Role Models

       When I say role models what comes to your mind, is it your personal role models? Or is it how you can become one/better one? Or maybe its even the movie Role Models. Well personally I hope it's not the movie because that movie portrays horrible values of a mentor. While the movie is quite hilarious I hope that no one acts like that with their mentees.  While reading the chapter for this week it gave eighteen values that it thought was important to have as mentor. Not only is it important to have them, but to also try and to pass them along as well.  In class as an activity Amy and Rachel would write three of the eighteen values on the board and we had to first go to the side of the room which represented the value we thought was our strongest out of the three, afterwards we would go to the corner that was our weakest. I thought this was a really great exercise cause not only did it get you thinking about the meaning of the values, but also why you thought you were weak or strong at them. It really forced you to think within yourself and about your values and how you were strong at them or weak and how you can become better at them. I thought it was also great to see how the other mentors compared or contrasted with yourself and made me think that if I needed up on one of the values then you could always talk to them about how they got to have it as a strong value. I really thought that Rachel and Amy did a great job on leading us and can't wait to see them lead again.
       This chapter, whilst it was short, still held a lot of depth and meaning. It really is about teaching us how to become an overall better person and to reflect and teach this to our mentees. It also made us think about who we admire the most and why. What can we do to become more like them or what qualities do we already posses that make us like them. I hope everyone has a good week, it's suppose to be warmer so enjoy! Get ready for me and Jenna coming at you on Tuesday! Out!

       What does self-awareness mean? To most people it just means to be conscious of your actions and what is going on around you, yet to a mentor it means much more. To a mentor yes it does mean this, but it also means to know this and with this knowledge, use it to help others. For mentors, self-awareness is a necessary tool because to help others, you must first understand yourself.  In the reading for this week it talked about how understanding yourself can not only improve how you feel about yourself, but can give you a sense of empowerment as we realize that we have the ability to improve or own circumstances. With this there are six types of self-awareness: intellectual, resource, physical, emotional, social, spiritual. While all of these are important, mostly one is more important to a person and is a big driving force. It also talked about the self-system and how self-esteem, self-concept, and self-efficacy are all related and effect each other. With all these tools you may ask well how do I use these to help myself change or improve? The answer to this is that most everything that we do as humans is out of habit. The way to improve or change is that once we are self-aware of our actions and etc, we can use them in everyday situations to help get practice. Over time we will change, its almost training yourself.
        While in class we talked about a lot of these subjects. We all went around and shared some insight about ourselves and where we get our drive in life. A lot of these stories were quite private an I want to thank everyone for opening up and sharing. I don't know for everyone, but for me it was actually quite hard to open up about mine, it was an emotional time for me so telling everyone made me a little emotional about it. In response to the blog question, my role as a mentor and helping them become self-aware is to lead them down the right path. A lot students may come in already knowing themselves yet others will have no idea. I feel like I can help them by talking with them and telling my story and tell them how it changed me. I can ask them simple questions that will get them thinking like, what is it that is most important in your life? What would you do to keep that thing in your life? Questions like this can really make you think about your life and what you want out of it. I want to thank Anthony and Beth for doing a great job. Thanks for reading! Have a good one, out.

Relationships/Anyone wanna be my Valentine?

       Well first off I just wanna say I had this blog done, then realized I wrote about the wrong subject so I deleted what I had then also realized I could have saved the one I just wrote for later but its to late for that now....eff my life haha. Anyways lets get started, for this weeks blog we are talking about establishing and maintaining relationships. This chapter could possibly be one of the most important chapters in the book because when we meet our new mentees it is very important that we establish the right kind of relationshiop with them. We need to be trusted by them yet also not to far into the friend area where lines are crossed into the unprofessional area. You can think of your relationship as more of a partnership than friendship. In the book it talked about how there is stages of a mentors relationship. It starts with asking question about where you are in the stages, and by your answers it helps to tell you just where you are in the relationship. I thought this was a really good thing because sometimes you can be close to the person or so called "project" and may not even realize til you take a step back where you are.  This can then help you to make corrections and or move forward.
        In class Deb and Joey did a really good job with their presentation. They really got the class involved and called upon our acting skills, like Greg who played the great role of a young lady. The part that I liked about the skits we did was that they were real life situations that we could encounter next year. It actually got me thinking that if I'm out an about next year that and I see a mentee I still need to be professional about the situation and handle it in a way that doesn't reflect poorly upon myself and the University. I hope for every ones sake that no one gets in a situation that makes them feel super uncomfortable and if you so I have the up most confidence that everyone will handle it in the most professional way possible. Hope everyone has a great and enjoy some weather that is -28! Out

Being All You Can Be

       Hey everyone, I know you all are just as sad as I am bout not having class on Tuesday and not being able to see every ones bright and beautiful faces, hope everyone can survive til next week.  Anyways, this weeks blog is a combination of a couple things, chapter 3 reading and the leadership sessions we attended. Last week on Friday, we all had to attend a session, I choose to attend the session about Biofeedback: What your mind is telling you body. While my initial guess of what the session was going to be about was that it was to be based on the science of how your mind makes your body react to things and etc, it turns out the session was actually about how you can control the involuntary actions your body does and how this can help you. At first I thought it was going to be SUPER boring and stupid, but as the session went on it got really interesting about how simple things can elevate your heart rate and cause a Fight-or-Flight reaction in your mind. Once your mind does this it pretty much shuts down the frontal lobe of you brain, which is in charge of problem solving, analysis, judgement, and even memory. This effects us because if you consider yourself a bad test taker it turns out your body is probably reacting in this manner. With biofeedback you can learn to control your heart rate and mind and calm yourself down during a test and be able to rock it. Pretty cool I thought
       On Saturday we had to attend another leadership session. The main speaker, David Coleman, was a really good speaker with a lot of great information. The movie Hitch was actually based off him and his job. In his speech he talked about how today while our generation is incredibly smart that a lot of people don't know how to talk to people in person or be leaders. He also brought it to our attention just how sick our generation is with taking so much on our plate that a lot of times we will just skip eating or something so we can get more things done. David brought up the point that most companies say it is only as strong as its weakest link, but he thinks this is a load and that a company is actually only as strong as its strongest link. He said he would bet everyone in the room was probably a good person, but just how good? We did a little exercise that showed us while we are good people, we still do things we shouldn't like deliberately litter, talk about people behind their back, etc. After his talk I decided to go to his small session as well. There we learned that even though you may not treat someone who is different from you much different, over the course of the day if everyone does that then it just gets beat into them and they notice that they are different. Overall he did a great job talking and to anyone who missed him I feel bad for you.
       Now to the reading, in the reading for this week its main goal was to help us understand defining our roles as mentors and how to do that. In the book it talked about how there is kind of a check list that you can try to use to help yourself be a good mentor like using: First impressions, charisma, courtesy, gratitude, etc. Now that I'm in a leadership position where I have to lead and teach others, I understand better just how hard it will be to try and convey the message that I'm trying to get across. It actually kind of made me open my eyes to just how hard a teachers job probably is. Trying to get 300 people to understand the material your teaching probably super tough. I just hope I can convey the good advice I have to my students. Have a good one everybody. Out