All Mentoring articles
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ArticleFour degrees of school-based mentoring
This monthly column looks at God’s work in schools: through schools’ work and in children’s education as they think Christianly about what they study
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IssuesMentoring: Love your ‘frenemies’
I had a great experience of peer mentoring the other day (that’s really just a posh term for two friends chatting and encouraging each other!).
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IssuesMentoring: What would Gareth do?
The sun sweats over a tense Russian stadium. England have just won their first ever penalty shoot-out in World Cup history. The crowd erupts.
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BlogWhy mentoring can change a young person’s life
Reggie Nelson knocked on doors in Kensington and asked each person how they made their money. One door opened to an opportunity for mentoring and a job in the financial sector. Youth worker Nathan Bossoh explores what we can learn from Reggie’s story…
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IssuesMentoring: How do we measure spiritual growth?
As a teenager, I remember being quite easily discouraged about my relationship with God. Why wasn’t he speaking to me? How could I become more ‘successful’ at putting my faith into action?
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IssuesMentoring: #identity
How often have you heard someone described as a wolf in sheep’s clothing? The phrase actually originates from Jesus himself in Matthew 7:15 and refers to someone who appears harmless, but their true identity is potentially hurtful.
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IssuesMentoring: Hide and seek with God
I regularly enjoy playing a completely terrible version of hide and seek with my 3-year-old. Those of you with kids will no doubt recognise this game.
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IssuesMentoring: Russian doll syndrome
During one of my first seaside trips as a child, I remember getting a stick of rock and being fascinated by how the writing went all the way down the stick.
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IssuesMentoring: Fear, hope and love
I was blessed by my 3-year-old daughter’s bedtime story last night. Each page had a different scene and ended with the phrase: “God knows all about me.” I was struck by how the answer to our fears is so often in knowing the closeness of God and the love he has for us.
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IssuesMentoring: White privilege
Have you had any personal experiences of prejudice or injustice? The danger of privilege is that the privileged rarely see the extent of their power and position. Realising this and seeing the world through someone else’s eyes marks the difference between changing the world around us and developing an attitude where we think we deserve our luxury, advantages and benefits.
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IssuesMentoring: Creating robots
I recently trained to be a full-time firefighter. The training was hard but they ingrained one thing into us: they are not trying to create robots who just follow orders, but crews who think for themselves and use their skills as each incident requires. It’s not enough to go through the motions - that could kill you. Something about that resonated with me regarding mentoring.
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IssuesMentoring: Self-control
Why is it that getting up at 7am for work can be absolute torture and require three hits of the snooze button, while 7am on a weekend morning for a long cycle in the Peak District is often an absolute joy? (It may be the other way around for you!) I’m sure you have your own struggles, but the answer is to do with our motivation.
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BlogMentoring: Gentleness
Imagine this: she looked at me with horrible disdain in her face and threw my artwork down on the desk. “What is this rubbish? My nana could have drawn better than this and she’s blind. Do it again. You can do so much better than this - come on!”
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IssuesMentoring: Faithfulness
I was about 10. We were on holiday and my brother and I were playing on the campsite playground. Throughout our childhood we were like cat and dog, always bickering and fighting. Being four years older he always won. On this occasion, however, some random kid picked up my bike as if to take it and was intimidating me. My brother waded straight over and well and truly told him where to get off, until the kid backed off and left us alone. I was gobsmacked. I realised that, underneath everything, my brother loved me - which meant standing by me when things got serious. It was a picture of what it means to be faithful to someone.
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BlogMentoring: Goodness
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
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IssuesMentoring: Kindness
Interestingly, as I was thinking about writing about kindness this month, I ended up in a conversation with my 12-year-old daughter about a lonely lad at her youth group, and whether it was her responsibility to look out for him if he was sitting on his own. As a year-eight, life is hard enough already just trying to fit in - is going out of her way for others actually her job?
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IssuesMentoring: Patience
Seb sat grinning at the table while Liam poked him in the face. We were at our annual residential. Seb was one of the leaders and the kind of guy who never stopped smiling; he was full of patience and kindness. On this occasion Seb was being severely tested. For a full 20 minutes, Liam, 16, amicably poked Seb in the face to see what it would take to break him. Seb kept laughing - I think in the end he did crack but only as far as brushing his hand away with another laugh. It was amazing!
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BlogMentoring: Peace
Buy your mentee a cactus. Seriously. In fact, the cactus will arguably be a better mentor than you! It has the privilege of doing what you can’t do: spending vast amounts of time with your mentee, including many of the most intimate and crucial times of all. Granted you can talk and it can’t, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are a better mentor than this humble desert plant; it definitely listens better than you do.
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BlogMentoring: Love
I ran a 10k race last October. I’m a ‘middle of the pack’ runner, so my time of 48:44 was acceptable but not mind-blowing. I occasionally entertain dreams of finishing on a podium, but deep down I’m resigned to it never happening. It’s too big a goal to achieve. On reflection, I realised that if I had improved my time by just one per cent, I would have jumped a staggering 358 places from 585th to 227th. That’s achievable. It just equates to better nutrition and a little more training time. Just a small life change could result in significant growth. Still not a podium, but I would be moving in the right direction.
