Mentoring Minutes. Robin Cox
life’s journey, His unique purpose for placing you on this planet.
My dream for you is everything that you positively wish for yourself!1
1. Cox, The Spirit of Mentoring, 24.
The spirit of mentoring —a call to action
Grace is a word with a stoop in it. Love reaches out on the same level, but grace reaches down to pick us up.
—Author unknown
Why are you interested in youth mentoring?
This is an important question, as many well-intentioned people express an interest in mentoring youth, yet their motivation and understanding of youth is limited. Many volunteer adult mentors continue to move alongside young people and encourage them to chase their dreams, and reach their potential. The global community is enriched by the generosity of these people.
The best way to prepare yourself to mentor young people is to attend a mentor training program in which you travel on an experiential journey with other potential mentors to decide whether or not you are suited to youth mentoring. If not, there will be another way you can reach out and encourage people. Your unique gifts will never be wasted when you reach out to others.
Although youth mentoring has a long history, researchers and other professionals who work with youth continue to analyze how effective it is, and what form it should take.
Often, we have no idea how effective a mentoring relationship is. Then we read Matt’s1 story and how his mentor helped him transform his life, and we have a sense of the power of mentoring:
Jim was the father figure and male role model I unconsciously needed at the time. He was always there for me, through the good times and the bad. He was never too busy to talk to me when I had a problem. He offered me advice on everything from academics and athletics to girls. Jim had faith in me when I didn’t have faith in myself. He believed in me so much growing up that I started to believe in myself.
Why this book?
When I moved to New Zealand in 1999, I became involved in the development of youth mentoring programs which focused on the building of developmental relationships as advocated a number of years later by Search Institute CEO Kent Pekel2:
Search Institute’s studies of developmental relationships are certainly confirming that caring is critical. However, while we found that caring is necessary, we are also learning that it is not sufficient to make a relationship truly developmental. In addition to expressing care, we have identified four other elements that are essential: challenging growth, providing support, sharing power and expanding possibilities. Taken together, those five elements are the pillars of our Developmental Relationships Framework.
Later I developed the school-based GR8 Mates youth mentoring programs in Australia, while continuing to contribute ideas and resources to other start-up youth mentoring programs in Australia, New Zealand, and Africa. The success of these programs was because they focused on some of the relational variables mentioned by psychologist Professor Jean Rhodes3—“counsel or empathy, genuineness and warmth; counselor direct influence skills on youth; youth willingness to participate.” Jean shared a couple of points which my own experiences support:
Mentors should be provided training in these universal characteristics of effective helping relationships, as relational bonds and the delivery of more targeted and specific approaches to mentoring. When this balance is achieved, the mentoring relationship may be poised to better address the needs of today’s youth.
During these years I set up a website as a response to many queries I received about youth mentoring, and wrote a number of books to promote the spirit of mentoring, and youth-based peer mentoring, with the strong focus on building developmental relationships.
I retired from my teaching career and developed 260 free short podcasts to encourage anyone mentoring young people—http://www.mentoringmatters.buzzsprout.com
Mentoring Minutes
Mentoring Minutes is a collation of years of research, as well as my experiences working with, and coaching over 1000 adolescents (and teachers)—in a variety of face-to-face relationships—and training over 1000 volunteer adult mentors from a variety of professions. Mentoring Minutes is linked to the most recent adolescent brain research.
My research of youth mentoring programs in a number of countries revealed that a major challenge of many programs was how to offer regular and ongoing training and support to their mentors, with the purpose of building meaningful developmental relationships with their mentees. I searched bookstores and other online resources and did not find anything to meet that specific need—and it is a need, highlighted in feedback I have received from mentors.
So, I decided to write this book, condense, update, convert the content of the podcasts into a user-friendly weekly reference of messages to fill this gap, and be an encouragement to mentors, and anyone else working with youth. I have included “Mentoring moments” at the end of each week.
Mentoring moments
“Mentoring moments” provide practical examples of how ordinary people, like me, are impacted by the power of the spirit of mentoring. Brief vignettes of my personal experiences as a mentor and mentee are woven through these “Mentoring moments.”
Unlike many young people, I was fortunate to have some significant adults move quickly alongside me at crucial times of my childhood, after I had major cancer surgery as a young boy, followed soon after by the sudden death of my mother. Later, as I gained in self-confidence, I approached adults I respected for encouragement and support. In reality they became my mentors, and helped shape, refine, coach, and guide me to chase my dreams and fulfill my potential.
All these mentors and coaches during my youth had been trained to work with youth. Most would have attended professional development workshops to keep them informed of youth-related research. In some ways, they give credence to Professor Jean Rhodes’4 belief that: “Rather than deliver interventions, mentors in nonspecific programs should be trained to support their mentee’s engagement in targeted, evidence-based interventions.”
These vignettes describe how my mentors sowed and nurtured the spirit of mentoring as they positively influenced different seasons of my life, and then how I have passed that mentoring baton on to others as best as I can. All the stories are true. The names of my mentors are their real names, though I have changed the names of those I have mentored to protect their privacy. Their actual words are shared, as examples of how to sow the seeds of the spirit of mentoring in the lives of those with whom we interact. Mentoring keeps me humble, and always open to new teaching.
I also share feedback from adolescent mentees, adolescent peer mentors, and volunteer adult mentors in these pages to highlight the power of mentoring our youth, and to encourage anyone with an interest in mentoring to take on an unforgettable challenge.
How to use this book
This user-friendly book has not been written as a book to read from cover to cover. Here are some suggestions for you to obtain the best value from the book.
•The daily messages cover fifty-two weeks of the year. There are five messages each week, including the “Mentoring moments.” The messages vary in length. I would encourage you to set up a discipline that works for you and allocate a few minutes to the days you read and reflect on the messages. You will feel more confident that you can develop a meaningful relationship with your mentee. Keep the book on your office desk, by your bed, or in a place where you can refer to it for a couple of minutes each day.
•The messages are arranged into general themes, which continue to work within a holistic framework—the development of the whole person. This structure allows you to use it as a reference should you want to look up a particular topic. However, if you are dealing with challenging issues, it is worth seeking the opinions of professionals, or more experienced people.
•Parents and teachers of adolescents