I was delighted when Cecilia Lipovsek approached me to write an article for the ITI-LRG earlier in April. After a quick brainstorming session I decided to share my experience with mentoring and coaching as an interpreter. I hope you’ll enjoy the read and I’d love to learn about your experience with these two CPD options.

P.S. Originally published in the LRG May 2024 Newsletter.

We interpreters love to learn. However, we mainly think of CPD in terms of perfecting our interpreting skills. When it comes to building our business acumen, one can spend days or weeks deciding where to begin.

That is why today I would like to invite you to explore two options that I recently discovered: mentoring and coaching. I will share my own experience with these two support options, compare their outcomes, and encourage you to give them a go.

I know how difficult it is for our community to reach out for help, be that because of our perfectionism, because we aren’t comfortable coming
out of our interpreting shells, or perhaps because we’re simply doubting
the outcomes. Nonetheless, I decided to look at it as an experiment, a hypothesis worth testing. Now I’m happy that I did.

I started by booking five sessions with a business coach. I chose her not because of the years of experience under her belt, but because of her communication style, energy, and messaging. This is the first lesson I learned before even starting the coaching itself: sometimes it is the deep human connection that makes us want to work with someone or, indeed, make someone want to work with us.

The second lesson I learned was that to know how to talk about your value, you first need to explain it well to yourself. This is the foundation that will keep you going during the low seasons, when you might worry about slowing demand. There are coaching techniques that, once applied, will remind you of your value and guide you like a North Star through your darkest nights.

Speaking of orientation, my coach helped me gain strategic clarity and distil my business priorities for the next year. Next, she helped me set out the steps to follow and set deadlines for them.

Her working ethics ruled out making any suggestions or sharing her personal experience to avoid distracting me. All she did was ask the right questions and guide me through my own thoughts. We always started the sessions with one issue I wanted to solve, and I always left the sessions with potential solutions. It was then my job to implement and test them.

If I were to choose a third lesson to share with you (although there are many more), it would be that you already know most of the answers. My experience with business coaching was ultimately a guided conversation with myself, where the coach made sure that I didn’t lose direction and found the answers I needed.

My experience with mentoring was somewhat different. All the people I  approached were professional interpreters and household names in our industry. They were either known for certain business skills and niche insights, or I just felt that they were the right people to ask for specific advice. For each session, I chose a question that applied to their areas of expertise, and they shared their own experience and knowledge, and gave their advice on the issue. They also referred me to other industry professionals who could take the discussion further.

Our sessions gave me the knowledge that otherwise would have taken months, if not years, to harvest on my own. In my experience, mentoring helped me to access industry-specific knowledge, whereas coaching helped me to gain strategic clarity and take action.

In conclusion, I found both coaching and mentoring very helpful and I will be going back to them as needed. Of course, both require some investment. But the beauty of it is that you’re not the only one making an investment. The people to whom you reach out also become invested in what you do, no matter whether they are coaches or mentors. They are people with whom you connect on a deep and meaningful level. By daring to ask for help, you create your personal support network, and I believe this is the best form of investment available to date.