Athena: mentor, myth and metaphor

Abstract

We explore the insight metaphor brings to understanding a phenomenon that has defied description and explanation, although part of human experience for millennia and subject to scholarly debate for decades. That debate has been largely replaced with pragmatic discussion of techniques for mentoring (and its cousin coaching), thus over-simplifying something as intriguing for its unintended consequences as for those intended. After examining personal accounts of mentoring we invoked the metaphor of Athena: elusive, often in disguise, but timely and powerful in impact; and Jung's (1996) concept of transformative shifts (metanoia) in the development of personal and professional self, suggesting such shifts begin at unconscious levels of 'being'(Higgs & Titchen, 2001), but eventually influence overt 'doing' and 'knowing'.