There are various techniques on how to become the perfect guide to a potential follower, all of which should depend on your personal goals and how much control you are willing to give. Generally, there are three primary paths that a guide may take: mentoring, coaching, or directing.

It is always great to guide someone, but it is hardly ever easy. Experience and wisdom is necessary, in order to share knowledge. Moreover, knowing how to share this knowledge effectively, in order to be completely understood, is even more necessary. Being approachable, empowering, encouraging, and knowing how to make others feel better about themselves without treating them like children is another needed trait, as is pointing them towards the right directions in life while still enabling them to learn for themselves and from their mistakes on their way to success.

There are various techniques on how to become the perfect guide to a potential follower, all of which should depend on your personal goals and how much control you are willing to give. Generally, there are three primary paths that a guide may take: mentoring, coaching, or directing. A lot of times, these three types of guidance are combined or interchanged when in conversation or in the media, but there are several differences amongst them, however subtle, that need to be explored and ultimately understood.

Mentoring or mentorship pertains to a relationship between a mentor, who has more experience, knowledge, and wisdom and a protégé, who has less experience, is usually younger, and is sometimes uncertain and flighty. Mentors are usually more prominent and more skilled in certain areas of life than protégés. Mentors serve as teachers to protégés to guide them in becoming better in certain fields. Usually, mentors will do so by teaching through examples of the job itself while protégés are just starting out on their careers. By emulating their mentors, protégés will then have more of an idea of how they, too, can become just as successful as their mentors one day.

Coaching pertains to a guidance process, where a person who acts like a leader overlooks a group of people, or a single individual, with the aim of reaching certain goals. Coaching is different from mentoring because coaches are usually already done with their careers before they try and lead younger generations based on their own experiences. Also, coaches often only have a single goal in mind, while mentors may be more abstract and widespread with their goals. Coaching is most common when it comes to sports teams, where someone who was once a star player now helps other players in becoming successful in their own games and the goal is usually to earn as many victories by winning as many games as possible for the team.

Another known technique of coaching is known as life coaching. In this case, a successful person that is ready to retire may teach other people who wish to start their lives in work. In a deviant version of life coaching, a person who has been through fear in life may coach individuals who still live with the same particular fear and help them get over their anxieties and come out as improved individuals.

Directing pertains to a higher person’s instruction of a lower person. Mentors simply guide their protégés, but do not make orders; they point them towards the right direction, but don’t push them towards it. Coaches encourage their teams to train, but do not necessarily tell them exactly what they must do. But in directing, there is a closer definition to the relationship between a boss and an employee, most of all when the boss is ordering the lower people how their lives should be led.

There are various techniques on how to become the perfect guide to a potential follower, all of which should depend on your personal goals and how much control you are willing to give. Generally, there are three primary paths that a guide may take: mentoring, coaching, or directing.