up long after the session ends.
I learned this the hard way, by doing it wrong first. Early on, a student asked whether she should take a promotion that would move her across the country. I told her what I would do. She took my advice, it did not go well, and the conversation afterward taught me more than any course could have. She had not needed my decision. She had needed help thinking through her own.
The best question I can ask in a mentoring session is rarely the one with the fastest answer.
02
What “create the path together” actually means in practice
In a real session now, I try to slow down before I offer an opinion. I ask what the person has already tried, what they are actually afraid of, and what they would tell a friend in the same position. Half the time, by the point they finish answering their own questions out loud, they already know what they are going to do. My job was to be in the room while they found it, not to hand it to them.
That does not mean I withhold my experience. When someone is about to repeat a mistake I have already made, I say so plainly. The difference is timing and ownership: I offer the perspective after they have done the thinking, not instead of it, and the decision stays theirs.
This is the same thread that runs through every business I have built, from freight to publishing to English lessons. Experience a problem firsthand, understand the system behind it, then build something more useful from what was learned. Mentorship is just that same pattern applied to a person instead of a company.