2: Coaching and Mentoring Styles and Models Available to Purchase

In some ways, being a coach or mentor reflects the personality and approaches used by the practitioner in determining how they present in that role. Coaching and mentoring skills are often used in and amongst other interventions and can often be implicit rather than explicit. Formal coaching and mentoring approaches can also vary depending on the kind of work you are undertaking in different youth work contexts. For example, an employed and fully trained youth worker may work differently from someone who is volunteering in this role and not engaging with young people on a day-to-day basis. Or a coach or mentor within a school environment may work slightly differently from someone working in a youth club setting. However, it is important that a coach or mentor has a good understanding and self-knowledge about their working processes, so that they can help the young people engaging with them to know what to expect and understand those variable boundaries. This chapter will examine different kinds of approaches to enable coaches and mentors to have confidence in the way in which they would specifically like to work. We will also look at a range of tools or models that can be used within coaching and mentoring that will form the basis of the coach or mentor’s ‘toolkit’. We will try to help you identify which tools might best suit not only your personality or experiences, but also those which might be useful to young people in different situations. We would encourage you to experiment a bit and try out some of these with the young people you are working with. You can then invite them to give you feedback on how they found these tools and whether you think they would be useful in future work.