Addressing Subclinical Distress through CBT-Informed Mentoring for Entrepreneurial Wellbeing

Research on entrepreneurial mentoring has documented mentor actions and outcomes, but how mentor-entrepreneur dialogue produces those outcomes is less clear. We argue that mentoring helps entrepreneurs reinterpret difficult situations, leading to clearer judgments and adaptive actions. However, how mentors use, or could use, dialogue to reshape interpretations is still underexplored. To clarify this, we undertake cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) as a lens. CBT works by helping individuals examine and revise the interpretations driving their distress. Applied to mentoring, these principles can help entrepreneurs manage forms of distress that affect well-being, judgment, or action but do not require clinical treatment. This paper uses CBT to build a standardised process for guiding interpretive change through mentoring dialogue. It proposes two CBT-informed pathways, cognitive and behavioural; specifies ethical boundaries for their use in mentoring; and outlines necessary mentor training. This shifts research from cataloguing mentor functions to specifying actionable intervention pathways, opening new directions for theory and practice.