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Mentoring is about giving young people a safe environment in which to make decisions about their values and beliefs. Let’s not mistake good mentoring for one-on-one tutoring, with a flow of knowledge from you to them. Mentoring is not an environment for instructing the young person into how to become a ‘mini you’. Your job is facilitating their discovery of ‘the best them’.
This month’s resource is about taking advantage of the slightly more fluid summer timetable to explore new locations and new ways of facilitating your mentees’ growth. Mentoring is a relationship, not a regular meeting across a table.
THE HILL-TOP PRAYER TIME
Get them out of bed at a ridiculous hour to climb a big hill and pray over your town or nation. Allow them to see the way you spend prayer times with God and use it to stretch both of you.
PEOPLE WATCHING
Go people watching – or more specifically praying for strangers from a safe distance! Find a coffee shop or park bench in a busy public place and pick out one person each discussing what you can learn about them from watching them. Is it strange to think about people you might not normally pay attention to?
THE FAMILIAR AND COMFORTABLE
You might need to go outside of your own comfort zone to help see things from your mentees POV. You might love coffee shops, but your mentee might be more comfortable in a skate park. It might even be a certain time of day (or night!) or platform for communicating such as chatting online on ‘FIFA’ or using Snapchat.
THE UNFAMILIAR AND UNCOMFORTABLE
Pick somewhere that the young person will feel outside of their comfort zone: anywhere very early in the morning, a war or art museum, an old people’s home, a tour of a mosque. It can be more specific: if the mentee is not sporty, getting them to do an outdoor activity can be useful to stretch them – or if they are sporty, visiting a stuffy library to look for old books or perhaps a ballet if they are an ‘alpha male’.
Pray about it and spend time thinking openly about what will give you both a new perspective and new opportunities for exploring new areas of your mentees (and your) brain and spirit. May you have a blessed time together!
