The day I realised I was coaching people to be more like me.
9 min read · Some mentoring does not help a person become more themselves.
Then one conversation changed the way I heard my own advice.
I was speaking with a leader I respected. Bright, thoughtful, and more perceptive than many people around her realised. She had been holding back in a room that needed more from her.
Not because she lacked judgment.
Because she understood the room perfectly.
She knew what happened. She knew who became exposed, who became difficult, and who became easier to exclude next time.
We spoke for a while. I gave her the advice that had helped me in similar rooms.
Be clearer. Be steadier. Say less before the point. Control the temperature. Hold the line.
She listened carefully. Then she said something close to, “I can do that. I just think I would sound more like you than like myself.”
That was the moment I saw the problem.
Some mentoring does not help a person become more themselves.
That is a difficult sentence to write, because most mentoring begins with care. Someone comes to you with a moment they are struggling with. A difficult manager. A tense board relationship. A room where they know they need to say something but can already feel themselves tightening around the risk.
You listen. You recognise the pattern. Then, with the confidence of someone who has survived versions of it before, you offer what worked for you.
For a long time, I thought that was generosity.
The blind spot is the moment a leader mistakes the behaviour that helped them survive for the behaviour another person needs to lead.
1. The advice sounds useful.
A leader asks for help before a difficult conversation. The mentor helps them sharpen the message. The advice is practical, calm, and immediately usable.
What sits underneath.
The advice may also carry a hidden instruction: speak in the shape the system already trusts.
That shape may have worked for the mentor. It may even work for the person receiving the advice. But success is not the only test. The deeper question is what the person had to edit to succeed.
2. The room has a preferred version of credibility.
Someone is told to be more concise, more composed, more direct, or more certain.
What sits underneath.
The room may not be asking for better leadership. It may be asking for a more familiar version of leadership.
That distinction matters. A person can become more polished and less present at the same time. They can become easier for senior people to absorb, while the part of them that could have widened the conversation starts learning how to fit inside it.
3. The mentor calls adaptation maturity.
The mentor helps someone manage the temperature of the room. They teach timing, restraint, and the discipline of not making the moment heavier than the system can hold.
What sits underneath.
Sometimes that is maturity.
Sometimes it is compression.
The difference is hard to see from the outside because both can look calm. Both can sound professional. Both can be rewarded.
But one expands the leader’s range. The other teaches them which part of their range to leave outside the door.
4. The person improves, but something narrows.
The person becomes more fluent. More acceptable. More recognisable to the people who make decisions.
What sits underneath.
The room may be rewarding the exact behaviour that keeps the deeper pattern intact.
That is the uncomfortable part. A leader can become more effective inside a system without becoming free inside it. They can carry the advice well and still lose contact with something essential in their own signal.
5. The system travels through the mentor.
A trusted mentor shares what experience has taught them.
What sits underneath.
Experience is never neutral. It has been shaped by reward signals.
How quickly to interrupt. How much feeling to show. When to soften a truth. When to hold eye contact. When to look away. When to become easier to absorb.
Over time, those patterns become part of the mentor’s body before they become part of the mentor’s language.
Then they get passed on as advice.
This is why mentoring needs a mirror, not only a conversation.
In an Echo Sprint, those moments become visible as a Discovery Mirror: a way for the leader to see the behavioural pattern clearly enough to choose a different response while the pressure is still real.
— Where did the leader hold back?
— What reward signal made that behaviour feel rational?
— Which part of the response was judgment, and which part was inherited adaptation?
— Where is the one Lever that can help the leader recover range without pretending the room has no consequences?
That is the deeper work.
Not through a borrowed script.
Through a more honest relationship with the moments that shape how a leader shows up.
The most dangerous mentoring often feels the most generous.
The gap is closeable.