Louise Ritson is a consultant mentor and facilitator based in England. She provides specialized personal mentoring and facilitation services that are appropriate for directors and senior managers in industry and the public sector.
Mentoring and facilitation can help you to enhance your performance and reduce stress, both in your day-to-day work and in addressing specific problems.
These services are both based on Louise Ritson's expertise in the subjective aspects of being a person in an organizational context, and on her extensive training and experience in working with people and in business.
You can use personal mentoring and group facilitation either to enhance long term performance or to address a specific problem or crisis.
To understand how personal mentoring fits with other services like coaching and personal development, see this chart:
Words like mentoring and coaching are often used confusingly. This chart shows one way to understand the relationships between different kinds of service.
You generally use consultancy (the orange area) to address a specific issue. While you might be involved professionally with the consultant, you are unlikely to be involved personally. So consultancy is narrow in scope and low in personal involvement.
To increase your knowledge and skills, you can use a range of training-based services (the blue area). Training courses tend to have the most specific content. However, with coaching and personal development, the breadth of content is greater and you are more personally involved. Traditional mentoring is very personal to you but can be restricted in scope.
Personal mentoring (the green area) goes beyond knowledge and skills to address high-level issues that are key to your effectiveness in a very broad range of scenarios. Work of this sort tends to be more personally challenging and involving than training or traditional mentoring.
Louise Ritson uses the term mentoring in a special way — to mean a one-to-one professional relationship with a personal mentor who does not provide you with advice, knowledge or skills. Instead, your personal mentor provides a high degree of empathy and rapport in helping you to use your own inner strengths most effectively.
Personal mentoring allows you to explore your own perceptions and feelings in depth and with the security and confidentiality of a professional setting. You can use personal mentoring, for example, to consider the personal impact of business issues, and the business impact of personal issues.
The objectives of personal mentoring are to maintain and enhance your personal effectiveness, to reduce stress, alleviate isolation, and avoid burnout. Typical outcomes include increased confidence in your intuition, beliefs and principles, calmer and more sure-footed handling of difficult situations, better realization of your strengths and passions, and clearer conceptualization.
Louise Ritson's expertise with people can facilitate the working of teams, business relationships, and other situations in which people come together with a common purpose. Examples include boards of directors, senior management teams and meetings between business partners.
Facilitation of this kind does not impose particular ways of working or undermine authority and process. Rather, it helps people to express their fears and aspirations and to find common ground by facing difficulties openly.
The objectives of facilitation are to maintain and enhance the effectiveness of business and team relationships, and to reduce stress in those taking part. Typical outcomes include increased understanding and confidence between team members, quicker resolution of conflicts and difficulties, shared long-term vision, and greater willingness to take risks and embrace change.
Louise Ritson grew up in Cheshire, England, and for many years she was a successful businesswoman there. In her early thirties she became a company director, specializing in client relationships in advertising, marketing and PR, with major international clients.
Following a move to the Midlands she changed her career direction, undertaking extensive training to become a professional cognitive-behavioural therapist. She built up a private practice, ran programmes to help people recover from personal loss and separation, and went on to set up programmes for people with care responsibilities, working with the NHS and Social Services.
Joining the PPP healthcare group (now part of AXA) in 1995, Louise implemented the first Care Support Service in the UK healthcare insurance industry. She created a national network of care specialists, developed a wide-ranging healthcare information system using computer database and network technology, and established her personal presence in the healthcare industry as a care expert and visionary. Within the group of companies she influenced strategy and business initiatives, and established a reputation as a therapist, a key management facilitator and personal mentor, and a primary instigator of business development.
Louise Ritson now combines her business skills and professional training in these ways:
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