So I looked up the origin of the word "Mentor" and found that it is the name of an old friend of Odysseus, to whom he entrusted his household when he left on the odyssey. Old Mentor didn't do such a good job, but occasionally, the goddess Athena would take the form of Mentor, as in the quote below from Book III of the Odyssey. In Mutual Mentoring, rather than assuming that we know what the answer
is for someone else, we listen so that the heart can be heard. Here is the whole quote from Homer's The Odyssey:
"Mentor, how shall I go up there and greet him? I've had no practice with such formal speech. And then, when a young man seeks to question an older one, that could bring him shame." Athena, goddess with the gleaming eyes, then said:
"Telemachus, your heart will think of something, and power from heaven will provide the rest." Often a mentor is someone who "knows the ropes" about something we want to get involved in. This kind of relationship is very important, but at the same time the mentor needs to be able to listen, to hear in us the new thing that wants to emerge. It could be that what we want to do has never been done before. Thinking at the Edge uses the practice of Focusing to dialogue with our practical cognitive ability, so that we can think beyond the usual paradigm.
