All Mentoring articles – Page 2
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IssuesReady-To-Use Mentoring:Role Reversal
This week I went for a walk with a young guy in the Peak District near Sheffield. He grew up in the youth group I used to run and has since moved away, but during the holidays, he made the effort to come up and spend time with me.
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BlogReady-to-use Mentoring: Would you rather?
Mentoring is a game of give and take - it’s offering wisdom and sharing but also probing and nudging your mentee. Try a round of ‘Would you rather?’ to open up discussions. Allow them to ask you some too, because when you are both offering insight it becomes a two-way relationship. Steer the session towards things that may open useful or deeper conversations. Here’s some ideas but do share your best ones with us!
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BlogReady-to-use Mentoring: Three Persons…
Years ago, someone set up a ‘prayer tent’ in our Sunday service and I felt God speak to me quite clearly, and quite profoundly. As I lay on my back in the small tent, I looked up and saw that the pattern of the material as it joined at the peak was a small square with an ‘X’ through it (as the illustration demonstrates).
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IssuesReady-to-use Mentoring: Taking Stock
A few years ago, the Anglican church I was working for wanted to extend the building out and add a café.
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IssuesReady-to-use Mentoring: Self-reflection
Last week I broke my collarbone by coming off my bike during a triathlon in the Peak District. As far as my fitness plans went this was a curve ball: any plans for competing in other events went out the window. I was disappointed, annoyed and physically in pain.
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IssuesReady-to-use mentoring: The third person
Seeing things from an outside perspective can be a real benefit to achieving progress, insight, and hopefully change. When you are in the thick of things yourself it can be really hard to see the obvious mistakes you are making or understand anyone else’s point of view.
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IssuesReady-to-use Mentoring: Word of the Year
January should be the official mentoring month! New Year is a key season for appraising the previous year and setting goals for the coming 12 months. It’s also a time that often results in frustration, and even guilt, when a few weeks later, good intentions fall by the wayside and healthy habits are already broken. Here are some ideas to support your young people through it this year:
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IssuesReady-to-use Mentoring: Are you talking to yourself?
I was mentoring a musician this week who has a new single called ‘Victorious’. It’s about overcoming tough things that stand in your way and hold you back (in her case, dyslexia). In the same breath as telling me about the song, she was complaining about the problems she encountered in releasing the single, before she had a light bulb moment: she wasn’t following her own advice! She needed to resist the temptation to give up, and show more resilience and determination if she was to be victorious over setbacks and discouragement. She needed to live what she was preaching and remind herself of the facts, rather than listening to doubts.
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IssuesReady-to-use Mentoring: Resolutions
One of the few preaches that has really stuck with me over the years is from my childhood, and annoyingly for me back then, it was from my dad! He said, ‘This January, don’t make resolutions, make resolve.’ What he meant was: don’t create destinations that you may or may not reach; don’t set yourself up for a fall, rather build roads for yourself to travel along as far as you can.
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IssuesReady-To-Use Mentoring: The relationships matrix
There is precious little instruction and guided reflection on how to have a healthy (offline) social network and how to develop a range of healthy relationships. There’s no qualifications needed to become a parent, no training courses on how to be a good friend; a bit of thought could help us to reflect God better in our key relationships.
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IssuesReady-to-use mentoring: Listen up!
The worst mentoring relationship I have ever been in came early on in my mentoring ‘career’ …
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IssuesThe Youth work Lab: Mentoring
Welcome to the Youth Work Lab: the place where key youth work theories are tried and tested by on-the-ground practitioners. Each month,
the team from StreetSpace selects and explores a piece of youth work theory, and puts it to the test in creative and pioneering ways -
BlogReady-To-Use Mentoring: What are you hiding?
I heard a story of a mentee who said that he holds back in relationships to protect people from himself. He felt so negative about his bad points and shameful secrets that he felt he needed to put up walls for their sake. Perhaps this is extreme, but we all have areas we hide, indicative of low self-esteem or unresolved issues.
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IssuesReady-to-use Mentoring: Straw Polls, Straw Hats and Straw…Berries?
Youth ministry is often earmarked by its use of tenuous links. Making bread is a good one (to lead into talking about what ‘yeast’ we allow to grow and rise in our lives) or having a Nerf gun fight (to introduce the topic of what ‘fiery darts’ we shoot at each other with our speech). It struck me that this approach works well in mentoring too. As many of us meet in cafes, there’s often plastic straws knocking around so here’s ten ideas of discussion starters using straws!
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IssuesReady-To-Use Mentoring: Spiritual Growth
Unlike business, which can collect data on performance, or social media, which can count ‘likes’ and ‘shares,’ things-of-thespirit are rather more tricky to quantify.
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BlogReady-to-use Mentoring: From great to good
Good is the enemy of great.’ (James C. Collins Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t)
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IssuesMentoring: Never Giving Up
It’s not often that I’m met by a wall of paparazzi flashes when leaving XLP’s offices. After being shouted at to get out of the way, I accepted that perhaps they were more interested in Will and Kate than they were in me…
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IssuesReady-to-use mentoring: Get out of the office
‘Learning by doing’ is a hugely important principle in contemporary youth work and specifically in mentoring. It embodies the wisdom that is a few years old now, around the shift from a believe-behave-belong faith development to a belong-believe-behave progression.
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IssuesReady-to-use Mentoring: The listening game
I recently did some mentoring training for a fab youth discipleship programme called The Ascent. I loved their heart for discipleship and willingness to learn new mentoring skills in order to get alongside young people and walk with them through their ongoing faith and life journey.
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IssuesReady-to-use Mentoring: Petit Fours
This month’s mentoring resource is all about fours. Hopefully the following ‘fours’ will help you to bake some delicious delights of your own with your mentee as you follow your own special recipe for discipleship! Bon appetit!
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