Louise Ritson is a consultant mentor and facilitator based in England. She provides specialized personal mentoring and facilitation services that are appropriate for directors and senior managers in industry and the public sector.

Mentoring and facilitation can help you to enhance your performance and reduce stress, both in your day-to-day work and in addressing specific problems.

These services are both based on Louise Ritson’s expertise in the subjective aspects of being a person in an organizational context, and on her extensive training and experience in working with people and in business.

You can use personal mentoring and group facilitation either to enhance long term performance or to address a specific problem or crisis. To understand how personal mentoring fits with other services like coaching and personal development, see the chart on this page.

Words like mentoring and coaching are often used confusingly. This chart shows one way to understand the relationships between different kinds of service.

You generally use consultancy (the orange area) to address a specific issue. While you might be involved professionally with the consultant, you are unlikely to be involved personally. So consultancy is narrow in scope and low in personal involvement.

To increase your knowledge and skills, you can use a range of training-based services (the blue area). Training courses tend to have the most specific content. However, with coaching and personal development, the breadth of content is greater and you are more personally involved. Traditional mentoring is very personal to you but can be restricted in scope.

Personal mentoring (the green area) goes beyond knowledge and skills to address high-level issues that are key to your effectiveness in a very broad range of scenarios. Work of this sort tends to be more personally challenging and involving than training or traditional mentoring.