For the winter break I will be posting daily reflection prompts from earlier in the school year, from before I began posting prompt on this blog. Many of them are connected to the date when the prompt was originally posted, that will be pointed out in my response. Enjoy.
The word, Mentorship, means to be guided by someone with experience in a job or school setting. Do you have someone whom you would consider your mentor? And WHY/WHY NOT?
(From 8/22/22)
In an ideal world one finds a trusted teacher who can guide one from inexperience to expertise and that is called a successful mentorship. I took a graduate course at Pepperdine on Mentorship and discovered that I had been practicing a kind of anti-mentorship learning method. My father’s criticism and perfectionism taught me, as a kid, that it was better if I tried to learn “from a distance” and thus avoid the largely negative experience. Sadly, my dad’s gruff approach could be attributed to his own lack of having someone in his life to help guide him along. Despite that, we both learned, just not in the way or even perhaps the lessons that a mentor would have wanted us to learn. So, it was hardly ideal and I didn’t seek out instruction, but I learned. And a lot of my own values about hard work, integrity and expecting a lot from myself came from him, just not in an ideal “mentorship” fashion. The lesson then is that “students” are always learning from the verbal and non-verbal messages that the adults around them communicate. I could have benefited from a more direct approach, but then there was no one in my life who would have been able to guide me, given how differently the course of my life took me versus my father’s or my siblings. I probably could have reached out more to various professors, but then again, that was the lesson learned by early interactions with dad, to keep a safe distance and become my own person. I know he meant well, and in the end that’s good enough for me.
What sorts of mentorship experiences have you had, or did you resort to the anti-mentorship method I used?
