A mentor can serve as a critical sounding board at critical points throughout your creative career, providing an insider’s perspective and guidance you may not be able to get from other sources. The role of a mentor is to listen, learn, and advise.
A mentor can help you excel in your practice and career, and become the best version of yourself, helping you achieve your goals, introducing you to new ways of thinking, challenging your limiting assumptions, signposting, and offering critical feedback.
Each individual has different needs, but a minimum of six sessions usually ensures we establish trust, get under the bonnet of the core challenges, address priorities and key concerns. This sets the stage for positive transformational change.
We establish the number of sessions during the first meeting, once we’ve agreed what the goals are.
During each session, we provide a safe thinking space to explore your strengths, values and aspirations, alongside any creative blockers and unhelpful assumptions, clearing the way to enable you to reach your goals.
Building trust is key to having an honest, fruitful dialogue and relationship – a critical friendship, that best serves your needs. Once established, this trust means we are in it together, exploring alternative perspectives and strategies that will unlock barriers to your success.
We have a flexible, playful, collaborative approach that responds to your needs, but as an example, could include
a) review of your work and creative journey to date
b) assess your goals and priorities – what do you really want?
c) what is it that’s holding you back?
d) exploring opportunities
e) new tools, skills, methodologies, systems
e) identifying new horizons and action plans
f) bench-marking progress
g) celebrating success.
We will discuss your work, key drivers, recurring themes and obsessions and how you articulate it to a broader public. Interrogating new work, discussing prices, sales and income-generating strategies are often in the mix too. We assess ways to improve your communication styles and devise a strategy to help you reach new clients, curators, collectors.
Rates
Every client is different and therefore every mentoring and coaching relationship is different.
We work with some clients once per month for six months, others require support every two weeks during an intense period.
We need to determine what your needs are so we can see what level of support is required, who is the best person to help, and in what time frame.
Therefore the costs are different for each client.
Results are borne out of a positive productive relationship, and we know that we get the best results from a minimum of six one-hour sessions together.
Due to the high demand for our services we politely request that you only register if you have funds in place and are ready to start and book a minimum of six sessions
We are committed to helping clients transform their practice and reach their goals, therefore we currently do not offer one-off sessions.
Once you have registered we will assess your requirements and aim to come back to you as soon as possible.
Please note we do have a long waiting list to work with Ceri Hand, so cannot guarantee availability, but Ceri will refer you to the most appropriate Associate Mentor, specially selected to meet your requirements.
If you are applying for funding, please budget for a minimum of £100 per hour to work with an experienced mentor or £150 per hour to work with experienced coach.
Please register your interest in Mentoring sessions. We will review your application and get back to you within 10 days. Thank you.
Preparing for a mentoring session
Checklist:
• Consider and summarise in advance what the top 3-5 challenges are you want to address
• Select and share the images, links, texts and information you want to refer to during the session; choose images that you think best represent your practice from the start of your career to the present day
• Share your most up to date CV and artist/creative statement if you haven’t already
• Be ready to talk through your creative journey to date; what have you achieved, what existing networks and contacts do you have, what do you consider as significant developments, barriers to success and where do you want to be and what do you want to do?
• Prepare questions in advance, ask questions as you go along and in turn be open to questions and being honest
• Do take notes, but don’t let note-taking prevent you from listening attentively and engaging in conversation
• Make yourself comfortable and prepare the setting so that only what you want the mentor to see is visible; you may have some work displayed, or choose a corner of your home or studio that reflects you, your work, and processes
• Make sure you have selected time where you won’t be interrupted or distracted (phone, emails, doorbell, children, pets etc.)
• Have drinks or snacks ready and make sure comfort breaks are conducted in advance wherever possible!
How do mentoring sessions begin?
Your session will begin with a short introduction from me followed by an invitation to:
• Introduce yourself and summarise your life, work and career path to date
• Summarise your key challenges
• Provide examples of work or recount verbal experiences that illustrate your points and challenges
Next steps
We will help address your specific challenges, discussing your drivers, motivations and inspiration for your work. We will listen to you talk through your ideas and processes, how you have promoted yourself to date and help unpack any particular problems you want confidential support with. The work you show, combined with the way you speak about it and your challenges will provide a holistic picture, and from this we can assess the best short, medium and long term goals and action plan.
During the session, we will reflect back to you some key thoughts and learnings from your discussion and make recommendations, whether that’s feedback on your work, avenues or materials to try, some useful tips and some examples of other’s practice that may shed light on any particular areas for you.
What will we achieve by the end of the session and what happens next?
By the end of the session we should have an agreed action plan of some manageable tasks and goals to try and implement and practice, taking your ambitions and existing resources into account.
We will agree an ideal time-frame within which to try these new approaches that suits your schedule.
Please register your interest in Mentoring sessions. We will review your application and get back to you within 10 days. Thank you.
