I have had mentors at different points in my career. Some were formal arrangements. Others were never named as mentoring at all, just regular conversations with people who were willing to listen, ask questions, challenge me, and think things through with me.

What none of the good ones ever did was try to make me more like them.

Photo by Rishabh Dharmani on Unsplash

They didn’t encourage me to copy how they led, think the way they thought, or behave as if their answers could be lifted directly into my context. The value came from the opposite. They helped me look at myself from a different angle and see both my strengths and my flaws more clearly, without judgement.

What consistently surprised me was how powerful a fresh perspective could be, and how freeing it is to discuss it with someone who has no skin in the game. Talking a particular challenge through with someone who was not embedded in the same assumptions, relationships, or anxieties often opened up a new way of seeing it. Not because they told me what to do, but because the act of explaining the situation forced me to hear my own thinking more clearly.

This is one of the reasons mentoring matters so much in complex systems like the NHS, and particularly at the moment. When roles are changing and structures are shifting, people are often left trying to make sense of uncertainty on their own. And often asking ‘what’s going on?’ feels like it comes at personal risk or cost.

Research from The King’s Fund has repeatedly highlighted the importance of reflective space for leaders working in complexity. Not as a soft add-on or only when the going is good, but as a core capability when judgement matters more than rules.

Similarly, work from The Health Foundation on improvement and leadership shows that progress in uncertain environments depends less on technical expertise alone and more on adaptive capacity. That capacity is built when people have the opportunity to reflect, challenge their assumptions, and make sense of competing demands rather than rushing to premature certainty.

For me, good mentoring conversations often had an energising effect. Not because the problem disappeared, but because it felt more understandable. I could see where I had control and influence, and which pressures were real versus feared.

This is what I mean by clarity in complexity; Not certainty, or answers. But a better grasp of what is really going on and how you want to respond to it.

That is the spirit in which I am opening a small number of mentoring conversations through The Prescription. It’s not about fixing people or telling them what to do. It’s about creating space to think properly when things feel complicated and messy.

If you are navigating something that feels unclear, high-stakes, or just plain terrifying, especially in the current NHS context, this kind of conversation may be useful.