Conference Notes, Part III: Mentoring

MENTORING is becoming my favorite topic these days.  And so it was fitting that my favorite session I went to was on being a mentor.  First of all, I loved her title, "Mentors to Match our Mission."  I can't tell you everything the speaker said, but she was fabulous.  She started with this:  "A good mentor knows how to use the genius of others. . . . Mentors help others to find their genius."  Loved that!  Then she took the lives of great mentors, great geniuses, and pulled characteristics from them that we can all acquire to become great mentors ourselves.  In a nutshell, here are the characteristics:

Vision
What is your mission?  She described parts of her mission: math, teaching her daughters femininity, motherhood, etc.  I loved that she didn't say her mission was to save the world.  We all have those small parts of our mission we need to focus on.  With vision comes direction.

Failure
We need to recognize the value of failure and not be afraid of it. 

Genius
Focus on the strengths of your children (or those you mentor).  With genius comes security.

Sacrifice
With sacrifice comes peace.  If you're not feeling at peace, maybe there's something else you need to be sacrificing (this was hard one for me!). 

Love
Not only do we need to love those we mentor, we need to love what we are doing.  She talked about having hte attitude of love in the things we do, creating an attitude of love in our environment, and developing and attitude of love toward those we mentor.  With love comes passion.

Work
Larry H. Miller has said, "If you want extraordinary results, you need to put in extraordinary effort."  With work comes power.

Integrity
Here is where realistic expectations of ourselve and our children come into play!  We can't ask our children to do things we ourselves are not willing to do.  With integrity comes peace of mind. 

Trust God
It's between you and God, not them  (whoever them is).  Trusting in God leads to faith in yourself, God and others.