The Role of Mentorship in Toastmasters

There are no precise definitions of mentorship.  At its core, it is when someone has mastered a particular skill, takes a protégé, or, in the context of a craft, an apprentice, and helps them master that specific skill.  In some areas, such as smithing, or even the Sufi path, this process is a formal initiation into the mysteries and rituals of that path, and that mentorship may take years.

Within the context of Toastmasters, mentoring is a less formal process where the mentor undertakes to guide the protégé, or protégée, in the finer points of public speaking and appointments.  A lot of Toastmasters use the term “mentee” to refer to the one mentored.  Personally, I consider it a debasement of the language, and never use this term myself.  It seems, to me, a denigration of the gravity of this process.

I have spent more than two decades in a Sufi path, and because of that background, I liken the mentor-protégé relationship to that between the shaykh and the murid.  Accordingly, I am not keen to take on a protégé for the sake of it, and have the title, “mentor”.  It is an unnecessary aggrandisation of the self, another title that feeds the ego, but does not better me as a person.

In the same vein, I have high expectations of anyone who would consider me a mentor, since I do not take this lightly.  I was fortunate enough to have had an excellent mentor, Gerald Yong Kim Heong, DTM, of AIA Toastmasters Club.  We never sat down, except for the first time, to have a long chat about my Toastmasters journey.  Instead, I followed him on some club visits, and I observed the way he spoke, conducted his evaluations, and addressed the issues, and modelled the best of it, clarified the rest, and incorporated that knowledge.  It was not what he said, but how he said it, and how he did it, that truly instructed me.

I do not expect my protégés to be excellent speakers, since the art of rhetoric is not just hard work, but innate ability.  What I do expect, is effort, and a thirst to be better.  I do not expect them to win competitions, since I do not think much of them.  These pageants have no real worth beyond the Toastmasters circuit, since no one talks like that in the real world.  Exaggerated emoting is not going to close that deal, or convince that client.  I am a realist.

Perhaps the best example of mentoring in rhetoric can be found in the relationship between Aristotle, the author of Rhetorike, and Plato.  Aristotle studied at Plato’s Academy, but was not an exclusive student in the manner that Plato learned from Socrates.  But Aristotle certainly did learn from Plato.

There is no denying that Plato and Aristotle are two rhetoricians that greatly influenced the history of rhetoric.  However, their use and definition of rhetoric were different.  Plato’s was the classical approach; he used rhetoric as a means of education to pass down his beliefs and practice.  He was a conveyor of absolute truths, and utilised the dialectic method of critical thinking to arrive at these absolutes.  This moral position is impractical.  Aristotle took from Aristotle, but modified the role of rhetoric, to be utilised as a tool of persuasion, to move the masses for or against a position.  This is the basis of the Toastmasters approach, utilising Aristotle’s logos, ethos and pathos.  Socrates was appalled, and did not approve.

In summary, a good mentor should nurture a protégé to surpass him.  When the student has surpassed the master, that master has completed his mission.  Our role is to always nurture a generation that is better than we are.  That is how society advances.  That is what mentorship actually is.