The audience listened intently as Claus Daniel, Associate Laboratory Director for Advanced Energy Technologies, delivered the keynote address at the 2025 Postdoctoral Research and Career Symposium. Claus emphasized the importance of asking good questions to maximize the power of mentorship and recommended The Book of Beautiful Questions by Warren Berger. His remarks reminded me of one of the biggest hurdles people face when beginning a new mentoring relationship:
What are we going to talk about?
We define mentoring as a collaborative learning relationship built on trust, where mentors share their knowledge and experiences to help mentees reach their full potential. Collaboration requires dialogue, which means both mentor and mentee must be active participants in the conversation.
So how do we ensure we are having productive, meaningful conversations that foster learning?
In a mediation skills course, I learned that good conversations benefit when we are calm, open, and curious. Let’s look at each of these.
Be calm
Being calm doesn’t mean you expect a conversation to be confrontational. On the contrary, it allows you to clear your mind and consider what the other person is saying before you respond.
A few simple ways to stay calm before and during a conversation are:
- Take a few slow, deep breaths.
- Pause briefly before responding.
- Assume the other person is coming from a place of goodwill or positive intent.
Be open
Once you are calm, you are in a better position to be open. Open to what?
Be open to other points of view, to making mistakes, to new ideas, and to unexpected questions. In short, be open to learning.
Be curious
Curiosity is a key skill in mentoring—for both mentors and mentees. Mentees need to ask questions to get the mentoring they need, and mentors need to ask questions to understand how best to support and guide their mentees. Curiosity prompts us to want to know more.
To unleash your inner curiosity, ask open-ended questions—questions that invite more than just a yes-or-no answer and encourage true dialogue. Asking good questions is a powerful tool to foster learning.
What kinds of questions help?
Randy Emelo, author at River Software for mentoring solutions, writes in Ask Me Anything: The Power of Questions in Learning that we should tap into the same curiosity we had as children, when everything was about discovery and learning.
What do you want to know about your mentor or mentee?
- What mistakes have they made?
- What successes have they enjoyed?
- What were the circumstances around those experiences?
In addition to The Book of Beautiful Questions, there are countless examples of questions to ask your mentor or mentee available with a quick online search. For example, this article by Mentorloop offers 73 questions to ask your mentor or mentee, grouped by stages of the mentoring relationship.
Give it a read, and then be calm, be open, and be curious.
And have yourselves some great conversations.