Helen Colley was no doubt correct in pointing to the way in which the benefits – the positive outcomes – of the activity of mentoring are those that tend to be accentuated and celebrated. It would be dispiriting in the extreme to spend any significant amount of time dissecting ways in which mentoring relationships may fail, and my own preoccupation in this guide has been to try to promote and celebrate the value of mentors’ work. Nevertheless, it seems both worthwhile and realistic to at least include some references in what follows to less successful mentoring relationships – by way of ‘cautionary tales’, and with an exceptionally high degree of anonymisation having been an overriding concern when depicting them. The main emphasis of the first section of the chapter is indeed, though, to illustrate how Colley’s ‘happy endings’ have been arrived at.