Finding someone to support you in a mentoring role is a wonderful way to bring more joy, fulfilment and success into your life. We live in very fluid and evolving times and it feels like many people are in search of comprehensive support and guidance. Many of us are looking for new ways of living which honour a rich understanding of life and what it is to be human but which don’t shy away from the modern world, new innovations and new understandings. Many of the supports and institutions which we relied on in the past are changing or disappearing and people are often turning to older, time tested traditions and/or newer, often scientific understandings.
My approach to mentoring focuses on a few key pillars which we can discuss and work on.
1. Joy and enjoyment
Something I’ve been exploring and thinking about increasingly is the importance of joy and enjoyment. Generally in the West we come from a culture that has valued the work ethic above most things. Work and activity is very important of course and can provide fulfilment and many benefits to the rest of society. But sometimes it can create imbalances such as for those who work too hard and don’t take enough care of their own health or who work hard and become so narrow focused that they end up acquiring a huge share of what might otherwise be available for others to work for.
In some spiritual traditions there seems to be an understanding that underneath all our desires, our true essence is something like pure joy. (The idea is something like, when a desire is fulfilled and longing is temporarily suspended, we come in direct contact with our true essence of joy and therefore we think that it’s the fulfilment of the desire which has brought us joy when really it’s the cessation of longing that has allowed us to experience our fundamental nature.) Indeed many traditions even claim that the ultimate aim is to realise this true nature and experience uninterrupted joy.
Perhaps an alternative perspective would be that we are here to experience all the contrasts of a physical existence and the ups and downs of experiencing joys in many different manifestations and forms. Mentoring relationships are one of the ways that we can try to bring more wisdom into navigating these ups and downs and develop habits which are conducive to bringing positivity and joy into our lives.
One of the challenges I’ve found as a piano teacher in recent times is that my interest has shifted towards encouraging people to experience more joy and less towards the mechanics of jazz piano and improvisation. I still enjoy making music and performing as a jazz pianist sometimes but generally I find it more interesting and fun to explore creativity more freely and follow different flows as I feel directed to at different times.
2. Exploration
Many of these topics are connected and interlinked and one of the ways that I think we can experience more joy is to give ourselves permission to explore more. It can often feel like we’re facing a competitive world and especially in music and art we have to become the best and specialise or else we’ll never ‘make it’. On the other hand, if we force ourselves to do things which we don’t feel inspired and excited to do, it can create negative feelings and frustration in our body when we force ourselves to work at our craft for the sake of ensuring that we’ll be successful enough.
Generally my encouragement is for people to explore music, explore jazz and jazz piano, explore art, explore creativity. Try different things, composing, improvising, solo creations, group creations, electronic music, different instruments, different styles, different techniques or other art forms. Try to follow your inspiration and excitement. I’ve generally found that when I was really focused on a grand goal like becoming a great jazz pianist, although it furnished some fruitful results, it can embed a degree of tension, frustration and disconnection into the relationship with the activity. Over time, I’ve found it more preferable to focus on the inspiration and excitement of trying new ideas and experiments with music or outside music which for me at least, feels like it brings more stimulation and joy into my body and the relationship with whatever activity I might be exploring. A mentoring relationship is a great way to encourage exploration and not only focus on achieving goals and getting to a destination.
3. Creativity
Again, creativity is strongly connected to exploration. One thing I’ve often found is that some people can feel blocked about creativity because we’ve grown up with certain ideas about creative geniuses in our culture.
From my understanding, it’s a completely natural state for the mind to come up with new ideas all the time. Indeed, most people are still living in a paradigm where the mind is coming up with an unlimited variety of ideas about how we might be in trouble or how there might be danger lurking round the corner. But when we can learn to assuage those ideas and calm the mind, we can focus on putting it towards more creative and positive use. Mentoring is a great tool for helping people to connect with their naturally creative intelligence.
The other element is that, the mind is naturally very creative and constantly asking, ‘what if this’ or ‘what if that’ or ‘what would happen if’ or ‘imagine if’ or ‘what if I combined x with y’. But we also have a judgemental element that says ‘no that won’t work’ or ‘ no, that’s not good’ or ‘no, I would need this and this first’. One concept I like to work with here is to try and separate the two, generate ideas vs. using discernment to decide what is worth pursuing or worth keeping.
I also like to compare it to evolution. Instead of waiting for the muse to strike, it can be useful to generate a large range of creations and output and then decide what’s worth using and keeping. It’s generally better to try something and create something and get the creative juices flowing and then bring in the element of selection and discernment later. In other words, generate a fair degree of variations and then use the element of (natural) selection/discernment. In our mentoring conversations we can explore this topic in more detail.
4. Play/playfulness
Another element which can be integral for creativity is play/playfulness. When I was studying jazz piano, I was often quite scared of doing improvising badly or getting in other people’s way. One day, I was in a group lesson and having a go at accompanying in a jazz setting and I was explaining that I found it difficult because I felt like I was getting in the way, knowing that when you accompany you’re supposed to be supporting the soloist and not being the main voice. But it meant that instead, what I played was unconfident and hesitant which ended up not being good accompaniment in a different kind of way. My teacher told me to accompany in the worst way I possibly could, break all the rules of ‘good’ accompaniment and this completely freed me up to try all sorts of different things like playing loud and discordantly. On paper it should have sounded bad but in reality, it added all sorts of interesting colour, vibrancy and confidence to the music.
Creativity needs this kind of atmosphere of play where people feel free to try things, experiment, fail and learn from failure. It’s totally natural for children to play and try things and we tend to assume that it’s not something adults are supposed to do. But actually, playing is so important for creativity, trying new approaches, creating lightness in an environment, not allowing things to become stuck and stagnant and making all sorts of aspects of life light and fun. This is another respect in which mentoring can play an important role in encouraging people to try something which is actually very natural but somehow socialised out of us.
5. Permission (to do what excites you)
Often people know that they really want to be doing something exciting and creative and adventurous but society has generally impressed upon them that they’re supposed to be living in a certain way or that it’s hard to make a success of the things that they really want to do. Often the only thing that is needed from mentoring is permission to do those exciting things and try out those new inspirations. Often we sort of know that this is the path that we should be on and that will bring us more fulfilment but we just need that little push or encouragement that yes, I can do this and it’s ok to try and it IS going to reap benefits at some point even if it’s not in the short term or the medium term.
To compliment this, sometimes we also need some nuanced and more wide ranging direction that yes let’s do those exciting things but let’s also consider some wider implications. Do we need to do knuckle down and push hard towards our goals, do we need to take on some other work to support our passions or do we need to consider some wider responsibilities within society.
6. Goal setting and projects
Generally, I find that people are used to a very goal oriented approach to life and are used to working towards becoming a better musician or artist by working in an incremental and compartmentalised manner. But some people on the other hand, are naturally more creative and more exploratory and I find that I can provide more useful guidance for such people by encouraging more structure, more goals and step by step development. Equally, over time, my students can become familiar with more exploration and creativity and then it can be helpful to reintroduce more goal orientation and working towards completing small projects. Mentoring is the perfect context to explore the dynamics of these potentially opposing dynamics.
7. Meditation and spirituality
While I was studying in the Netherlands I often met people who were interested in spirituality and meditation, including my teacher and it felt completely normal and natural to start exploring it. This was in contrast to my experience living and growing up in the UK where there tends to be a dominance and tacit assumption for a reductionist materialist paradigm.
As a result, I sometimes like to introduce students and mentees to meditation and spiritual practices. I feel that meditation can help with improving concentration and bringing more clarity into one’s life. But ultimately there are deeper aspects which bring one in alignment with a deeper purpose and service to the world. Generally in today’s world, we tend to grow up with values which are in service to economics/capitalism and although there are benefits and positives to this approach, it fails to take into account a broader health and wellbeing for all people, beings and the planet. Therefore, I find that meditation is able to both bring a deeper focus and clarity into our lives and broaden our awareness of the problems in the world that need addressing and connect us with a deeper creative intelligence which can help us to find solutions to such problems. Mentoring is a great opportunity to introduce some spiritual practices, explore both narrow focus and broad awareness and ensure that a student or mentee doesn’t become too imbalanced in one particular direction.
Here’s a link to Headspace which is how I got started with meditation.
And to three gurus I’m interested in:
https://isha.sadhguru.org/uk/en
8. Healing our relationship with money, wealth and prosperity
When I was younger, I generally gravitated towards more left wing perspectives. I was troubled by the suffering and injustices in the world and felt that a huge factor in this was poverty and inequality. In recent years I have come to appreciate some of the values of the right of politics and come to better understand where they are coming from though I probably still tend to lean more towards the left in general. One aspect of having a left wing perspective when I was younger, at least for myself, was that I tended to view money as bad and often harmful and potentially poisoning for society. Certainly when money is placed on a pedestal and when money is able to corrupt people to do things which are not conducive to a harmonious society, then money can become problematic and damaging. If lots of people start choosing to become rich by selling drugs, weapons or lobbying on behalf of addictive/harmful activities, then money can become a very corrosive force.
However, money can also be incredibly useful and helpful. One of the main benefits of money is that it’s incredibly flexible, for example in comparison to bartering. It’s hard to determine a precise exchange rate for items such as, let’s say, chickens and building materials and neither are necessarily easily transportable. On the other hand, to create something portable, flexible and that can be easily divided and which can represent the value of different items can be immeasurably useful. And so money can be used in many good ways, it can be given to people in need, it can be used to buy necessities like food and shelter, it can be used to buy things which bring joy into people’s lives, it can be stored up so that one can invest for the future or make upgrades to a business or a home and potentially many other uses which it can be put towards.
It can often be the case that if you see money as bad, you will start rejecting the possibility of it coming into your life. Whereas, if you see the potential benefits of money, you will have a healthier relationship with it and start seeing it as something which is helpful and beneficial and which flows in and out of your life as you need it. Whilst there can be many valid criticisms of money particularly from the left, it’s important not to see them as an absolute conclusion on the issue and try to develop a healthy relationship with money that neither pedestalises it nor rejects it as bad and thereby inadvertently rejects it out of one’s life. Through our mentoring conversations we can try to identify areas where one might be blocking the flow of money because of negative thoughts and feelings on the subject.
9. Health, diet and wellness
I find that it’s incredibly important to develop a healthy body and healthy mind in order to achieve one’s desires and goals. If one’s body is not very active and is suffering from various ailments, generally the mind is going to feel more negative and frustrated and every task is going to feel harder and more challenging. If on the other hand, one manages to bring a degree of harmony, balance, poise and ease into one’s body and mind, activities will generally be smoother and life will flow more easily and be more productive.
To achieve more harmony, balance and ease, it’s important to put the right fuel into the body and the right impressions in terms of what we digest with the mind, i.e. culture, news, conversations, the content of relationships and sense impressions etc. Before one can make progress as a musician, artist or in other professions, it’s important to first establish a platform of good diet, clear and positive mind and general good health. Without this, one might make progress to a degree but at a certain point, bad habits and bad health will catch up with us and slow us down in the long run. When I was studying jazz piano, I was often tempted to push myself harder than my body was ready for. Sometimes I maybe had certain tensions or my body was telling me it was tired but I would push through regardless, feeling that it was virtuous and desirable to work hard and pursue my ambitions no matter what. But time and time again, I would get minorly burnt out and end up taking more time out than if I’d worked with more consistency. So health, diet and wellness is immensely important and a vital topic to explore in mentoring conversations because of its propensity to improve other aspects of one’s life.
While exploring and learning about yoga I also developed an interest in Ayurveda at a certain point and can highly recommend booking a consultation with Sashi Sathyavathi if you’re interested.
https://www.msaholistic.life/
10. Collaboration and co-creation
One of the things which my teacher introduced me to in The Netherlands was ideas relating to complexity theory and complex systems in business. I found these ideas really interesting and I feel that there’s huge potential in the future for all of us to work more collaboratively together in order to amplify our interests and passions and create really interesting innovations by combining insights and perspectives from different professions, traditions and ways of working. Also, for some people, working collaboratively comes much more naturally than working alone and so it can often make sense to lean into such tendencies and dispositions. This is one of the topics we can explore in our mentoring conversations.
Our capitalist societies usually have a tendency to glorify the individual and emphasise working flat out and developing oneself as an autonomous agent in a ‘dog eat dog world’. Whilst development as an individual can be really interesting and fulfilling, it’s also really beneficial to develop connections and collaborations with people which can often amplify what we’re capable of as individuals and lead to innovations and new creative solutions. Therefore this is something that I also like to explore and encourage in my mentoring.
Please get in contact if you’d like to find out more about mentoring and mentoring conversations: