A few weeks ago, we held a two-day mentor training workshop. It was over a year of planning to reorganize all the things we do as mentors, consolidate them into distinct “buckets” of knowledge, create a workbook – and finally – present it to real, live human beings.
It was an amazing experience and we had the pleasure of working with some very gifted individuals to make this all happen. One major theme kept popping up – there’s always more to learn. In our case for example, just one week after completing the year-long creation process for this training program, we had already generated a list of five or more new training topics we wanted to develop and implement.
If you sit still and stop learning, the razor loses its edge and you miss out on improved efficiencies and outcomes. Take this website for example. It has served it’s purpose for a few years by providing general information about the Minnesota River Valley Mentoring Program – but that’s all it’s done. We want it to be more informative. Provide more useful tools to both our mentors and anyone who takes a few minutes to check out our site every now and again.
Because of this, we are now working on providing more information here on a regular basis. We will start by covering snip-its of information from our mentor training program. The next step will be to include new content based on the add-on training modules we have identified as beneficial continuing education.
To give you a preview of what’s to come, below are some of the core topics we cover in our base mentor training program. We will piece those out into manageable updates via our website and go from there.
- Learning about the person you’re mentoring and discovering their wants and needs.
- Communication and observation skills.
- Building relationships. (spoiler: It includes you, the mentee and God.)
- Setting goals and building action plans
- Running mentor-mentee meetings.
- Holding both you and your mentee accountable.
We look forward to sharing what we know and are interested in hearing if there’s anything you want to learn about. We are not professionals and continue to learn everyday. It will be fun having you learning along with us.