by Stephanie Sides
The first principle from my opening column on this topic, in the last issue of EAP, was the importance of finding a mentor. I’m certainly no expert at this game. But in retrospect, and considering a few women that have helped guide my life (perhaps unbeknownst to them), I think it’s something that young women might want to consider.
I suggested, in scouting for a mentor, that one start by considering one’s mother’s good girlfriends because this is where I unwittingly began. Finding mutual interests, and even quirky things in common (details below), is a good way.
If you’re lacking a mother or the good girlfriends nearby, the next step is to try a trusted teacher, local shopkeeper, a sister of your brother’s girlfriend — someone older (somewhat or by many years – it doesn’t really matter) that you feel a connection with.
You don’t have to guess right every time. (If you did, there’d be no reason for this column!). So keep looking until you find someone that resonates with you.
And that you resonate with her.
And 1 doesn’t have to be the magic number. If you have several potential mentors, consider yourself lucky and go for all of them. In aggregate, they’ll bring you a much wider perspective. If you listen to all their viewpoints, you’re likely to be much further ahead than your peers in understanding about life, which, after all, is what this is all about.
Basic Rule: Your mentors are there to help you. They will help you gain perspective though many of the things they say will sound like standard clichés: (a) life is not easy, (b) life is not fair, and (c) life is what you make of it.
All of which is true. The sooner you learn these basic lessons, the sooner you can get to work on crafting the life you want with a savvier sense of the obstacles you’re likely to encounter and with foreknowledge about how to address them.
If you establish an open relationship with her/him/them and make clear your needs (which of course calls on you to identify them up front), they most likely will be delighted to help.
This is your manifest opportunity to express your needs, wants, disappointments, anger, and sadness to someone who’s already pre-disposed to listen and provide advice.
They can do that best if you tell them, as explicitly as you can, where you need help. Where are you stuck? What do you feel uncomfortable about and just don’t know why?
The issues I’ve had the hardest time sorting out typically have been related to an emotional train I’ve identified as disappointment, anger, then (and the longest caboose) sadness, which can be the most debilitating.
The best they can offer you is constructive criticism, so pay attention to that. It won’t always be comfortable for you to hear them, but their thoughts are likely to reward you in the end as they have more experience than you do. Trust their experience.
Be sure to filter their thoughts through your own experience, as it’s possible they may be entirely off base with respect to your life.
The important thing is to keep yourself and your needs part of the filtering process. If something doesn’t make sense, ask about it.
Your job, in return, is to help your mentor (and his/her generation) understand what’s different about you (and yours). That’s of equal importance, so don’t miss this opportunity. They will be thankful you took the time because it will help them with other relationships you may not know about but that are likely to be problematic.
Which brings me to the importance of a two-way relationship: Your relationship will be most effective when it’s give and take. It’s important that you, as the younger member, not become the “needy” member of this relationship: You should think about getting and giving back in equal measure, just like all relationships in life. That will ensure the value and longevity of the relationship.
Also consider friends as potential mentors. They constitute your “support group.” These people are equally important and perhaps easier to find because the relationships are more likely to happen and are clearly symbiotic. If a friend or two is not supporting you, and you find you’re doing all the supporting, it’s time to find a different support group member. As they say: Surround yourself with people who bring out the best in you.
Once I cottoned on to this one, my life improved immensely. (Important note: I’m suggesting we distinguish this sense of personal relationship from the broad notion of compassion for others. There are many people in our immediate realm that need our compassion immensely, and we should always do our best to help these people.)
As you get older and “get to that age” (you’ll know it’s time when you start noticing you’re older than the majority of people you spend time with), look for younger girls to mentor.
Here’s a bit of personal detail on why I think the mentoring notions mentioned above worked for me…
My mother had a “younger” friend that brought her no end of laughter. She was a likely candidate for a mentor because we had some important things in common. The clincher for me, being a beginning horsewoman (we had ponies in the back yard), was that she had ridden, as a mere teenager, fancy jumpers out of Detroit, some two hours away. She wasn’t just a rider; she was a rider that rode talented jumpers. That was a big deal. I was told later that, had the Olympics not been so female-unfriendly at the time, she might have qualified to compete during the 1960s. (I’m reminded that riding events in the Olympics are the only ones in which men and women compete head to head; even so, there still has been some heady discrimination to overcome. Still, by today’s standards, the women, especially in dressage, dominate. Jumpers and cross-country are more male-dominated.)
Anne loaned me my first pair of tall riding boots, the mark of a serious rider, when I was 13 and just learning to jump. This worked because we shared a physical characteristic — big calves — hardly typical in the riding world.
To this day, I send her holiday photos of me and my aging (now 23 years) Thoroughbred, and she has told me stories about opportunities she’s had in her 60s to ride talented warmbloods owned by friends. So our mutual lifelong love of horses continues.
I don’t think I considered her a mentor per se at the time. No one used that word back then. But I did look up to and respect her. I think those aspects are what define a mentoring relationship. She was also one of the few career women my mother knew back in the late 1960s, so she had an exotic influence on me.
Everyone liked Anne because she was lively, loud, and laughed a lot. But for me, she was real about life and could express its utter ridiculousness without letting it discourage her, in spite of the burdensome family problems she had. She also had an intellectual edge that appealed to me and treated me as if I were her peer whose notions of life were worth taking seriously.
In my later years, I’ve found that I call her when family, and especially father, problems loom large. She’s been unfailingly honest, like my now-deceased uncle Randy. It’s amazing what you can learn from relatives later in life.
One of my most rewarding friend-as-mentor was my friend Cherri (pronounced “Sherry”). Though we’re about the same age, I always looked up to her because I deemed her more academically accomplished: Though she had a rather eclectic career, which caused some people I’m sure to disparage her immense credentials, she had a PhD in computer science. I had known her casually for years though a professional conference we attended every year. Then she spent a year on sabbatical in the research organization I worked at with an office just down the hall. That’s when I really got to know her.
She’s one of those few people that, while we don’t see each other very often, always energizes me after a coffee get-together, as if I’ve gotten a jolt of Jolt from her. What I particularly value about her is her proactive, positive nature and sense that, gee, this problem MUST have a solution: She’s a never-say-never kind of person to the core. So she always gives me hope, no matter what the situation. Plus we’ve had some contemporaneous ups-and-downs, not necessarily at the same time, but situations that provide a foundation of understanding that support our friendship.
I fell into mentoring younger people, by the by, when I was approached a couple of years ago to take on a high school senior for fall term. This was part of the school’s graduation requirements: Each senior had to intern in a local place of business or learning. Since the school was affiliated with the university I worked at, my work place was a natural to solicit.
Joanna, my intern, came to me for 90 minutes once a week. Since my area was communications, I wanted to share with her my love for and challenges with the field. My research institute was new, so we talked about creating a tagline encapsulating its values and strengths, playing around with different phrase and word order, various adjectives that might apply, the relative emphasis of the place of each in the phrase, and so forth.
I had her to read selected newspaper articles, then summarize them for me and look for evidence of bias. I also asked her to analyze the language of one of George W. Bush’s speeches to see what that said about his intellect and what he thought of his audience. Joanna seemed to like the word play aspects of this work, which is what had always appealed to me about the profession.
I figured these kinds of assignments would provide greater value than assigning her to do mind-numbingly stupid clerical tasks (which seemed the norm for “intern projects”), which teach you nothing about the workplace other than that you don’t want to be there.
We also talked about personal things affecting her life, like the best approach to application essays for college admissions and what problems she might encounter adjusting to college life and being away from home.
She tells me I was one of two people who influenced her to apply to UC Berkeley (my alma mater). She was accepted and just finished her freshman year, focused on a major in chemical engineering. She came by for a short visit in January while she was home during semester break, and she clearly had the world by the tail.
She and I are still in touch and, in fact, have collaborated on a related article in this issue of EAP, “A College Freshman’s Perspective” [to read Stephanie and Joanna's column, THE TRANSITION TO COLLEGE, click here].
I enjoyed this experience with Joanna so much that I’ve since signed up to mentor two students at the same school this coming fall.