Mentoring at Novator Coaching provides experienced, one-on-one guidance from Samira Saberi — drawing on 15+ years of hands-on business leadership to help you navigate career decisions, industry challenges, and professional growth. Unlike executive coaching which develops your own answers through powerful questions, mentoring shares direct experience, advice, and lessons learned.
What mentoring includes
Mentoring sessions focus on sharing practical wisdom from real business experience. Samira provides guidance on career navigation, strategic decisions, industry dynamics, leadership transitions, and building professional networks. This is particularly valuable for professionals who are new to leadership or entering unfamiliar territory where experienced guidance accelerates learning.
Mentoring vs coaching — which do you need?
If you need someone to ask powerful questions and help you discover your own solutions → coaching. If you need someone to share their experience and tell you what worked for them → mentoring. If you need someone to do the work for you → hire a consultant. Our guide on coaching vs consulting vs mentoring explains the differences in detail.
Who benefits from mentoring
First-time managers navigating new responsibilities. Professionals transitioning to a new industry. Entrepreneurs building their first business. Executives preparing for C-suite roles. International professionals adapting to U.S. business culture. Samira's bilingual English/Farsi capability makes her uniquely suited for mentoring professionals across cultures.
How mentoring differs in practice
The distinction is often described abstractly, so here it is concretely. In coaching, you bring a situation and the coach asks questions until you can see it clearly enough to decide. The expertise is in the process. In mentoring, you bring a situation and the mentor tells you what they did when they faced it, what it cost, and what they would do differently. The expertise is in the experience.
Both are useful and they solve different problems. If you know the answer but cannot act on it, coaching is the right tool. If you genuinely do not know how something is done — how a board conversation goes, how to structure a first international hire, what a founder exit actually involves — being asked reflective questions is a slow route to information someone can simply give you.
What the mentoring draws on
Samira Saberi has fifteen years of business experience across multiple countries and markets, an ICF PCC credential, and a Harvard Business School Leadership Principles Certificate. That combination matters for mentoring specifically, because it means the guidance comes from having run things rather than only from having studied them.
Common ground includes scaling a business past the founder, building and leading teams across cultures, moving between corporate and entrepreneurial environments, and navigating professional life in a business culture different from the one you trained in. Sessions are available in English and Farsi, which for some clients is the difference between describing a situation and describing it accurately.
When mentoring is the wrong choice
Mentoring carries a specific risk that coaching does not: the mentor's experience may not transfer. What worked in one industry, at one company size, in one decade, is not automatically right for your situation. A good mentor says so, and flags where their experience stops being relevant.
Be cautious of mentoring that arrives as a set of rules. The useful version sounds like “here is what I did, here is what it cost me, here is what was specific to my situation.” The less useful version sounds like “here is what you should do.” If you find yourself following advice you cannot explain the reasoning behind, the relationship has drifted somewhere unhelpful.
Most engagements are a mix
In practice the two modes alternate inside a single relationship, often inside a single session. A question about how to structure an equity conversation may need direct information first and reflective work afterwards, once you know what the options are and have to decide which fits.
Engagements typically run six months at $285 per session, every two weeks, in person across Los Angeles or by Zoom. If you are unsure which mode you need, that is a reasonable thing to work out in a first conversation rather than deciding in advance.
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