Aside: Consulting and mentoring share some things in common. One thing that is gold for a consultant is to be sitting in a meeting and have the client repeat yo

Aside: Consulting and mentoring share some things in common. One thing that is gold for a consultant is to be sitting in a meeting and have the client repeat your ideas, word for word, back to the execs. and claim the idea as their own. To outright 'steal' the idea and get all the credit. It means that the client actually listens to you and thinks your ideas are good [0]. The same mechanism is true with mentoring. If your mentee nearly parrots your ideas, you're gold. If they continue to do bull-headed things, you're sunk; you must how you mentor as it's clearly not working [1]. [0] This means you can raise your rates without fear, btw. [1] To be clear, mentoring is a lot more than just this. Whole books have been written about mentoring, read them.