{"id":5691,"date":"2016-07-27T03:16:49","date_gmt":"2016-07-27T03:16:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/?p=5691"},"modified":"2016-07-29T02:18:56","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T02:18:56","slug":"co-mentoring-our-way-back-to-the-basics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/2016\/07\/27\/co-mentoring-our-way-back-to-the-basics\/","title":{"rendered":"Co-Mentoring Our Way Back to The Basics"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

\"Chuck-0215-1\"by Chuck Sandy<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe positive effect of one loving relative, mentor or friend can overwhelm the negative effects of the bad things that happen\u201d<\/em> \u2013 David Brooks<\/em><\/p>\n

People toss the word mentoring around so easily that you might be tempted to believe that everyone is talking about the same thing and that it\u2019s something easy to do. Be a mentor, people say. Find a mentor, others advise. That\u2019s how you move forward, serve others, and solve our world\u2019s problems all at the same time. If only it were that simple. I used to believe it was.<\/p>\n

Do a little<\/em> online research, though, and you will quickly find over fifty definitions of mentoring and tons of the motivational memes about mentoring that float through our social media feeds. But dig deeper, as I\u2019ve been doing, beyond all that and widely into readings in education, psychology, sociology, and counselling and you\u2019ll eventually find evidence-based research-driven mentoring models and training programs that will give you a better idea of what mentoring really is.<\/p>\n

Although these models and programs all have very different aims and objectives, all of them have these three intertwined threads running through them: the centrality of relationships, the need for careful listening, and the call to be empathetically non-judgmental. Oh, and the idea that the learning is slow, very slow, so slow that it won’t\u00a0even look like learning until the\u00a0day it (maybe) becomes self-directed<\/em>\u00a0change.<\/p>\n

At this point you might be wondering why I\u2019ve been doing all this research and reading about mentoring and I\u2019ll tell you the truth. Having found myself in a position in which people began seeking me out as a mentor, I most often got it all wrong and failed miserably. My most miserable failures as a mentor occurred when I talked more than I listened, misunderstood the relationship, wound up answering questions people didn\u2019t have, and gave advice that wasn\u2019t right. It doesn\u2019t really matter how right my intentions were. Those failures happened.<\/p>\n

This year, though, I had a wonderful opportunity. I had a health crisis which forced me offline and into a long period of quiet reflection and focused reading. Although I\u2019ve now come out the other side of all that into a period of renewed health, I\u2019m still offline for the most part. That\u2019s because I\u2019m trying to put into\u00a0practice what I\u2019ve been learning. Central to that is the idea of co-mentoring and a return to the very basics of community building.<\/p>\n

In our ever more connected online world — a world in which everyone’s talking and no one’s really listening — it\u2019s easy to forget how isolated and fragile so many of us really are. We attend a webinar or online course and feel thrilled that we\u2019re a part of something bigger than we are. We build a PLN and marvel at how our ideas can so quickly spread across the globe. This is no doubt a wonderful thing and I’m all for it. But it\u2019s an illusion to believe that these are communities unless we very consciously one by one and two by two make them so. That is<\/em> possible. Enter co-mentoring.<\/p>\n

A while back both Jason R. Levine<\/a> and I found ourselves in a fallow period of our lives. We were between ideas and feeling kind of down about it all, so one day we decided we\u2019d meet once a week on Skype to spin ideas, talk about our lives, and really listen to each other. What developed was much more\u00a0than a friendship. We discovered a way of being together that\u2019s empathetic, relational, and listening focused. No, that\u2019s not a crazy idea. Tell me more. I\u2019m listening and I hear you. Yes, I\u2019ll be here next week. It’s hard work\u00a0and it’s time consuming — but there\u2019s real value in it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I\u2019ve also been building similar co-mentoring relationships with \u00a0Philip Pound<\/a>,\u00a0 Tim Hampson<\/a>, and Josette LeBlanc<\/a>. While it’s true that\u00a0Tim, Josette and I are building structures to help people find their calling and share their stories, and true that \u00a0Philip and I are working on EdYOUfest<\/a>, the bigger story is the one about how we’re co-mentoring ourselves through the days. This means we’re not even thinking about fixing each other or doing much advising. We’re just building little communities of two or three while doing a lot of listening.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile there are the people around me in this physical world and the little\u00a0communities we\u2019re co-creating and co-mentoring\u00a0\u00a0together right here in the very area where I sit and write — but that\u2019s another story. It follows the same principles but is much easier \u00a0because of the shared physical space.<\/p>\n

In a wonderful essay on the Evidence-Based Mentoring site<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Dr. Tim Cavell \u00a0 writes that \u201cthe lesson here is that less is more \u2026 That means we might have to pull back from the urge to \u2018sell\u2019 ourselves to others, to be always entertaining or engaged; sometimes it\u2019s best to simply be with those we love. That\u2019s the essence of accepting others. Finding a way to simply be with them.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the real work. I know, that doesn\u2019t sound like much and perhaps none of this is new to you, but as usual, I’m a slow learner and have had to learn the simplest things last.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Chuck Sandy \u201cThe positive effect of one loving relative, mentor or friend can overwhelm the negative effects of the bad things that happen\u201d \u2013 David Brooks People toss the word mentoring around so easily that you might be tempted to believe that everyone is talking about the same thing and that it\u2019s something easy … Continue reading Co-Mentoring Our Way Back to The Basics<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4925,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mentoring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itdi.pro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}