What Coaches/Mentors Can Learn from Braiding Sweetgrass
Terrence had coached youth basketball for a decade and measured his success the way most coaches do, wins, scholarships, kids who made varsity. One former player came back years later, not to thank him for a winning season, but for the one practice where Terrence had sat with him after a bad loss and just listened. Terrence realized he had spent years extracting effort from kids, drills, conditioning, discipline, without asking nearly as often what they needed back. He started ending practices differently, asking each player one honest question about how they were doing outside the sport, and treating the answer as part of the job, not a distraction from it. The scoreboard barely changed. Kids started staying in the program longer, telling him things they used to keep to themselves.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
The gift economy Kimmerer describes
Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a trained botanist, describes plants and land in her own tradition as gift-givers whose gifts create a responsibility to give something back, not resources for the taking. She offers this as her own inherited perspective, not a universal coaching philosophy. For a mentor, the useful translation is treating a mentee's trust as a gift calling for something given back, not simply talent to develop and claim credit for.
A packed roster of mentees makes it tempting to focus only on whoever shows the most visible potential. Practice: before your next session, name specifically what that mentee has given you, effort, trust, honesty, and acknowledge it directly.
Before your next session, name specifically what that mentee has given you, effort, trust, honesty, and acknowledge it directly.
Where this shows up in daily life
Kimmerer's chapters return often to how rarely modern life notices what is taken and whether anything is given back, whether water, food, or the labor behind an object. In coaching, this shows up when a mentor tracks improvement carefully but rarely asks what the relationship has cost that person, or what they need in return for their trust.
Structured programs measure mentee progress but almost never measure what the mentor gave back in the relationship. Practice: once a month, ask each mentee directly what they need from you that they have not been getting.
Once a month, ask each mentee directly what they need from you that they have not been getting.
Practical self-application
Kimmerer's own teaching favors small, repeatable practices, gratitude before using something the earth provides, tending even one plant with attention, using fully what is taken rather than wasting it. Translated into mentoring, inspired by rather than copied from her tradition, this might mean closing each session naming something the mentee gave you, or protecting your own capacity so giving does not run you dry.
A mentor's own limits are easy to ignore when a mentee clearly needs more time than is available. Practice: set one fixed boundary on your mentoring time and protect it as carefully as you protect the mentee's growth.
Set one fixed boundary on your mentoring time and protect it as carefully as you protect the mentee's growth.
The larger debate
Kimmerer's book also sits inside a live, unresolved conversation about land stewardship, the place of Indigenous knowledge within environmental science, and land rights and sovereignty. These are real, evolving debates the book engages with rather than settles, and reasonable people disagree on specifics. A coach drawing on this book's ideas should treat that debate as background context, not a stance to bring into the mentoring relationship.
A mentor trying to notice, appreciate, and reciprocate with every person they coach runs into the plain limit of time: a full roster leaves little room for the individual attention reciprocity requires. Depth and breadth compete directly in mentoring, and real reciprocity with everyone at once is rarely possible. Most mentors will manage this well with a few people at a time, not the whole roster simultaneously, and that is a realistic tradeoff.
Name one thing, honestly
- Which mentee have you measured only by their output, never by what the relationship has cost or given them? - Where in your coaching has your own need for renewal gone unacknowledged? - What would change if you asked mentees what they need from you as often as you ask what they can improve?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Set one fixed boundary on your mentoring time and protect it as carefully as you protect the mentee's growth.