Quiet Please

There is a funny type of people in existence who appear shy, sensitive and serious. 

Perhaps you know one, are married to one or are a parent to one. Maybe (said with a whisper) you are one: an introvert. 

History shows that introverts have, well, made history: Rosa Parks defiant on the bus, Albert Einstein focused in his lab, T.S. Eliot absorbed at his desk.

Susan Cain's book "Quiet" is a best seller, a book with a pristine white cover, all about the power of introverts. She makes a fascinating and thoroughly researched case that quiet folk, those of us who want to slink off to the corner at parties and find small talk awkward, are not quite as peculiar as we feel, or others think.  Susan, herself highly introverted, has been on a journey of listening to uncover what the quiet folk among us can bring to a world that just can't stop talking.

In our mentoring work at Lifespace Trust, we work with hundreds of individual young people each year. Our mentors create a safe place for them to tell their stories and work out how to work through tricky issues in their fast-paced lives - friendships, moods, body changes. Being a teenager is a full time job. Some young people are ready and willing (and brave enough) to chat away: "This is me, this is my story". 

While that's a great place to start, we also meet young people who feel like they don't fit in, are not sociable and mostly feel alone. Eye contact doesn't come easily, and as for participating in group work, that's just a horror. But the tragedy is they perceive they are worth-less because of it. 

As if talkativeness was the measure of our value.

One lad I know ate his lunch in the boys' toilets every day just to get away. In fact hiding is a common trait of introverts. We need time alone to recharge our energy. He truanted from school for most of a term with anxiety, until he eventually formed a strategy where he sat quietly in a chair in his bedroom before school for twenty minutes just to get ready for the day. He would...

1. write down some thoughts; 

2. take some slow deep breaths; 

3. and remind himself that he could take the day... just... one... hour... at a time. 

It turned things around for him. From quietness, came his strength. Not unlike a little chap called Mahatma Gandhi, the all-time King of Shy.

What's my point? Perhaps as a new school term starts there will be a fresh flush of anxiety. Worrying thoughts will interrupt sleep. Yes the qualities of friendliness and teamwork are valid qualities for all young people to aspire to learn, but let's not miss the fact that some young people (and parents too?) will need something that's quite rare in today's relentlessly noisy world: a quiet place where the outside noise is switched off, and there's nothing weird about that. 

It's not odd, just important. 

For some of us, it is from quietness we find our courage. 

From quietness, comes our creativity. 

From quietness, we can finally hear ourselves think. 

So, if you score zero on the introvert scale, be patient with those quiet people around you. They do have meaningful things to say but you may need to ask them what it is! And if you are introverted, give yourself quiet spaces to recharge. Even in the toilets at lunchtime if you must. 

The stark truth is this: Your presence makes a difference to the people around you more than you know. Quiet people really can help make sense of the world.

(images courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net / (c) this article first appeared in Connection Magazine, September 2013, author: Chris Spriggs)

The Meaning of Mentoring

Here’s your challenge:

You have thirty seconds to mentally list all the TALKS, LECTURES, SERMONS (etc.) that have positively influenced your life. Go.

How many did you remember?
Now, given a further thirty seconds, this time mentally list all the PEOPLE who have influenced you for good. Go.
How many names are on that list? Is your second list longer than the first? I thought so.

Safe Places and Sign Posts
There is a universal truth at work here - people are mostly influenced by people – and there is a universal way this happens, called ‘Mentoring’. For all the awesome podcasts and inspirational talks that we are rightly thank-full for, give me a one-to-one mentoring conversation (over coffee) anytime.
Over the years mentoring has been defined by numerous academics and practitioners, most laconically perhaps as ‘a brain to pick, an ear to listen and a nudge in the right direction’ (John C. Crosby, American former-politician). I would add ‘a heart to touch’ at the start of that definition.
Mentoring has endured. It spans cultures and faiths; it connects genders and industries; it bridges generations and personal worldviews.
We might even say that at its best mentoring offers a safe place in life’s storms, a signpost at life’s junctions, and a stretching process at life’s edges. But maybe that's just me trying to get poetic about it.

Acting For Help
In my day-to-day work, looking after a mentoring-based charity I founded in 2004, each year provides us with new chances to reach out and influence over 100 emerging young men (yes, we work with amazing girls too). In fact, close to 70% of our total number of requests(from schools, families and agencies) are boys, underlining Australian psychologist Steve Biddulph’s observation that “girls ‘ask for help’ whereas boys ‘act for help’.” It’s one of those generally-true generalisations.

A Two Way Street

While ‘Mentoring’ as a term increasingly comes into vogue, its rise causes confusion and misuse. Dr. Kate Philip, of University of Aberdeen, says it is so widely used it has come to be almost meaningless. Let's make it clear: Mentoring is distinctive from befriending (a social focus), different to counselling (a therapeutic focus) and not the same as coaching (a performance and skills focus). Yet mentoring reaches into each of these other forms of help by way of the core communication-process skills it draws on – such as active listening, attentive questioning and specific feedback. In a nutshell, mentoring is ultimately about character and capability. Becoming who you really are to do what you really must do.

Time For Stories

How come people have a deeper longer-lasting sway over us than sermons, however well-pitched, rehearsed and spiritual? Mentoring goes beyond picking brains, lending ears, and pushing people on. It reaches deeply into our Personal Stories. As U.S. author Don Miller once tweeted, “Your Advice sends me on my way. Your Story comes with me.” Mentoring opens the door for our unique and quirky individual stories to be exchanged. It is a two way street, not one way, and this is where it diverts from counselling and coaching. Mentoring presses play on the possibility of both people changing - it is not expert-led, but maturity-led.

Mentoring is a narrative-nudging gift for us on earth, to both become the people we ourselves aspire to be, and enable others to become all that God intends them to be too. Even in a society obsessed with iContact more than eye contact, where we are so easily ruled by goggle-boxes and google-searches, people will always need each other. We have an in-built hunger for words to become Flesh and sermons to become Stories. Search Engines can retrieve a trillion bits of information at the click-click of a mouse but one thing they can’t do. They can’t find us meaning. Only people can do that.

A Task

May I suggest a task? Who on your mental list of positive people can you say “thank you” to for their influence on you? In turn, is there someone – whether in your street, office or contacts list – that you could be a safe place for? Go ahead. Be a part of Someone’s Story.