 In the next 7 minutes, I would like to make sure that all of us have a clear understanding of how Toastmasters envisions mentoring and why some of us might have got it slightly wrong. Today I am going to talk about mentoring and how Toastmasters has defined mentoring and I remember giving this project almost 3 years ago when pathways had just rolled out in our district. This was in the good old days in Kuwait city where we could have a meeting in person and not on Zoom. And I remember many senior Toastmasters had attended our meeting because at that time I was considered the Pathways expert. I hope I still am and they wanted to understand from me how Pathways has defined or redefined the concept of mentoring. And at the end of the meeting they came up to me and said Kaji, that was a revelation. But why did they say that? With the rollout of Pathways, Toastmasters has clearly segregated the support that we provide to our members in two different categories coaching and mentoring. What do we understand about coaching? In our normal life we might have something like a football coach, a music coach or maybe even a drama coach and what are the features that sort of link all of these activities together. For coaching the first thing is that the coach must be skilled in the subject. If you are a football coach I expect you to be an expert in football. If you are a music coach I expect you to be a good musician and if you are a drama coach I certainly hope that you are a good actor. The second aspect of coaching is that you have the skill but you should be able to transfer this skill to those who desire it. And this is not something that everyone can do. It also has its own skill set. Third part about coaching is that it's a short term engagement. In Toastmasters coaching could be for example a member who has difficulty in body language. So a senior Toastmaster who has the expertise in body language could coach this person for a period of let's say two or three sessions, short term engagement and once the skill is transferred the role of the coach is over. So skills transfer them and short term. That's the role defined by a coach. So what is then a mentor? We can consider a mentor as someone who supports us and who guides us in our journey especially in Toastmasters. And I love this quote by Bob Proctor on mentoring where he says that a mentor is someone who sees more talent and ability within you than you see in yourself and helps to bring it out of you. How does that translate when we compare mentoring to coaching? First of all skills is not a necessity in mentoring. Unlike coaching where you need to have that skill to coach a particular person in mentoring it is more about supporting it the person supporting your protégé. If the mentor feels that this person requires to develop his body language he can always reach out to coaches who can coach this person for that particular skill set only and then the mentor takes over and guides him on the rest of the journey. The second thing is that the mentor does not transfer skills rather he will share his own experiences because remember a protégé also has his own skill set. So mentor-protégé relationship is more of a learning experience for both. The third part of a mentoring assignment is that it is a long term. As Toastmasters you need to commit at least six months. You can commit more time but six months is the minimum expectation. So if you really think about it what we used to call mentoring is really coaching. We used to look at our protégé's speech we used to correct it and we used to tell him you must do this you must do that that's not mentoring that is coaching. If you want to be a mentor you need to be there for the protégé to find out for himself or herself what they are good at and develop their own wings and fly. Clear distinction between coaching and mentoring. Skills here it is more of support skill transfer this is more of experience sharing short term and here it is long term. So it is very clear to me that all of us need coaches to help us to build specific skills and we need many of them for each of the skills that they are good at but we need one mentor to be with us on a journey into Toastmasters. The question is do you need a mentor or not the question is do you have a mentor and if you don't have a mentor please go and find one.