NOVIDARO Commitments

Mentoring is an asymmetric relationship. You bring what is not yet clear, I bring experience and a way of reading. That calls for rules written in advance, not agreed after the fact. These are NOVIDARO’s.

Every item below has a practical consequence. None is a vague statement of intent, and where one of them is not yet in force that is written into the item itself. If any of them is not being met in your mentoring, talk to me first. If my answer does not resolve it, you can take the case to the professional association I belong to, and the route is in the first commitment. A complaint about deadlines, billing or service quality, which is a different matter from ethical conduct, has its own channel and its own deadlines, both in the contract: acknowledgement of receipt within one business day and a conclusive answer within five.

Before we start, nothing is a surprise

You receive in writing the format of the cycle, its duration, its cadence, the fee, what is included and what is not, before any payment. You also receive the code of ethics I adhere to and the description of how I conduct each session, so that you decide knowing what you will find.

If at any point you want to complain about me, there is a route and it is public. Whenever possible, the starting point is to speak to me directly: it is the fastest, and most of what becomes a formal complaint is resolved in an honest conversation before that. If it is not resolved, or if speaking to me is not a viable option for you, the complaint goes to the professional association. In the case of EMCC, it starts with the regional affiliate, EMCC LATAM, and can escalate to EMCC Global, which maintains a published formal procedure and a dedicated address, [email protected]. The current addresses are included in your contract.

If any point is not clear to you, it must be clarified before we sign, not afterwards.

What is said in the session stays in the session

Strict confidentiality over everything you bring. The exceptions are few and specific: legal requirement, illegal activity and concrete risk to your safety or to that of others. You agree to those limits before the first session. They are not small print discovered along the way.

The session needs the right conditions to happen

A session is a conversation that requires you to say out loud things you have not yet said to anyone in your organization. That does not survive an open-plan office, a moving car or someone within earshot.

On my side, I guarantee a closed room, no third parties present, no interruption and the full time reserved for you. On your side, I ask for the same: a private setting, headphones and camera on. If in any meeting the condition is not met, we say so to each other and reschedule, at no cost and without consuming the session. A session held in poor conditions wastes your time and mine.

How the sessions are recorded

I keep a record of every session, and I do so for three reasons: to maintain continuity from one meeting to the next, to produce your one-page report and to sustain the evidence of my own practice before the accreditation I am pursuing.

The record starts with an audio recording of the session. On that audio I use transcription and artificial intelligence tools to organize the notes and prepare your report. Nothing leaves here without my reading it, correcting it and signing it: the tool works for me, and responsibility for what reaches you is mine, including when the error started in the tool.

Three limits always apply. Nothing is recorded without your written consent, and you can ask that a specific session not be recorded, without having to justify it and with no loss of service. None of the tools I use to produce that material uses your content to train models, and I check this in each supplier’s current terms before contracting and at every change. And the same confidentiality as the previous commitment applies to that material, from the audio to the report.

Your data and your words remain yours

What I record of each session, where it is kept, for how long and what happens to that material at closing is in your contract, which sets out the retention period for recordings and transcripts and the specific consent for them. In my professional records, you appear by initials. The processing of the data this site collects is set out in the Privacy Policy.

The messaging channel between sessions is WhatsApp Business, with end-to-end encryption and a backup protected by a key only I hold, and with no use of any artificial intelligence feature of the platform in conversations with you. Even so, it is not my record of the cycle: whatever is relevant from what passes through it I move into my notes, which follow the safekeeping and the retention period described above, and at closing I delete the conversation on my side. The copy that stays on your device is yours, and over that I have no control at all.

A testimonial is requested in writing after the closing, with the text submitted for your approval and with the right of withdrawal at any time: no contract clause authorizes me to use your image, your voice or your words without you saying yes at that moment.

If your company sponsors the cycle, what it receives is defined in advance

The scope of what the sponsor receives is agreed in writing with you and with them before the first session, and it does not change afterwards. The standard is confirmation that the cycle took place, how often and whether it was completed. Themes, session content and any assessment of you are not part of that scope under any circumstances. If the request goes beyond what was agreed, I refuse and I tell you that the request was made.

Whoever pays has a legitimate right to know whether the investment produced an effect, and that right is met at the level of the program: whether the cycle happened, whether the objectives agreed at the start were worked on and what the design delivered. What is not shared is you. Assessing the process and assessing the person are different things, and that distinction is in the contract, not in the good sense of the moment.

When the cycle is sponsored, I operate inside your company’s rules. I ask for the supplier code of conduct, the information security policies and the data handling rules before starting, and I comply. With one exception, stated before anything is signed: no internal policy obliges me to hand over what is protected by these commitments. If the company rule demands session content, the theme addressed or an assessment of you, it does not prevail. I refuse, I tell you, and if the demand is a condition of the contract, the contract does not happen. It is better that you know this now than discover it at the moment you need it.

One relationship at a time

If I already work with someone in your reporting line, your function or your organization in a position that could conflict with yours, I say so before accepting you. If the conflict appears in the middle of the cycle and cannot be resolved in a way that harms nobody, I withdraw.

The same rule applies when the prior relationship is with me. If we knew each other before, whether through friendship, family or work, that does not rule out the mentoring, but it does require the separation to be explicit: what is said in the session does not circulate in the other relationship, and the other relationship does not enter the session as a shortcut, as an assumption about you or as a constraint on saying what needs to be said. We agree that in writing before the first session. If at any point the separation stops working, we close the cycle, and choosing the earlier relationship in that case is not a loss.

One case does not fit that arrangement: anyone with current power over your career or over mine. A current manager, a current appraiser, someone who decides your promotion. There no separation is possible, and I do not accept.

During the cycle, the mentoring does not become a door to something else. I do not use the session to sell another service, I do not accept commission for referring you to anyone, and I do not accept from you an offer of work, partnership or business while the cycle is open. If something like that comes up, I say so at once, and the choice is explicit: either the mentoring continues, or the other relationship begins after the closing. Both at the same time, no.

If you come through a referral, what that person receives from me is nothing beyond thanks. No referral is paid, and no referral gives me access to information about you.

The boundary that is not negotiable

There is no romantic or sexual relationship with anyone I work with, nor with anyone who sponsors the cycle, in no case and under no circumstance, for as long as the professional relationship exists.

Boundary is also what happens outside session time. Any in-person meeting takes place in a professional space, never in a residential setting, nor in a social context or with alcohol. I do not accept gifts of value, professional favors or commercial reciprocity from anyone I work with.

The working channel is the one agreed in the contract. Between one session and the next, it serves logistics and what has already been agreed with you: recording a commitment kept, reporting how a situation we prepared went, clearing up a specific question about something already settled. A new theme, a new decision or a conversation that requires context does not fit into a message, and I will say so and bring it to the next session. Not out of rigidity, but because a subject handled in writing and in fragments is a subject handled badly.

I reply on business days, and the time varies. It depends on the hour, on the schedule and on the kind of question: an answer that requires me to think first takes longer than a logistics confirmation. And, just as I attend to nobody during your session, I do not answer messages while I am with someone else. The commitment is not to answer fast, it is to answer when I have the best answer to give. Silence within that is not neglect, it is the same framing.

These rules do not exist because I distrust you. They exist because mentoring is an asymmetric relationship with real emotional load, and in a relationship like that the boundary needs to be written before anyone needs it.

Mentoring has limits that cannot be crossed

Mentoring is not psychotherapy or clinical treatment, and it does not replace either. When the subject crosses that boundary, I say so clearly and refer you on, even if that interrupts the cycle. The same applies to demands outside my competence: I would rather decline than improvise.

I work exclusively with adults in a professional context. I do not work with anyone under 18, and mentoring with adolescents requires safeguards, consent from guardians and specific training that are not part of this practice.

If during a cycle your situation comes to require protection that mentoring does not offer, what is above applies: I say so clearly, I refer you on and, where appropriate, I interrupt. Interrupting at that point is the correct conduct, not a service failure.

Difference does not become noise here

You arrive with a trajectory, an origin, a way of speaking and a repertoire of references that are not mine. That is not an obstacle to be corrected along the way: it is part of the working material, and much of what there is to read in your organizational environment sits exactly there.

Origin, color, gender, age, religion, orientation and disability do not enter as a criterion in anything I do, neither in whom I accept to work with, nor in the reading I make of your situation. I assume I carry biases, including the ones I do not see, and I treat that as a matter for the review of my practice, not as something already solved. If at any point my reading reduces you to a stereotype, point it out there and then. I would rather hear it during the cycle than find out afterwards.

Continuing professional development in inclusion, diversity and bias is part of my annual hours as a specific item, not as a subject that resolves itself through good intentions.

What happens in the session does not stop at the door

Mentoring deals with your career, and your career produces effects beyond you. When a plan of yours depends on shifting cost to the team, to a supplier, to the end customer or to the environment, that enters the conversation as part of the reading, not as a moral judgment. It is the same work as always: seeing the whole system before deciding, because that is where the decision will be called to account.

When sustainability, social impact or the climate transition appear on your professional agenda, and they appear more and more often, I treat them as a legitimate subject for mentoring and not as a matter for another department. EMCC Global, whose code I follow, maintains its own program in that area, and its material is part of my continuing development.

In my own operation, what is under my control: remote sessions by default, with no travel and no printed material, and in person travel only when you ask for it and it makes a difference.

Every idea has an owner, and the owner is named

The NOVIDARO Method is an arrangement of mine. The repertoire it rests on is not, and the authors are cited by name wherever they appear, here and in the material you receive. When I use a model, an instrument or a question that comes from someone else, I say whose it is. I do not turn other people’s work into property of the brand, and the only thing I sign as mine is the synthesis.

In what you receive, the rule is simple: the content about your own situation is yours and you use it as you wish inside your organization; third party models and materials follow the conditions set by whoever created them, and that is indicated in the document itself.

My practice is reviewed by someone outside it

No mentor should be the only person assessing their own work. I am establishing formal professional supervision with a qualified supervisor, a requirement of the accreditation I am pursuing and standard practice in the profession. Until it begins, this commitment lies in the future, and I would rather say so than write in the present tense something that is not yet happening.

When it begins, this is how it works: I take situations from my practice to that supervisor anonymously, with no name, company or any data that identifies you, and the supervision relationship is itself confidential. You will be informed when this comes into force.

After each session, I review how I conducted it

Every session produces two records. The first is your report. The second is mine: a written reflection on how I conducted it, what worked, what I let pass and which of my own assumptions were operating without my noticing. That second record does not go to you, and it is what keeps the practice from becoming repetition.

At the end of each cycle, I ask for your assessment in a structured form. It feeds into that same review. That is why I ask, and not out of closing courtesy.

Beyond that, I maintain continuing professional development with a recorded annual load, at least the one required by the accreditation I am pursuing, and I follow the output of the field. You are contracting an up to date practice, not a repertoire frozen in the year of my training.

If I am not in a condition to conduct

Conducting a session demands full attention. If at any point I am not in a condition to offer that, whether through physical or mental health, exhaustion or personal circumstance, I reschedule, and I say that I am rescheduling for that reason. I do not conduct at half strength and I do not charge for a session I knew would not deliver.

If the condition is not temporary, I seek professional support before working with anyone again and, if necessary, I trigger the plan in the next commitment. You do not have to manage my state, and you should not have to work out by deduction that it affected your cycle.

If I cannot continue

There is a written plan for the case in which I cannot complete a cycle through illness, incapacity or death. It defines who notifies you, what happens to the material in my safekeeping, how the closing is conducted and the proportional refund of what was not used. A summary of that plan is delivered together with the contract: a continuity plan the client does not know about is of no use.

If one day I close the practice in a planned way, you are notified in advance, and no record of yours is transferred to another professional without your express authorization.

Professional indemnity insurance for this activity is not yet in place. While it is not in force, this site does not claim otherwise, and the start date will be stated here.

The cycle ends by design

The closing is a planned stage of the process, not either of us giving up. At the close, we compare the starting point with the point of arrival, including what did not advance, and we decide together whether there is a next cycle. You can end it whenever you want, on the terms of the contract, and I will encourage the closing if another form of help would serve you better.

What ends is the cycle, not my duties. Confidentiality over everything you brought, care with your records and the prohibition on my taking advantage of the relationship that existed continue to apply after the last meeting, with no time limit.

What happens if I fail to comply

A complaint that is upheld has a real consequence. If a procedure finds that I violated the code I declare I follow, I accept the sanction that follows, including loss of membership and of any accreditation I may obtain. A code with no accepted sanction is ornament.

The obligation runs both ways. If I have reasonable grounds to believe that another professional is acting unethically, I speak to them directly, and, if there is no solution, I take the case to the association they belong to. I do not do this behind their back or as market gossip: it is a written duty, not a personal initiative.

And if discriminatory conduct appears in a session, whether yours or from someone in your environment, I do not treat it as a neutral fact of the case. I name it, with respect and without turning the session into a tribunal, because that is what the code asks of me and because ignoring it would be choosing a side.

What I do not promise

I do not promise promotion, a raise or recognition. Those outcomes depend on decisions that are neither mine nor yours. What I commit to delivering is the process: a reading of your environment, criteria for deciding, applicable repertoire and a plan you can sustain on your own.

The credentials this site declares

What this site states about me corresponds to what is active on the date you read it. I am a member of the International Mentoring Association and of EMCC Global, the latter through the affiliate EMCC LATAM. Individual EMCC accreditation is in progress and not concluded: being a member of an association is not being accredited by it, and treating the two as equivalent is common practice in the mentoring and development market. Here, it is not. Where something is in progress, the site says it is in progress.

These commitments derive from the Global Code of Ethics for Coaches, Mentors and Supervisors, created in 2016 by the Association for Coaching and EMCC Global and today adopted by twelve signatory professional bodies, among them EMCC Global and the International Mentoring Association, to which I belong. Where the code sets the minimum, here there is more. Where I do not yet comply, it is written that I do not.

None of this is a verdict on colleagues. Mentoring and coaching are fields with legitimate and very different schools, methods and tools, including in their use of AI, and that variety is healthy. What I describe here is the standard of this practice, and what I refuse in any practice is one thing only: telling the client something that does not correspond to what exists.

Read the code in full (V4, December 2025)

This page is reviewed at least once a year, whenever a new version of the code is issued and whenever my accreditation status or the tools I use change. Earlier versions are available on request.