xdg

Thank you! I just checked and it does not ignore markdown prefixed words.

Also, I found that `:syn off` gets vim to spell check within markdown formatting.

> for me I see coach as a person that can help me discover the why and the mentor is someone that can help me discover the how

That's not how I see it, but you expressed that really clearly. If that distinction works for you, then that's great!

I've also worked in consulting in a past career, and I've had a hired coach, and the line you quote with words like "partnering" I would describe as part of marketing the product. They're not exactly going to say "hire us to push you out of your comfort zone", but that is the role.

You said: "they keep asking questions and pushing" -- that's what I mean by setting the agenda. As I mentor, I don't see my role as "pushing". Questioning, sure. Providing perspective, sharing my stores, yes. Actionable feedback on skills is the closest I'd come to "pushing" and even then, they can take it or leave it.

When I see people talking about coaching, I often see -- directly or indirectly -- some aspect of the role of the coach to be to "bring out their best". I rarely see words like that used to describe mentoring relationships.

Thanks! Fixed. We're all human. :-)

And now I've discovered that vim spell check skips words with leading markdown symbols like `*randical`. I'll have to dig into that more.

Update: pasting the web page to Google Docs found a few more typos. I fixed those, too. Usually I print and read to find typos, maybe I skipped that this time. Good reminder to do that and the Gdocs review. Really: thanks for the reminder, regardless of the sassiness. :-)

Maybe this is a useful way to think about it: I'd argue that doing code review for everyone on a team doesn't mean I'm a mentor to everyone on the team. I'm doing a task that is part of my job -- to coach the team on coding -- and they have to consider my comments whether they want to or not.

But if an engineer approaches me and says "in my last performance review, I was told my code isn't very well structured; can you help me?" and I walk through their code with them, then I'm mentoring. It's skill mentoring, in this case, which, as I said, has the most overlap with coaching. Same activity, but different context.

But as someone else said, this distinction isn't really the important part of what I wrote. So if people disagree on the terminology, that's just fine.

The terms are used so interchangeably by people that I'm not surprised you might disagree. I looked at a bunch of definitions and tried to distill a useful distinction.

Given that people hire coaches, but usually not mentors, the distinction for me is that a coach is engaged towards a goal and therefore is more directive of what you need to do to get there.

I don't think your example question is a great one for exploring the distinction because it's a single, binary question. But even in your example, despite the coach responding with questions, you describe the coach as pushing you to go do some work: figure out the differences yourself, or come up with a project to explore the question.

In that sense, I see the coach as "setting the agenda" whereas the mentor is having a more open-ended conversation about it.