A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring

life is a learning opportunity and that lessons are constantly being taught all around us.

Hand in hand with consistency come honesty and trust. When a teacher or a coach or any kind of mentor is consistent in his or her principles, it creates trust between the mentor and the people he or she is mentoring.

Knowledge is nothing unless it is shared.

I’ve talked before about the graduation gift my father gave to each of his sons when we completed grade school: a two-dollar bill, and a small card with a poem on one side and seven rules for living on the other: 1. Be true to yourself. 2. Make each day your masterpiece. 3. Help others. 4. Drink deeply from good books. 5. Make friendship a fine art

That’s one of the important things about mentoring that I believe is often overlooked: Some lessons are learned more subconsciously than consciously. There are things I learned from watching my father that I purposely tried to copy in my own life. But other things I found were just kind of absorbed and became a part of my thinking and reactions wit

Humiliation is not the same thing as correction: One attacks the person; the other attacks the problem.

If we don’t pass on what we’ve gained, we are halting the upward reach of society, and we are denying everything that came before us that enabled us the luxury of learning those lessons we refuse to share.

Do any of us really have a choice as to whether a child looks up to us? Do we have any control over another person’s choice to look to model themselves after our own lives?

The English teacher side of me shows a bit when I point out that the word “mentor” is both a verb and a noun. It is simultaneously something you do and something you are.