A community of mentors keeps growing

We welcome 14 new volunteer mentors this month!

They are just about to complete their 3 day mentor training programme based at The Barn, Bidford-on-Avon, delivered by Mentoring and Training Co-ordinator, Kate Cocker and Director, Chris Spriggs. This will grow the community of Lifespace mentors to 49... which is great news for reaching more young people who face difficulty and distress, more speedily and effectively. Every mentor teams up with an individual supervisor.

All their mini-biographies and photos are on our new website in the gallery of mentors:

http://www.lifespace.org.uk/our-mentors.html

 

Welcome to...

Cher-Anne Beard, Jo Broughton, Lorraine Cattrell, Janette Del Monaco, Fran Foster

Liz Gregson, Jo Harper, Sara Le Grice, Fiona Legros, Isabelle Mullon, Bethan Pierce-Jones, Debbie Seaborn, Gill Thomas, Sam Wehby.

 

 

 

 

The Mentor Training programme includes:

-    Understanding the role of a mentor and the qualities required
-    What mentoring is ...and isn't!
-    How mentoring differs from counselling, befriending and coaching
-    The mentoring life spiral as a process for mentoring relationships
-    How to start and end mentoring relationships well
-    Role plays and mentoring resources
-    Young people and mental health
-    Mindfulness and resilience in mentoring
-    Creating positive outcomes
-    Mentoring techniques and questioning styles

We deliver mentoring training approximately every 9 months to give time to making sure all our new mentors are effectively inducted and matched to an individual supervisor. To enquire about our next training (scheduled for April - June 2016) please call the office on 01789 297400 and ask to speak to Kate Cocker.

The training currently costs £195 which is payable in advance by a trainee. This is reimbursed in full once a mentor has completed 24 hours of mentoring with Lifespace as a volunteer. If the cost is a barrier to your participation but you are still interested in volunteering with us, please contact us and we are open to discussing possibiities.

Volunteers are accepted only after a full interview, two references and a DBS Enhanced Disclosure. 

Going Blank On Purpose

Ever had a moment like this?

I stood before the audience. A hundred faces stared at me, waiting. I was the keynote speaker, the medium-sized attraction. This was it. But my mind went blank. I remembered my name but after that there was_______________ (exactly, nothing). Just a big space my words weren’t occupying.

The crowd coughed, trying to jolt me into action. Somewhere in the distance a fire engine passed, siren-blaring. Perhaps sent to rescue me. I gulped but the ground refused to swallow me up. Both of us, the floor and I, our mouths seized shut. That’s when I walked off the stage.

Since that accidental awkward silence, over ten years ago, I’ve spoken publicly over 400 times. That one-off moment taught me a great deal about preparation. “Achievement” writes journalist Malcolm Gladwell, “is talent PLUS preparation”.  You can’t just turn up and perform. But when it comes to preparation, the secrets for doing well in the future often lie in the journey we’ve already made.

So, let me pose a question.

What would the line of your last decade look like if you were to chart the up and downs?

My guess is it wouldn’t be a straight line, but more like a pulse rate monitor. There would be ups (I hope), downs (alas, they happen to us all, some of them whilst public speaking) and flat bits where you really weren’t sure what was going on. Or is that just me every morning before caffeine takes effect?

Imagine doing this on a piece of blank paper. Horizontal line across the middle marking out the last ten years to the present day. Vertically up the left hand side a scale from -10 (the sad-awful stuff) rising to +10 (the amazing-proud stuff). Oh, just like that picture there. How handy.

Imagine your line. Its course would be unique. If it looks random, this confirms you are a human not a robot.

Now, a single line can never capture the story of your last decade.  Our lives are rich and strange (or is it just strange to feel rich?) But doing this simple exercise, on paper or mentally, can help pick out key high/low moments from which to learn. A strange paradox: Preparing for the unknown. I so happen to believe life is not an accidental mish-mash but we can influence the lines our lives take.

The day I write this is the 10 Year Anniversary of the mentoring work of Lifespace Trust. A decade in which our mentors have individually supported 968 young people. We’ve had ups (I’ve just been handed a cheque for £10,000 towards our work!) and we’ve had downs (a few significant mistakes of my doing come to mind).

Ten years ago I sat in a café in Stratford and on a blank sheet of paper I wrote what I wanted to see happen. Then with a clear idea of what I wanted, I talked to people who knew what I needed to know, and who cared. This afternoon I’m going out to the same café - but for a fresh coffee - with another blank sheet. I will chart the course of our last ten years, like you can do yours. Then ask some questions.

Notice the highs: ‘What might this suggest? How can we do more of that?’

Look at the lows: ‘How did that happen? What can we learn from that?’ Then talk it through with trusted people to get a 360° perspective.

 

The next decade – yours and ours - will have wobbles. But sometimes creating a blank moment on purpose is a golden chance to pause. Look how far you’ve already come. A reminder to hope. An invitation to dream. It’s time to live life on purpose and have something useful to say.

 

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.

The problem with Father Christmas

Do you remember that childhood occupation of writing your Christmas letter to Father Christmas? The excitement you had at dreaming up what else you could add to the list? There was that lovely innocent belief, wasn’t there, that you could decide something you wanted, scribble it down and - hey presto - in just a short period of time it would be delivered to your fireplace / the foot of your bed / under the tree* (*delete as applicable) With a “Ho Ho Ho” included.

Prepare yourself for bad news.

Father Christmas never got those letters. There were no magic elves.

If you got anything off your list it was (take a deep breath) down to the sheer hard work, sacrifice and organisation of others. Now I’m a parent of three small children I know how much effort it takes to deliver the goods – I watch my wife do a great job of organising the whole process!

Now I wonder how this connects to young people in school, or to you and I? 

What we DO come across in our mentoring work are young people (some, not all) who live and breathe with the corrosive idea lurking in their amazing minds that "whatever I want in life will just arrive". Maybe not in a red sack / pillow / sock* (*you get the idea) but that the universe will conspire to make it happen for them…but somehow without their involvement.

You start asking...When did they decide to become a passenger in their own magnificent life, the one that they have Chief Responsibility to lead? At what point does the penny drop that Accomplishment requires Action. Persistent, informed, purposeful action. Sometimes, the penny never drops.

The mentoring and education work of Lifespace revolves around the absolute passionate intention of helping young people lead their own lives in the direction they really want to go. Don't wait for Santa, because he ain't comin'.

Sometimes nurturing a young person’s belief in themselves can be harder than convincing them that Father Christmas might be out there. The obstacles seem many and are audible.

“But I can’t… But I tried… I can’t be bothered…I’m just not any good at…” Yet ask them what they want, and many people, not just teenagers, have a spark of an idea about how they want their life to be different. The limiting belief creates a limited range of behaviours.

Our advice to those people wanting to succeed at something?

Firstly, get clear on what you do want. Yes, writing it out does help, then you can SEE what you’re thinking. Just not addressed to Santa.  Keep the wording positive and succinct. Be specific. Make sure it’s something you are in control of.

Secondly, consider what you need. Who can you talk to? What can you read about it? Who can you model who does it well? What in your past can you squeeze learning from? Rethink the past “gravestones of failure” as “milestones of feedback”. Your past isn’t what you thought it was. We've all failed at something, this no WAY means we are failures.

Thirdly, decide and do something. Then notice what happens. No the Elves won’t put in an extra shift on your behalf, but it’s strange how change always follows action which always follows decision. The world looks different depending on our attitude towards it.

Finally, adjust and keep going. Once you’re taking control of the steering wheel of your life, you have to keep your eyes on the road...

…you just never know when a stray reindeer might appear.