Mentoring Minutes. Robin Cox
Here are some key aspects of a developmental relationship.
•The mentor involves the mentee in deciding how they spend their time together.
•The mentor and mentee make a commitment to be consistent and dependable.
•The mentor understands that the relationship might be fairly one-sided initially, but takes responsibility, as an adult, to keep the relationship alive.
•The mentor is determined to have fun.
•The mentor respects the mentee’s opinions and viewpoints.
Mentoring tip: Play a supportive, encouraging, and strengthening role with your mentee.
Day 4: Set performance goals
There are a range of processes for setting and achieving goals. Mentors encourage their mentees to experiment with different processes until they find one that works for them.
I tend to focus on performance goals when I work with youth, as I find mentees take ownership of their goals and, in most cases, go from strength to strength as they strive to reach their potential. Performance goals allow mentees to set processes in motion to achieve their eventual goal or outcome. Mentees control the process, though they cannot control the outcome.
•Performance goals follow a step-by-step process. This makes progress easier to measure.
•Performance goals are “behavior-oriented” and “specific.”
•Performance goals allow flexibility when mentees hit major obstacles or setbacks.
•Performance goals lead to ongoing achievement, which increases the mentees’ sense of self-worth, and confidence in their ability to repeat or improve on past efforts.
•Performance goals are challenging, yet realistic, and a valuable aspect of positive brain development.
Mentoring tip: Turn every mentoring experience into a learning opportunity.
Mentoring moments
Fifteen-year-old Matt struggled in my history class. This led to a discussion on how he could improve. We met for extra tuition each week over a nine-month period, at the end of which Matt had progressed from barely a pass to achieving a distinction in his final public exam.
During this time I also coached Matt on the sport field, so we had positive interactions away from an academic environment.
Matt’s mother wrote me this note which highlighted the importance of a mentor as a patient, non-judgmental cheerleader, and encourager.
We cannot thank you enough for all the help, interest, and time you have so willingly given Matt this year. He was, as you know, losing confidence and becoming very depressed until you gave him the encouragement he needed. As a result, you have one very staunch admirer and two very grateful parents.
Mentoring tip: Empathy includes making a genuine effort to understand the many physical, psychological, and social demands youth face.
17. Barnard, Socially Collaborative Schools, 81.
18. Carr, Mentorship.
19. Weinberger and Forbush, The Role of Mentoring, 80.
Week 8
Goal setting—a start
Oxytocin is produced when we are trusted or shown a kindness and it motivates co-operation with others. It does this by enhancing the sense of empathy, our ability to experience others’ emotions.
—Paul Zak
Day 1: The role of the goal getting mentor
When you encourage your mentees to set achievable goals their lives take on new purpose, and their energies are positively channeled in specific directions. Part of the goal-setting process during the mentoring journey is to assist your mentees to make sense of the confusion they may experience, which is normal at this stage of an adolescent’s life.
Here are some ideas to think about as you guide your mentees on the goal getting journey.
•Identify and name their strengths.
•Identify their passions and interests.
•Determine how they respond to challenges. An important life experience for your mentee might be to learn, during their time with you, how to handle failure. Early in your mentoring relationship create an environment in which your mentee knows that failure is never fatal, but simply an important stepping-stone on the life journey. Share stories of people who have risked failure to achieve their dreams. Walt Disney and Thomas Edison are two well-known examples.
•Take non-life-threatening risks in a safe and secure environment.
•Plan, prioritize, and develop strategies which use resources available to them.
•Commit to something, and see it through to a conclusion.
•Identify and solve problems. Look at obstacles as opportunities to grow and develop.
•Guide and coach them how to evaluate their progress.
•Help them appreciate that they have control over their choices and goals most of the time.
•Help them appreciate that a dream is an end in itself, while goals are normally a means to an end. When all the goals or pieces of a puzzle come together, they will realize the dream.
•Coach them how to visualize their goals as if they have already achieved them. This increases their self-confidence and self-esteem.
Most of us have careers to think of, futures to secure, people to provide for, things to do. We need maps. We need direction. We need an itinerary. In other words, we need to set ourselves goals.
Mentoring tip: Great mentors encourage mentees to “begin” to imagine their futures, and help them shape and evaluate the course of their lives.
Day 2: Volunteer adult mentors and goals
Here are some tips for mentors as they embark on a mentoring journey.
•You have a role as a coach and a cheerleader. Aim to motivate your mentee to move out of their comfort zone and maximize their potential.
•Your mentee looks to their parents and a range of other adults in loco parentis—mentors, teachers, workplace superiors—for definitions of life, goals, and values.
•Goal setting with your mentee requires patience, perseverance, encouragement, empathy, and being an exemplary role model.
Researchers have shared some positive outcomes of the effectiveness of goal getting strategies in a young person’s life.
•Mentors observe a greater sense of pride and self-worth.
•A mentee gains increased knowledge and experience, especially when the focus is on topics of their interest.
•A mentee develops greater independence with regard to improving the ability to make choices.
•A mentee develops a stronger ability to respond to failures constructively and positively.
•A mentee develops a greater tolerance of calculated risk-taking.
Mentoring tip: Your role as a mentor is to inspire, motivate, and encourage your mentee to achieve realistic, achievable, measurable, and personally set goals.
Day 3: Why a mentee struggles to set goals
Someone once said that the instant you set a goal a light goes on in the future. I have seen this occur time and time again in the lives of