Practise Soft Skills With the AI Mentor: Giving Feedback
October 1, 20265 min read
One week with an illustrative new team lead: an AI Mentor course on giving feedback, coaching on her own words, flashcards and a rehearsed hard conversation.
Skip to the guideA note first: Anna is an illustrative example, not a real pimReader user. The week below shows how the tools fit together; it is not a testimonial or a record of results.
Imagine Anna, just promoted to team lead. On Tuesday a developer delivers a feature two days late, without warning anyone. She knows the rules of good feedback: be specific, talk about behaviour, suggest a next step. But in the moment she says: "You need to be more proactive."
He nods. She nods. Nothing changes.
Knowing what good feedback looks like is one thing. Saying it calmly, in the right words, to a real person, takes practice. Soft skills can be practised like a language: short regular practice, honest correction, another try, and a reminder a few days later.
Day 1. Anna says what she wants to learn
In the evening Anna opens Ask AI on Home, taps the Help me to learn ... tile and finishes the sentence:
Help me to learn giving constructive feedback to colleagues. I am a new team lead. Please create a study with 4 short lessons and practice dialogs.
The AI Mentor asks a few questions first: what she wants to improve, which style fits her team, how much time she has, how much feedback she has given before.
Anna ticks day-to-day feedback, corrective conversations, mixed style and 30–60 minutes a week. The answers shape the plan, so a new lead with half an hour a week gets something different from an HR manager preparing annual reviews.
A minute later she sees a proposed course of four short lessons: Foundations, Structure (the SBI model), Delivery (tone and emotional reactions) and Practice (real scenarios and follow-up). Nothing is created until she approves, and she could ask for changes. It looks right, so she approves once.
Each lesson has its own menu: read, practise, quiz, flashcards. She marks a lesson complete herself, ideally after trying the skill on a real colleague, so the progress line stays truthful.
Day 2. A lesson book written for her
Anna taps Create lesson book. The AI Mentor writes a book for lesson 1, aimed at a new lead who wants everyday feedback and a few difficult conversations: behaviour versus personality, the chain of observation, impact and next step, when to give feedback, and ready-made phrases. It ends with exercises such as Is "You are careless with details" about behaviour or personality? Rewrite it.
One example sentence looks very much like her own "be more proactive". The book stays in her library like any other, so she can bookmark phrases and reread a page before a meeting.
Day 3. Practice, where mistakes are safe
This is the most important part. Anna taps Practice and writes feedback she might give this week, the way people write when tired and annoyed:
You were unprofessional in the demo yesterday and it made the whole team look bad. Please be more careful next time.
The AI Mentor replies politely and directly: this version is vague and sounds like a personal attack. It then shows a specific version, naming what happened in the demo, its impact and a next step, and asks her to rewrite her own sentence.
In real life nobody stops the conversation to explain why your words failed. Here Anna can try ten versions in ten minutes. A tip: write what you would really say, not the textbook answer.
Day 4. A short quiz
Anna takes a five-question quiz, some multiple choice and some in her own words, including a rewrite of the sentence she practised. The wrong answers are believable: Personality trait sits next to Observable behaviour. Afterwards the AI Mentor goes through each answer and suggests whether to practise more or move on.
Flashcards, so it isn't forgotten
Training ideas fade quickly unless you revisit them. Anna asks for flashcards of the key ideas; the AI Mentor suggests six and she can remove any before saving.
The cards join her daily reviews (the Exercise card on Home). They are scheduled by spaced repetition, which brings each card back when you're likely to start forgetting it, the same one used for vocabulary. A week later, "What makes feedback 'specific'?" shows up in her queue, takes seconds, and in a one-on-one she describes what happened instead of judging the person.
Day 5. Rehearsing the difficult conversation
Anna has been avoiding one conversation: she rejected a senior engineer's pull request in front of the whole team, and he was clearly hurt. She rehearses first:
Role-play: you are Mark, a senior engineer who is upset because I rejected his pull request in front of the team. I am his new team lead and want to practise de-escalating this 1:1. Coach me briefly after each of my replies.
The AI Mentor asks how strongly Mark should react; Anna chooses upset. Mark says it felt like being called out. Anna apologises and offers to review it together, one to one. Mark stays in character, still stung, and a short coaching note follows: acknowledge how he felt, do not defend the public rejection yet, offer a concrete next step.
Reading it is uncomfortable even in a simulation, which is why it helps. When the real conversation comes, she has said the hard words once already.
Not only feedback
The same approach fits other soft skills: rehearsing a talk, negotiating a raise, listening to a frustrated customer, saying no politely, running meetings, resolving conflict. It starts the same way, with "Help me to learn...", a few honest answers and some minutes a week. If you are unsure where to begin, pick the conversation that went worse than it should have.
Language note: the AI Mentor answers in the native language set in pimReader. To get lessons, quizzes and flashcards in your language, set it as your native language and tell the AI Mentor once, in its behaviour settings, to always answer in it.
The AI Mentor course, lesson books, Practice, quizzes and AI flashcards use AI, part of pimReader Plus; reviewing the flashcards you keep is free. When you open an AI feature, pimReader offers Try free for a month: no card, no account, nothing renews. Tap Not now to carry on without AI.