For years, finding a mentor has been advocated as a career and personal development practice. In 2020, more individuals than ever want a mentor, and more organisations are trying to provide mentoring in the workplace as a learning and development initiative.
The benefits of mentoring are vast, for both the person being mentored, the person doing the mentoring, and the organisations they work at. Countless studies have been carried out on the positive effects mentoring can have, from confidence, to mental health, to promotion likelihood.
There's a lot to read about mentoring on the internet. But if you want a summary of all the best mentoring statistics and research on its effects, we've done the reading for you and compiled it all in one place!
So whether you're looking to learn more about mentoring, or need some killer stats to support your mentoring program at work, look no further...

You matter … pass it on, become a mentor! Every January, the mentoring movement unites in celebration of National Mentoring Month and uses the power of our collective voice to recruit new mentors for teens, adults, and drive meaningful change for all individuals. This month-long celebration of mentoring is full of exciting opportunities to grow the movement and raise awareness about the power of relationships.
Mentoring has a positive impact on youth and the volunteer mentor. Research confirms that quality mentoring relationships bring about powerful and positive changes in youth. Mentored youth have a greater chance of avoiding negative influences, such as substance abuse, bullying or dropping out of school. (guider-ai.com/blog/mentoring-statistics-the-research-you-need-to-know)
One in three youth grows up without a positive adult role model to look up too. The need for positive role models is extremely vital as families deal with the stress of unemployment, illnesses and lack of support. There is no better time than National Mentoring Month to reach out to one of our amazing mentors. Just click the contact tab above to get in touch!

Source: https://www.guider-ai.com/blog/mentoring-statistics-the-research-you-need-to-know

Research from the Korn Ferry Institute supports this paradigm shift in perceptions about coaching. The research found that most people rate "coaching and developing others" among the top three most important leadership competencies, according to 360-degree assessments.  Although this competence is rated highly, it is consistently the least practiced competency worldwide. Why does this knowing/doing gap exist? Leaders say it is because they do not have enough time; they do not know a proven process; and/or they feel it will slow down their immediate performance. These reasons, dare we say excuses-carry serious risks. If you don't take the time to coach and develop team members now, you will pay for it later-guaranteed.

​Using a haphazard, gut-feel coaching approach, only when it is convenient, yields haphazard results. If you neglect coaching to drive short-term results, you will handicap your team's ability to sustain performance over time. Coaching your team is the ultimate pay-me-now or pay-me-later leadership proposition. Applying a consistent approach to coaching others is fun-damental to leadership excellence today.

Sources: Kevin Cashman, "Leadership from the inside out: Eight Pathways to Mastery," Forbes.com

The power of positive coaching, Lee J. Colin, PhD & Julie Davis-Colan

In today's world, we have more generations than ever. It is important to steer communication, engagement, trust, and performance across generations including Gen Z, Millennials, GenX, and Baby Boomers based on Jason Dorsey's latest research. Learn why different generations experience the same challenges differently—such as working remotely—and what to do about it to drive results while increasing motivation, loyalty, and collaboration.

By understanding these new insights, strategies, and specific actions, we can apply them to keep different generations working together, focused, and motivated. Not only is iGen a large generation and very different than Millennials, but iGen are already influencing marketing, technology and workplace trends in a major way. Whether you call them iGen, Gen Z or Centennials, this new generation of consumers, employees, and voters are going to have an impact immediately.

“There has never been a more urgent and important time to understand Gen Z and Millennials in every business sector,” said Jason Dorsey. “Millennials now outspend every other generation of consumers and are the largest group in the workforce. Gen Z, already age 23, are ushering in a new era of communication, engagement, and expectations that will drive new change in every industry and market.”

Source: jasondorsey.com/blog/the-rise-of-greenwashing/

It’s vital to ensure your blood sugar levels meet your target range, as much as possible, in order to help prevent or delay long-term, serious health problems. Many of these health complications can consist of anything from heart disease, vision loss, to even kidney disease. Staying in your target range can also help improve your energy and mood. Below we have provided essential tips and tricks to help you improve your blood sugar even if you don't have diabetes.

Portion control is one of the key ways to help control calorie intake and can help maintain a moderate weight. Accordingly, proper weight management encourages beneficial blood sugar levels and has even been proven to reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Observing your portions and serving sizes can also help reduce calorie intake and lead to subsequent blood sugar spikes.

Here are some helpful tips for managing portion sizes:

• Measure and weigh portions.
• Use smaller plates.
• Avoid all-you-can-eat restaurants.
• Read food labels and check the serving sizes.
• Keep a food journal.
• Eat slowly.

Another way we can carefully monitor our blood sugar and diet is by using the glycemic index. This helpful tool measures how we absorb or digest foods, which affects the rate at which blood sugar levels rise. Both the amount and type of carbs determine how a food affects blood sugar levels. By consuming low-glycemic-index meals, you can reduce blood sugar levels, especially in those with diabetes. Although the glycemic index of foods is important, the amount of carbs consumed also matters.
Foods with a low to moderate glycemic index include:

• bulgur 
• barley 
• yogurt
• oats 
• beans 
• lentils 
• legumes 
• wheat pasta 
• non-starchy vegetables

Stress can also affect your blood sugar levels. Hormones such as glucagon and cortisol are secreted during stress. These hormones cause blood sugar levels to go up. One study showed that exercise, relaxation, and meditation significantly reduced stress and lowered blood sugar levels for students. Exercises and relaxation methods like yoga and mindfulness-based stress reduction may also help correct insulin secretion problems in chronic diabetes. 

High blood sugar (hyperglycemia) is present in one's body if you don't make enough or effectively use insulin, a hormone that regulates blood glucose and helps it enter your cells for energy. High blood sugar is associated with diabetes.

According to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), "13% of U.S. adults live with diabetes, and 34.5% have pre-diabetes." This implies that close to 50% of all U.S. adults have diabetes or pre-diabetes. Here are 5 easy ways to lower blood sugar levels naturally: 

Participating in regular exercise can help you maintain and increase insulin sensitivity. By increasing insulin sensitivity, your cells are able to more efficiently use the available sugar in your bloodstream. Exercise also helps your muscles use blood sugar for energy and muscle contraction. If you have problems with blood sugar management, you should routinely check your levels. This will help you learn how you respond to different activities and keep your blood sugar levels from getting either too high or too low. Some useful forms of exercise include weightlifting, brisk walking, running, biking, dancing, hiking, swimming, and more.

​Your body breaks carbs down into sugars (mostly glucose), and then insulin helps your body use and store sugar for energy. When you eat too many carbs or have insulin-function problems, this process fails, and blood glucose levels can rise. However, there are several things you can do about this. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) recommends managing carb intake by counting carbs and being aware of how many you need. Some studies find that these methods can also help you plan your meals appropriately, further improving blood sugar management. Many studies also show that a low carb diet helps reduce blood sugar levels and prevent blood sugar spikes. What’s more, a low carb diet can help manage blood sugar levels in the long run.

Drinking enough water may help you keep your blood sugar levels within healthy limits. In addition to preventing dehydration, it helps your kidneys flush out the excess sugar through urine. One observational study showed that those who drank more water had a lower risk for developing high blood sugar levels. Drinking water regularly helps rehydrate the blood, lowers blood sugar levels, and could reduce diabetes risk. Keep in mind that water and other non-caloric beverages are best. Sugar-sweetened drinks raise blood glucose, drive weight gain, and increase diabetes risk. 

Sources: ​SingleCare Team | “What Should My Blood Sugar Level Be?” The Checkup, 11 May 2021, https://www.singlecare.com/blog/normal-blood-glucose-levels/.

​“Manage Blood Sugar.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 28 Apr. 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/managing/manage-blood-sugar.html.
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When you uncover a problem, it’s vital to generate a multi-step plan for healthy blood sugar levels. The most important aspects to look at are: sleep, stress, exercise, movement, and nutrition, to create an effective long-term strategy. Many individual's goals are different, and can depend on whether you want to lower blood sugar, raise blood sugar, increase insulin sensitivity, or something different altogether. If you focus on a specific goal, and put the necessary effort towards that, you can easily accomplish your desired result.

The first major step in any healthy blood sugar goal is to balance carbohydrates with protein and fat. Carbohydrates (carbs) have a major impact on blood sugar, and protein and fat slow down the rate at which those carbohydrates are broken down, thus giving you more blood sugar stability. So rather than restricting carbs right off the bat, it is more advantageous to focus on creating meals and snacks that include carbs, protein, and fat.

Often just this small change can make a big difference in helping to achieve healthy blood sugar levels. By changing someone’s breakfast to something that’s much more balanced, it encourages your body and mind to feel stable, calm, and clear-headed. It is vital to focus on the quantity and quality of carbs. For people who are showing signs of insulin resistance or other blood sugar problems, it is also recommended to pay attention to the quality and quantity of carbohydrates.

A highly recommended choice would be whole foods, because they give us fiber, which helps to slow down blood sugar release. For example you could choose sweet potatoes over gluten-free bread. By choosing carbohydrates based on the glycemic load, you'll have a measure of how much impact they’ll have on blood sugar. In terms of quantity, portion size recommendations should be individualized, but changing up portion sizes is something to consider if even high-quality carbohydrates are causing blood sugar fluctuations.

It is vitally important to determine the right foods and portions based on how your body responds. A part of blood sugar regulation is really about thinking more intuitively about meals and eating. How we feel after we eat, or how eating certain things specifically makes us feel, this dictates our personal behavior and attitude towards others. Whether we’re taking the time to eat slowly or rushing through our meals at a desk, all of these key areas provide us with really valuable data on how the process of eating impacts our bodies.

It is important to understand that everyone is different. What works for an individual and their blood sugar balance is very unique. Some people tolerate certain types of carbohydrates really well, and others don’t. For one person, a bowl of oatmeal might keep them stable for four hours. For another person, it might totally drop them two hours later. All in all this takes lots of self-experimentation, and really asking yourself those questions about how you feel from one meal to the next to figure out what works for you.

The takeaway: Your blood sugar levels can have a big impact on how you feel day-to-day, so learning to balance them through your diet, exercise, and lifestyle habits can help you feel your best and avoid future health issues. Not everyone’s blood sugar levels will react the same to changes though, so working with a holistic health coach can be valuable for determining what’s best for your body.

​
Sources: ​SingleCare Team | Updated on May. 11, et al. “What Should My Blood Sugar Level Be?” The Checkup, 11 May 2021, https://www.singlecare.com/blog/normal-blood-glucose-levels/.

​“Manage Blood Sugar.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 28 Apr. 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/managing/manage-blood-sugar.html.

One of the most basic beliefs we carry about ourselves, has to do with how we view and inhabit what we consider to be our personality. A “fixed mindset” assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way, and success is the affirmation of that inherent intelligence, an assessment of how those givens measure up against an equally fixed standard; striving for success and avoiding failure at all costs become a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled. A “growth mindset,” on the other hand, thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities. Out of these two mindsets, which we manifest from a very early age, springs a great deal of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness. The consequences of believing that intelligence and personality can be developed rather than being immutably engrained traits, are remarkable. At the heart of what makes the “growth mindset” so winsome, Dweck found, is that it creates a passion for learning rather than a hunger for approval. Its hallmark is the conviction that human qualities like intelligence and creativity, and even relational capacities like love and friendship, can be cultivated through effort and deliberate practice. Not only are people with this mindset not discouraged by failure, but they don’t actually see themselves as failing in those situations — they see themselves as learning.

Source: ​https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/29/carol-dweck-mindset/

Aspiring leaders need more and better mentoring than they’re getting today. According to a recent study, the supply-demand imbalance is severe: while more than 75% of professional men and women want to have a mentor, only 37% have one (Harvard Business Review, 2019). What’s more, most of the people currently acting as mentors aren’t having as dramatic an impact as they could because they’re too narrowly focused on career advancement.
Mentoring the whole person takes more effort, more time, and more thought. Here are some practices for doing it well:

Share your stories. This simple exercise can transform the trajectory of a mentoring relationship because it shows that you’re truly interested in understanding your mentee and his or her journey, not just in dispensing professional advice. It gives you knowledge of the person’s past which enables you to make more probing inquiries over time.

Ask great questions. Effective mentors develop a storehouse of probing questions on any number of subjects.

Start with the end in mind. Perhaps the most important question you can ask a mentee is:  How do you personally define long term success?

Unpack your mentee’s “toolkit.” A valuable area to explore is your mentee’s innate gifts, aptitudes, personality characteristics, and passions.

​Of all the ways you can spend your time, mentoring has one of the highest returns on investment. It enables you to take everything you have learned and “pay it forward,” shaping the next generation of leaders. By mentoring the whole person and not limiting your conversations to career matters, you will have even greater impact and will be felt by your mentees — and everyone they influence — for years to come.

Source: Woolworth, Rick. “Great Mentors Focus on the Whole Person, Not Just Their Career.” Harvard Business Review, 9 Aug. 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/08/great-mentors-focus-on-the-whole-person-not-just-their-career.

The annual expenditure on healthcare for mental illness is 18 billion dollars (LSE CEP, 2012). Additionally, mental illness reduces the United States’ gross domestic product by 70 billion dollars each year, reflecting the loss of output from individuals who are unable to work or to work to their full capacity (LSE CEP, 2012; Centre for Mental Health, 2010). As such, mental illness is a serious concern not just for individual employees but also for their employers and for society-at-large. 

One approach to address mental health issues in the workplace is mentoring. Mentoring is a trusting relationship where a more experienced individual (the mentor) provides guidance and support to a less experienced person (the mentee) (Kram, 1985). Mentoring theory (Ragins & Kram, 2007) suggests that mentors can provide their mentees with two types of support: career-related and psychosocial (Kram, 1985; Noe, 1988; Ragins & McFarlin, 1990). Psychosocial support typically takes the form of counseling, coaching, friendship, or personal and emotional guidance (Fowler & O'Gorman, 2005). Career-related support in mentoring relationships can assist mentees in “learning the ropes,” leading to higher job performance ratings and enhanced satisfaction (Scandura & Williams, 2004). Collectively, psychosocial and career support can build mentees’ trust with their mentors, which is also thought to produce socio-emotional benefits (Young & Perrewe, 2000). These two types of support indicate that mentoring has positive implications for the mentees’ mental health. Relatedly, a meta-analysis of mentoring research demonstrated that mentoring programs could reduce mentees’ stress and strain (Eby et al., 2008). 
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Mentoring provides a unique context for individuals to discuss and normalize their concerns, share ideas for managing anxieties, and learn how to build healthy relationships. In a context of increased pressure, relatively inexpensive organizational practices such as mentoring can play a critical role in supporting employees and therefore the wider society that they protect. 

Become a mentor. Find a mentor. 

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