The will

The will to be a mentor has been occupying my thoughts for a long time. It shows clearly in my research participants, but I haven't paid much attention to the best way of conceptualising it. Returning to Roberto Assagioli (1973) recently, I realise he might be able to provide a conceptual structure for relating my research sub-themes to the concept of the will.

Assagioli describes four aspects of the will that represent the different facets. They are:

1. The strong will - strength is only one aspect, and it is sometimes misleadingly thought to be all there is to it
2. The skillful will - the ability to obtain desired results with the minimum expenditure of energy
3. The good will - will can be a harmful weapon, but to be fulfilling, and for our welfare, the will must be good
4. The transpersonal will - this is the realm of metaneeds, essence, ultimate meaning and so on.

A study of the phenomenology of the will has revealed certain characteristics: energy, mastery, concentration, determination, persistence, initiative, organisation. There should be a lot of potential for overlap with my themes in the mentor experience.

Plenty of food for thought!


Assagioli, R. (1973). The Act of Will, London, Wildwood House.

The body in mentoring

It is sometimes said that the body is invisible in nursing. The dominant western perspective that knowledge and theory are supreme has tended to push the body into the shadows.  Ideas take preference to embodiment as a way of understanding human agency and culture (Rudge 1997). Even though the scientific body is very much the focus for nurses, the lived body, which is how patients experience their bodies, often takes back stage.

In mentoring, another meaning of bodies shows through. The patient's body becomes a site of teaching and learning.  It is a teaching and learning space - for showing a student how to do eye drops, insert a catheter, take blood pressures, apply dresssings and bandages and so on. There is, therefore, commonly a patient as third party present to mentors and students in workplace teaching situations. Mentors also use their bodies as teaching tools, physically showing practice or guiding a student's hands.

Florence Nightingale rocks!

Who would have thought that Florence Nightingale could still be so current?

"I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and administration of diet—all at the least expense of vital power to the patient."

"The everyday management of a large ward, let alone of a hospital—the knowing what are the laws of life and death for men, and what the laws of health for wards—(and wards are healthy or unhealthy, mainly according to the knowledge or ignorance of the nurse)—are not these matters of sufficient importance and difficulty to require learning by experience and careful inquiry, just as much as any other art? They do not come by inspiration to the lady disappointed in love, nor to the poor workhouse drudge hard up for a livelihood." (Florence Nightingale 1898, 2004 )

What did the Nursing Times survey tell us?

The Nursing Times survey (reported on 27th April) seemed to reveal some quite shocking statistics about mentors passing students who they wanted to fail.  Then, on the 11th May it was reported that the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) will take "immediate action" to address the concerns the survey raised.

The front line of this action entails writing to the directors of nursing in all NHS trusts and all deans in the universities and the commisioners of the education programmes to take immediate action and remind everyone involved of their responsibilities. While this is a useful first step, one wonders whether this will have the desired effect, which is presumably to ensure that students receive adequate support in their practice placements and have a fair and accurate assessment of their achievements. 

The job that mentors have to do to support and assess students is incredibly complex and in my opinion is severely underestimated when you consider the lack of time they have in which to do the work and the lack of formal or informal recognition they seem to have from their employers of the difficult job they do.
Those who do it very well can contribute a lot to our overall understanding of just what it takes to be a skilful facilitator of learning and a fair and just assessor who can really tell who you can trust to progress towards entry to the professional register and who you can't.

Trust is like paper

Compassion in nursing

There has been a lot recently in the nursing press about the compassion in nursing agenda, especially since the final report of the Prime Minister’s Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery has called for all nurses and midwives to make a pledge to provide high quality, compassionate care.  This week, it was annnounced that the first national batch of nursing students to be tested and tracked on their ability to show compassion will be arriving at Welsh universities this September.  Some nurses are indignant that anyone should assume that compassion can be measured in tick-box fashion, and some suggest that keeping cool and making hard clinical decisions in an emotionally detached way is preferable to getting too emotionally involved. Others think the problem lies in the lack of compassion that nurses feel they are offered by those in power. 

I'm not so sure that being compassionate excludes calm, somewhat emotionally detached decison-making.  I think that nurses need to find a balance between being able to empathise with patients and be responsive to their emotional needs alongside the more fact-based clinical reasoning.  Surely, in the end, it's about knowing how to treat people as people and not "conditions in a bed".  Some of the best nurses I know do this juggling act incredibly skilfully and seemingly without effort, but no doubt they are paddling furiously under the surface.  Then, there are some nurses who are incredibly compassionate with patients but pay less attention to the emotional needs of their colleagues.

In my recent work on trust as revealed by the mentors in my PhD study,  I had a glimpse into just how complex all of this is.  Trust is essential for cooperative teamwork.  Nurses want and need to be trusted both by their patients and their colleagues - and although trust judgements are partly made in terms of cold facts ( can I rely on this person to do the job properly?), trust is also about emotional connections with people (if I reveal my personal or professional vulnerability, will this person respect that and respond appropriately?).  Psychological safety is crucial if nurses are to maintain a no-blame culture and learn from clinical mistakes. The less trust there is in the workplace, the more errors and near-misses will be swept under the carpet and the system will struggle to improve.

The meanings of place and time

Spring is late this year. The snowdrops are still in full bloom and the daffodils are yet to grace us with their show of bright yellow, even the early ones, so St David's day came and went in a more subdued way, botanically speaking, than in recent years. The waxing and waning of the seasons provides an anchor, a way of grounding human experience. Today is the "ides of March", the thought of which fills me with a tiny sense of forboding, but not being superstitious, I don't attach any real significance to this.

The idea of place and time as being meaningful is often uppermost in my thoughts as I work with my research data. The different environments in which nurses work have an enormous impact on how they experience their work and their mentoring. A busy surgical ward presents a range of opportunities, challenges and constraints to a mentor that are quite different from a rehabilitation unit or a community nursing team. Whatever the setting, they all experience certain things that frustrate their efforts to be a good mentor and can strain their relationships with students and colleagues, along with the things that make their work worthwhile and that they feel passionate about sharing with students.

The work context dictates the pace of the work. The experience of time is very different in the different contexts and time dictates the rhythms of the work, the priorities that are constantly juggled and the affordances available to mentors to be with and support their students. Physical space is also significant - whether they can physically see the student at any time; whether there is a space for a private conversation; or how close is too close when working together. How these mentors feel about being a nurse, and nursing, in the context of their own lives is often an overarching driver for how they approach mentoring.