Great Mentorship’s Missing Tool: Emotional Intelligence

Picture a Tampa airport terminal, buzzing with travelers, coffee orders, and boarding announcements. Sitting apart from the noise, a mentor waits on her phone — not for her flight, but for an answer. On the other end of the line, a high-ranking military strategist, who had saved hundreds of lives through tactical precision and mathematical brilliance, was considering her opening challenge: Are you willing to be truly uncomfortable?

His answer was immediate: Yes.

For the mentor, her internal response came just as fast - doubt. Was his reply a trained reflex or authentic courage? And even more important — could she actually reach him to create any noticeable change?

This journey changed them both. 

The Gap No One Talks About

Mentorship literature is rich with advice about expertise, goal-setting, and accountability. What it often leaves out is the emotional dimension: the part of a human being that sits underneath every career decision, every leadership struggle, and every moment of stuckness.

Many of us who become mentors, coaches, and healers of some sort, grew up in environments where the soil was dense, hard, and sometimes unbalanced. We used these experiences as our work. Growing up where I did, feelings were neither named nor welcomed, so my default became anger : volatile, destructive, costly. Jobs lost. Relationships were toxic, broken. Honestly, it nearly derailed any positive future. Many coaches, therapists, and multiple modalities later, something was still missing: a language for emotions. An interior life vocabulary — a vernacular for the whirlwind of thoughts, emotions, anxiety and fear.

As mentors, our work begins on ourselves, or at least it should. We teach what we are;  this is the reason many of those we mentor come to us. They want what we have;we are who they are seeking to be. 

And it is always the case, when you are ready, the lessons and opportunities to become even better than you thought you will find you. Mine came from an unexpected place during the 2020 worldwide shutdown. A virtual leadership development course, populated by FBI agents, military strategists, fighter pilots, and industry leaders. Over nine months of rigorous, vulnerable, often uncomfortable inner work, surviving all the discomfort:  I was rebuilt. What made this course different was the emotional intelligence woven through it all: the missing piece that made everything else finally make sense. It became my mission and the greatest tool in my toolbox. 

Four Tools That Change Everything

Transformation doesn’t happen as a one-and-done type of situation. It is gleaned and gained from consistency and practice. Many mentorships miss out on lasting and even great changes because they are missing one essential tool: emotional awareness. Emotional awareness (emotional intelligence) doesn't replace skill-building or strategic thinking: it deepens them. Here are four practices I use with every mentee to uncover, build, and strengthen emotional awareness.

1. Learn Their Language

The most sophisticated guidance in the world is useless if it doesn't land. That means understanding not just what a mentee knows, but how they think, how they've been shaped, and how they naturally express, or suppress, emotion. A corporate executive, a nonprofit worker, and a combat veteran will all process challenges and possibilities differently. Effective mentors do the homework to meet people where they actually are.

2. Unconditional Active Listening

Most of us know what active listening means. This approach takes it further by adding the word unconditional because we all carry biases that quietly corrupt the way we hear people. Unconditional active listening means noticing when your own assumptions enter the room and consciously setting them aside. It also means resisting the urge to fix. Sometimes a mentee needs to talk something through; they're not asking for a solution. Ask before you assume.

3. Radical Curiosity

This is where mentorship becomes more art than technique. Radical curiosity means listening not just to what's being said, but to what's being avoided, deflected, or hinted at in tone and hesitation. Questions like “What if the outcome is better than you planned for?” or “Are you complete?” create the kind of psychological safety that let people surface what they've been carrying in silence. These pauses are where real breakthroughs live.

4. Honoring the Whole Person

She calls this bringing the woo-woo: a shorthand for attending to someone's beliefs, values, and spiritual life as legitimate data about who they are and what motivates them. You don't have to share their framework. You have to acknowledge it exists. When mentors treat the whole person — mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual — they gain access to a fuller picture of what's possible for them.

What Changed for the Strategist

Let me take you back to the start of this journey: in an airport with doubt, reflex answers, and becoming uncomfortable. With this particular mentee, I failed in our first mentoring session. We weren’t speaking anywhere close to the same language. And by using the tools above on myself first, I humbled myself and asked for help from military colleagues about how to speak words my mentee would hear with the tactics I was trying to use. 

I adapted and slowly, he dug out of his first response:  tactical. We went on a journey of exploration into passions he’d shelved long ago, places in his heart where he felt he could trust, and he tapped into feelings he’d left behind so he could focus on strategy. His head started talking to his heart.

Our final session was the exact opposite of our first. He wasn't reciting wins. He was sharing joy. He wasn’t talking about himself, he spoke about lifting others up in finding their path. Shortly after we concluded our time together, he texted to say he had accepted a fast-track position in finance. He called it unfathomable and credited our time together in seeing possibilities he couldn't have seen from inside his old frame.

Why This Matters Now

We are in an era that prizes expertise, metrics, and efficiency. Those things matter. But leaders who will shape the next decade, and the mentors who guide them, will need something more: the capacity to connect with human beings as human beings. To hold both the strategic and the emotional. To know that the most powerful question sometimes is “are you willing?”

Your legacy as a mentor isn’t about pouring your wisdom into someone else. It's about creating the conditions for them to discover what was always already there: waiting, beneath the noise of the terminal, for someone willing to listen.

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Loralei joined SLG as a Fellow in 2021 and stepped with joyinto the roles of SLG Certified Mentor, EQ-i coach, and Program Manager. Herprofessional career includes small business owner, lobbyist liaison, chief of staff, andproject manager in fields of university education, nonprofit capacity training, grantwriting, and private equity.

Serving as a founding member and leader of many nonprofits, she leads from a place ofpassion of bridge building, forging strong foundations, and bringing all voices to thetable. As a program manager for SLG, she brings active listening, love, actionable waysof living the virtues, and courage to all conversations.

Loralei lives in St. Petersburg, Florida with her two dogs Raya and Remy.

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