Why ask questions about emotions?

Emotions in themselves are not susceptible to moral evaluation; they simply are what they are, neither wrong nor right. Yet it’s important to track emotions in Christian mentoring. Three reasons for this are:

• They can be predicated on an accurate or an inaccurate reading of the circumstances that give rise to the emotion. If they come from an inaccurate reading, then those emotions may be inappropriate.
• They are often very powerful, behind-the-scenes drivers behind our actions, our decisions and the way we perceive and relate with others, and those things do bring us into moral territory.
• They can indicate a trajectory towards personal health and thriving or toward dysfunctional and unsustainable patterns of living.

In such a huge field, where do you begin?

Our human emotions are so many and varied it’s hard to know where to start to ask about a person’s emotional health. Which emotions are we trying to track?

One very popular mnemonic is ‘mad, sad, glad, scared’. If you can get a reading on these four fundamental emotions you are most of the way there to having a useful understanding of a person’s emotional health. However, I have found it helpful to add a 5^thcategory of ‘keen’ to explore emotions that relate to desire, enthusiasm, passion and hope. The following questions might provide a springboard into investigating ‘mad, sad, glad, scared and keen.’

Mad

• What has been making you cross lately?
• When have you recently had to consciously keep your anger in check?
• Over what things has your irritation spilled out in the last few weeks?
• How are you responding to injustice in your circle of influence?

Sad

• When was the last time you wept, and what was that about?
• What losses are you dealing with at the moment?
• Who do you know whose suffering breaks your own heart?
• What proportion of your typical day is spent thinking sad thoughts?

Glad

• What brings you delight?
• Who has affirmed you recently and what did they say?
• What is the most fun thing you’ve done in the last month?
• What is your most satisfying recent achievement?

Scared

• Who are you suspicious of or cannot trust?
• Have you had any disturbing dreams lately? What were they about?
• What do you worry might happen to members of your family?
• How do you fear Satan might try to wreck your ministry?

Keen

• What are you most looking forward to in the week ahead?
• If you could manage it, what would you love to give more time to?
• What part of your current role are you most passionate about?
• If God gave you one wish, what would you ask for?

Each of the fundamental emotions we have considered – anger, sorrow, joy, fear, desire – could lead a person in a positive or a negative direction. There is such a thing as appropriate and inappropriate, helpful and unhelpful instances of each of those emotions.

Therefore, a mentor might follow up the questions above – which are non-evaluative, information-seeking questions – with openly evaluative questions such as these:

• In what ways does your anger reflect God’s character and in what ways does it not?
• In what ways does your sorrow reflect God’s character and in what ways does it not?
• In what ways does your joy reflect God’s character and in what ways does it not?
• In what ways does your fear reflect God’s character and in what ways does it not?
• In what ways does your desire reflect God’s character and in what ways does it not?

I am firmly convinced that Christian mentoring necessarily involves helping a person consciously, deliberately and freely move from their present state of affairs to what, in God’s eyes, is a better state of affairs. That, in turn, necessarily involves the person having a clear idea of where they are, where God is calling them to be, and developing a desire to make the move forward.

But what about when a mentoree sets out on that journey to where they believe God is calling them to be and the process of change falls over? How can a mentor help to discern what is going on and why things are not progressing as first imagined? How can a mentor be a facilitator of positive change?

Through my reading of the literature on change management[1], four elements emerged as tremendously important for any change process:

• Discontent
• Hope
• Capacity
• Strategy

This suggested to me a simple ‘triage’ approach to exploring in a mentoring conversation why a change process has stalled. Where has it come off the rails? Is there a lack of discontent, or hope, or capacity, or strategy or some combination of these lacks? Once you have a clearer idea of what you’re dealing with you can put your efforts where it is most needed.

Examine Discontent

Not all discontent is valid and some attempts at change are predicated on discontent that God wants to transform into humble acceptance. However, change can also stall because mentorees who have a niggle that change is needed, then become inappropriately complacent once they have taken a step or two. These feelings and thoughts of discontent must be examined. If they are found to be valid it’s important that the mentoree is not simply prepared to put up with things the way they are, tolerating a state of affairs that falls far short of God’s intentions.

This backing off from change can come from a skewed sense of what is ‘normal’, an aversion to unpleasantness, a desire not to be negative, or sheer laziness. Whatever the cause, it is not until people are sufficiently fed up with what the kingdom of this world has to offer that they will begin on the path towards the promise held out in the kingdom of God.

As people in the marketing business say, first you have to sell the problem, then you can sell the solution. The role of a mentor may be to ‘rub raw the sores of discontent’, validating dissatisfaction where appropriate and affirming righteous anger over things that are not right. There are, of course, vested interests that are determined to prevent God’s transformative work moving forward and will seek to hose down discontent through either oppression or soothing. The chief of these vested interests are spiritual forces that must be exposed and confronted.

There is a prophetic edge to this part of facilitating change in mentoring. Being a godly mentor requires courage to declare the truth; to afflict the comfortable as well as to comfort the afflicted. Be careful not to make yourself so unpopular that you have no opportunity to work with your mentoree into the next stage! Be mindful of how much discontent people can bear before they become bitter and resentful, or crushed and despairing.

Stimulate Hope

A second point at which change can come off the rails is where hope is too dim to light the pathway ahead. A failure of imagination is crippling to hope. Even a person deeply dissatisfied with the present state of affairs will not embrace change unless they can see the prospect of a better future.

Imagination may fail for two reasons: fixation on threats and obstacles, and lack of exposure to alternative scenarios. Mentors have the task of presenting a larger perspective which addresses both these problems:

• Acknowledging threats and obstacles, but placing them in a bigger frame that also includes the stupendous power of God
• Drawing out stories of how God has worked across the centuries and is working across the world and across the street in contexts that have resonance with the mentoree

Strengthen Capacity

Discontented with the present and hopeful for a better future, mentorees may still come unstuck if they over-reach, attempting change for which they are not equipped. Consider how the Israelites had to strengthen their capacity before they could embrace the change God had in mind for them to occupy the promised land. God tells Moses in Ex 23:29-30

‘I will not drive them out in a single year, because the land would become desolate and the wild animals too numerous for you. Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have increased enough to take possession of the land.’

Change can falter because too much is attempted at once, or the process is rushed, or the intended change is unrealistic. Mentors can help to:

• assess the correct pace of change
• encourage steadiness, patience and perseverance
• identify resource gaps
• secure appropriate external support
• encourage the mentoree to refocus the direction of change if capacity simply cannot match intentions

Capacity issues are best tackled in the context of prayer. God’s grace in its endlessly various forms is an unparalleled resource within mentoring. We can be confident that God will supply the wherewithal to follow his call, but sometimes we do not have because we do not ask. If it turns out that a refocus of direction is required, mentorees must be able to receive this message as God’s wisdom and it is in prayer that they will hear his voice.

Develop Strategy

The final element essential to any effective change process is a thoughtfully considered strategic plan that provides traction so a person can actually get moving on implementing change in practical ways. Without this a mentoree remains stuck in the realm of nice ideas, possibility and potential, good intentions and empty words.

Developing strategy will involve breaking down a large, overarching goal into smaller, more specific action steps. There are several methods for going about this but one approach I find particularly helpful when dealing with a complex change process is Kurt Lewin’s ‘Force Field Analysis’. This two-step model first identifies positive and negative forces relevant to the desired change – positive forces that could help the change to happen and negative forces that you’re up against. The second step is to identify specific actions that would strengthen the positive forces and other actions that would help to neutralise or overcome the negative forces.

In general, when seeking to facilitate change mentors can draw attention to a few key considerations:

• encourage mentorees to anchor their desired change in regular routines and habits
• prompt mentorees to think ahead, considering the knock-on effects – the shock of unintended consequences can easily undermine changes that have not had time to take root
• set a schedule for regular review and evaluation so that the change process can be tweaked in the light of ongoing developments.

Facilitating change can get complicated but giving attention to these four elements could provide a simple structure for finding a way forward.

[1]If you want to dig into this topic, try John Kotter, Leading Change, Harvard Business School Press, 2012, Nic Beech and Robert MacIntosh, Managing Change, Cambridge University Press, 2012, and Robert Quinn, Deep Change, Jossey-Bass, 1996

Exercising Caution Around Goal-Setting

Both the process and the outcomes of setting goals in a mentoring context can be powerful. But that does not necessarily mean goal setting is always a good thing.

Some mentorees are what I would call ‘goal-averse’. This is usually a result of having been exposed to an approach to setting goals that they found unhelpful or even damaging. The very mention of goals makes them shudder and they might have similar reactions to terms like ‘target’, ‘objective’, ‘outcome’, ‘checkpoint’, ‘ambition’, ‘mission’ and ‘aim’. Such ‘crunchy’ language does not, for them, sit well amid a heartfelt search for how God is working in their lives and how they can respond faithfully to His work. However, different language that emphasises a ‘softer’ side may be more appealing. Words like ‘hope’, ‘dream’, ‘desire’, ‘longing’, ‘yearning’, ‘hunger’, and ‘passion’ are useful to overcome previous negative experiences of goal setting.

While I am not committed to any particular vocabulary relating to goals and goal setting, I am firmly convinced that Christian mentoring necessarily involves helping a person consciously, deliberately and freely move from their present state of affairs to what, in God’s eyes, is a better state of affairs. That, in turn, necessarily involves the person having a clear idea of where they are, where God is calling them to be, and developing a desire to make the move forward.

What might contribute to a person having a negative experience of goal setting? In their 2009 Harvard Business School Working Paper, Goals Gone Wild[1], Ordóñez, Schweitzer, Galinsky, and Bazerman came up with five ways in which goal setting can produce negative outcomes. They identify,

“specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation.”

Although their research dealt with corporate/commercial settings, the relevance for Christian organisations and Christian leaders is not hard to see.

A further caution needs to be exercised around the use in mentoring of the popular ‘SMART goals’ methodology. The SMART acrostic emphasises Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-framed goals. (There are some variations to the acrostic in the literature.) This methodology was developed in the commercial sphere and is best suited to performance goals. It’s an approach that is well suited to coaching and does have some usefulness in mentoring when dealing with more superficial, intermediate goals. But the deeper, more transformational goals of Christian mentoring will have to do with personhood – the sort of person the mentoree is becoming as a result of God’s transforming work in their lives. The SMART goals methodology is not well adapted to this sort of goal.

Developing Healthy Goal Setting Practice

Taking into account the warnings of Ordóñez and her research team, and considering the special emphasis on personhood that undergirds mentoring, we Christian mentors should seek to develop healthy goal setting practices where goals/longings:

• are set by mentorees
rather than their mentors
• are kept flexible and open for realignment and development
• are not simply about performance but also take account of the inner life and being of mentoree
• are progressively shaped around the hope God stirs within the mentoree
• are a grateful response to grace and not a means of currying favour or avoiding punishment

If these elements are firmly in place, the articulation of goals (or longings) within mentoring has the potential to:

• stimulate hope
• clarify priorities
• provoke movement
• calibrate progress
• prepare for celebration

Christian mentoring is built on the deeper reality of God’s already present activity in the life of a mentoree. Because this divine work is always transformative with a trajectory that begins where the person is today and arches forward into a better future where God has renewed the whole of creation, our work as Christian mentors will always have a place for the setting of goals, by the mentoree, which more and more closely reflect God’s intentions.

[1]Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Settingby Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. Bazerman. Harvard Business School Working Paper 09-083, 2009