What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from The Art of Showing Up
Coaches and mentors spend most of their time attending to someone else's growth, which can make it easy to forget that the same principles of real support apply to them too. Rachel Wilkerson Miller's central idea, that support only functions when it is specific and reciprocal, is worth examining from both directions in a coaching or mentoring relationship. A mentor who tells a mentee "reach out whenever you need me" has offered something well meaning but hard to use, since the mentee often cannot tell which problems are worth someone else's time. The same pattern shows up when a mentor's own peers offer vague support that never becomes concrete. This piece adapts the book's four ideas, knowing your own limits as a person who gives support professionally, offering and modeling concrete help, letting yourself receive support too, and building small consistent habits of care into a mentoring relationship, to the particular demands of guiding other people.
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
Naming your own limits as someone paid or trusted to support others
A coach or mentor who has not named their own capacity tends to keep taking on more mentees or sessions until the quality of attention they can offer any one person drops.
A mentor agrees to take on two additional mentees during an already full season because turning someone away feels unkind, then gives every relationship less than it needs.
Before adding a new mentee or client, check the addition against your current caseload and name what you would need to adjust.
Modeling specific help instead of open ended availability
"Reach out whenever" is not a plan a mentee can use. A specific offer, let us set a standing time to review your progress every other week, gives the relationship real structure.
A mentor tells a new mentee to message anytime with questions, and the mentee, unsure what counts as worth asking, goes silent for months instead.
Replace open ended availability with one standing, specific time and format for support each month.
Letting yourself be supported, not only the one who supports
Many coaches and mentors are more comfortable giving support than receiving it, which can leave their own needs unaddressed for years. Accepting supervision, peer consultation, or a mentor of your own is part of doing the work well.
A mentor absorbs a mentee's difficult crisis without processing it with anyone else, and the weight accumulates silently across many such moments.
Identify one peer or supervisor you can debrief with regularly and schedule that time as seriously as a client session.
Building the mentoring relationship on small consistent moments
The mentoring relationships people remember and rely on rarely hinge on one dramatic intervention. They are built from smaller repeated acts, a consistent check in, a promise kept about following up, showing up the same way in an ordinary week as in a difficult one. That reliability, more than any single piece of advice, is usually what a mentee carries forward.
When a mentee is in crisis, the instinct is to give everything and set your own limits and need for support aside entirely. Meet the immediate moment, then return quickly to your own limits and your own support system, because a mentor running on empty cannot sustain the reliability that mentoring actually depends on over time.
Name one thing, honestly
- Where have you offered open ended availability instead of a specific structure? - Who supports you the way you support the people you mentor? - What small, repeatable practice could make your support more reliable without depending on your own reserves running low?
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
Identify one peer or supervisor you can debrief with regularly and schedule that time as seriously as a client session.