Mentoring for Well-being: Flourishing Across Career Stages

Mentoring for well-being is in its infancy as a research topic, and there is scant literature regarding mentoring aspiring educational leadership faculty toward well-being. This ethnographic case study explored the ways the mentoring relationship between a late-career educational leadership professor and an early-career protégé influenced our well-being and enabled us to flourish personally and professionally. Our study was guided by the following research question: In what ways, if any, does our mentoring relationship influence our well-being? Over a two-year period, we journaled, recorded our interactions, and wrote narratives about our mentoring relationship. Although the data were collected over two years, the mentoring relationship had spanned eight years. In those years, the mentor transitioned from professor to late-career professor, and the protégé transitioned from M.Ed. graduate student to early-career professor. Seligman’s PERMA model is often used to measure well-being. In this study, the mentor and protégé analyzed their data through the lens the PERMA model, which consists of the following five domains: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. The findings indicated that we, the mentor and protégé, perceived that our well-being had been positively influenced by the mentoring relationship in all five of these domains. We viewed our relationship as a learning partnership and reported that this partnership had increased our confidence, productivity, and innovation and decreased our loneliness, both personally and professionally. This study resulted in the creation of a model for high-quality and sustainable mentoring relationships using the PERMA domains.