Discernment and Mentoring

I am pleased about a few right things about mentoring and not so pleased about a few other things about mentoring. It is nice to have a mentor as a confidant. What if this mentor cannot keep the discussions to himself and shares his mentee's apprehensions with someone else? Worse still- what if the mentee overhears this? this is not an assumption, let me tell you. This really happened in my work place. When the mentee shared this with me, to simply put- i was SHOCKED beyond comprehension. Despite mentors being trained and prepared before their mentoring engagement, if such a breach could happen, i wasn't sure and honestly wasn't prepared for this. At this point, i reflected on the " maturity quotient" of a mentor. I certainly believe that for a mentor, it is not enough if he is intelligent, emotionally strong and perhaps spiritually deep: he has to be mature enough to discern the deep from the peripheral issues. Sifting them comes with experience and an innate ability to sieve the "wanted" from the "unwanted" conversations. A mature mentor will be able to draw fine but firm lines when it comes to sharing his mentee's problems with someone he trusts also. This also makes me think- If the mentor does not have a solution to a mentee's problem, is it apparently right to seek a third's person's opinion and to what extent can this sharing happen? How do we define boundaries because we also know that one mentor cannot and " need not" know all. Does this mean that apart from the competencies of being a great listener, communicator, observer and a neutral judge, a mentor should be extremely mature in his temparament. How do we measure maturity? Should we measure at all? I believe discernment and mentoring go hand in hand at the end of the day!