Mentoring as a Radical Act of Presence
By Helen Patterson
There is a kind of mentoring that looks very ordinary from the outside.
Two people show up on a specific day, have a conversation, sometimes with a cup of tea that goes cold because no one is really drinking it. Words are exchanged about work, leadership, what the next steps might look like, what they might feel like. And after an hour, they part ways.
Far be it from me to criticise this set-up. Coming together through conversation is already a powerful form of connection. But I’ve always felt that a powerful layer can be missing from it.
That’s what I’ve come to call mentoring with heart. It’s an encounter that allows something much more profound to unfold beneath the surface, something that has very little to do with advice, and everything to do with presence.
Because, in my opinion, the deepest mentoring doesn’t simply transfer knowledge. It transmits being. It becomes an energetic encounter. And in a world that trains us to rush, to optimize, to perform, to split our attention across ten tabs at once, mentoring with heart can itself become a radical act: a shared return to the present moment.
The moment that changes the temperature
Most people don’t arrive at mentoring conversations as blank slates. They arrive carrying their week, their history, their nervous system, their doubts, the pressure they haven’t named out loud. They arrive with personal stories running quietly in the background: I should have this figured out by now. I’m behind. I don’t want to disappoint anyone. I’m not sure I belong here.
And the temptation, especially in workplaces, is to meet all of that with efficiency: to jump into solving mode, coaching methods, frameworks, anything that moves the person from “stuck” to “unstuck” as quickly as possible.
But mentoring with heart begins somewhere else. It begins with the simple decision to be fully with someone. What does that look like? It looks like putting down the urge to be impressive, not rehearsing your response while they’re still speaking, and listening with a depth of attention that still feels almost exotic to most people these days.
When that happens, you can quietly feel the temperature in the room change. The person’s nervous system begins to unclench, perhaps for the first time in a while. They feel safe to breathe again.
That shift matters more than we admit. Because the present moment isn’t just a place we land. It’s a place where we regain ourselves.
Presence is not a “nice extra”
We often talk about presence as if it’s a soft skill, something lovely when we have time, but dispensable when we don’t. Something we add on after the “real work” is done.
But in mentoring, presence is not decoration or an optional accessory. It’s the foundation. You can give someone advice without presence. Many people do. But when advice arrives without presence, it often lands like information, it may be useful, but it is rarely transforming. It stays in the head and doesn’t travel down into the places where people actually make choices: the body, the heart, the instinct.
Presence is what makes mentoring relational rather than transactional. Presence is what makes a person feel met, not managed. And being met is not a small thing.
To be met, truly met, can be a turning point. It reminds someone that they are not a problem to be fixed. They are a person in an endless process of becoming, allowed to be unfinished. To me, that is, in itself, a kind of healing.
Mentoring as a shared moment of meditation
When I say “mentoring as meditation,” I don’t mean it in a performative or mystical way. I mean it in the most grounded sense, with two people choosing to be here, in the present moment.
Meditation, at its heart, is attention. It is the practice of coming back from the mind’s endless commentary and arriving at what is actually happening now. Mentoring with heart invites the same return. Not by closing the eyes and sitting in silence (though silence is often part of it), but by creating a shared field of attention, an atmosphere where someone can hear themselves think again.
In that field, something interesting happens. The person being mentored often starts speaking differently, slower, maybe even less polished. And the mentor, if they are truly present too, starts listening differently. They aren’t focusing only on facts, but on what lives beneath the facts.
This is where mentoring becomes more than career support. It becomes a shared recognition of being, two people meeting in the reality underneath the job titles.
When boundaries soften, something opens
There is a reason presence can feel almost spiritual in a mentoring context.
When two people gather with genuine attention, they share more than space and time. They share nervous system cues, pace, tone, warmth, safety. We are more porous than we like to pretend.
The quality of someone’s presence can regulate us. Someone’s steady attention has the power to calm us. Human warmth can make us braver. And when that happens, the usual sense of separateness can soften, just a little. Not in a way that erases individuality, and not in a way that blurs boundaries unhealthily. But in that simple, human way where we remember: I am not alone in being human. I am not the only one who struggles. I am not the only one who doubts. I am not the only one who is trying.
We could call this empathy, attunement, co-regulation, and it would all be true. Or we could call it what it often feels like: a return to oneness. Not as an abstract philosophy, but as a lived sense of connection, an embodied remembering that we are part of something larger, held by something larger, and seen by someone else’s truth.
It’s difficult to overstate how powerful that can be for someone who has been operating in self-protection for a long time.
To be seen is to become present
A lot of people think presence is something you manufacture through willpower by focusing harder, being more mindful, scrolling less, even thinking less.
But in real life, presence is often relational. We learn presence by being met in presence. If you have ever sat with someone who was truly listening, you know what I mean. Their attention draws you out of your own spirals. It invites you to settle, and gives your mind permission to stop running.
And when you experience that enough times, something changes. You start to internalise that quality of attention. You carry it into your own life, you learn what it feels like to be with yourself without rushing or fixing.
This is why mentoring with heart develops presence in both directions. It doesn’t just help the person being mentored, it shapes the mentor too. Because to hold space well, you must practise returning, again and again. Returning to your breath. Returning to your listening. Returning to your own humanity. You must notice when you’re drifting into performance and allow yourself to come back from distraction. You must meet someone as they are, not as you want them to be.
The mentor’s temptation: control
If mentoring is presence, then one of the biggest threats to it is control. The subtle kind that calls itself “active support,” and shows up as offering solutions too quickly because silence feels awkward.
Have you noticed that too? The mind calls it caring, but often it’s just a script that prefers certainty to the unknown. It would rather fill the space with concepts and ideas, shape someone’s story into something more familiar, more manageable, more flattering to your own worldview, rather than lingering in the unknown of what isn’t resolved yet.
Mentoring with heart asks for a different posture. It asks for humility and trust: that the person in front of you has their own wisdom, their own timing, and that your role is not to pull them into your preferred outcome, but to accompany them as they find what is true for them.
Accompaniment is a radical leadership act. It says: I’m not here to dominate this moment. I’m here to honour it. And honouring the moment is, in many ways, the essence of presence.
What mentoring gives us that information never can
There is a reason people often remember a mentor for decades, even when they can’t remember what the mentor actually said. Because what remains is not always content. It’s contact. It’s the felt experience of being with someone who did not rush you. Who didn’t make you smaller. Who didn’t (knowingly or not) try to put you in a box.
In that sense, mentoring is never confined to the conversation. It ripples outward. A mentored person becomes a more present leader. A more present leader creates a more human team. A more human team becomes a safer place for truth. A safer place for truth becomes a workplace where people can actually grow.
This is how culture shifts. Not through slogans, but through presence moving from one relationship to another, like a quiet torch being passed.
The most radical thing we can do in a workplace
So what does it mean to call mentoring “radical”?
It means recognising that presence is countercultural, and acknowledging that, in many workplaces, the default mode is disconnection: speed, surface, performance, productivity at the expense of personhood.
Mentoring with heart interrupts that. It insists (gently, but firmly) that human beings are not machines, growth is not linear, and the nature of becoming is endlessly messy.
And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that we don’t just share tasks and meetings and goals. We share nervous systems, energy, the emotional weather of the rooms we enter.
When one person chooses presence, it changes what is possible in that room. When two people choose presence together, it becomes a kind of remembering, a shared recognition of being.
And in the midst of all our striving, our proving, our planning, what a gift it is to return, even briefly, to what is real. Not just as individuals. But together.
If you ask me, that is the quiet revolution we are moving towards: one moment of true presence at a time, passed from person to person, until a workplace starts to feel human again.