A time to give thanks
Its Thanksgiving today and its been about a month since ive been matched with my mentee and what do I have to give thanks for
- Im thankful to my mentee for allowing me to strike up a relationship
- Im thankful to Bolder Options for doing a good job with matching us up
- Im thankful to the YMCA for allowing us to stay out of the "not so" biting cold
- Im thankful to 3M for tickets to the Vikes Monday Night game
- Im thankful to my mentees dad for the support he offers
- Im thankful to my mentee for looking at this relationship as a way to grow
Well if you look at all my posts up till now it would seem that mentoring is really easy, and it is, but there are always times when you ask yourself - why did I get myself into this. And there have been times in the last month when I have had my misgivings. We will leave the questions and how I dealt with them for my next post and focus on the reasons that mentorship is fun.
- It gives you a reason to be a role model for someone (and a reason to be better than yourself)
- A kids smile is worth a lot more than anything I know
- You actually are making a difference
So until my next post (the one with mentoring misgivings - and how to deal with them) - Happy Thanksgiving
PS: Im watching the game and I always wonder where they get the mug shots for the players. Joey Harringtons pic looks like he badly needs a barber

Goal Setting
One of the things that the Bolder Options program does that really seems to make a huge difference to these kids lives is the setting of three goals that we then strive towards. My two mentees both seem to have the drive to achieve - but have never had the opportunity to work towards something with a plan. In fact my previous mentee has said more than once that Bolder Options helped him to prioritize his activities so as to tackle the things that would make the most difference to his life.
Coming back to my new mentee - we came up with two of his goals in this week
Bolder suggests that we focus each of the goals on different areas in the youths life namely academic physical and personal
Academic: these are normally easy to come up with since it normally involves evaluting which subjects your mentee needs help with. My mentee really needs to work on his math - so we have a pretty stiff goal of getting from a No credit to a B. Its going to be tough but I believe the weekly work that we do at the library will pretty much guarantee that
Physical: these always end up being something to do with 5K times. This time around I have challenged my mentee to run for 4.5 miles in 30 mins. I think he currently is at 3 and six-tenths so this one is going to be a tough one to get to
Personal: these are the most difficult ones to figure out. We havnt gotten down to figuring this one out yet .. so I guess this gets a post on its own
The Carrot
Something that Bolder doesnt talk about is little rewards or incentives. I find that they really work well. It normally means finding out what your mentee really wants. My mentee is really interested in Japanese stuff - and the only japanese stuff I really like is Sushi. Apparently he would like to try it too - so thats our reward if we get to a B in math ....so watch for an interesting post on sushi sometime in Jan :)

Weak Vikings and a Strong Run
We were lucky enough to get tickets to the Vikes-Pats game that had been donated to Bolder Options by 3M. We never get a chance to say thank you to these organizations that continuously support what we do - so heres a big shout out to 3M - THANK YOU.
The less said about the game the better - though the suite we were in was real cool - I think my mentee really enjoyed it. His only request was to find a place where he could buy horns - a request that was quickly silenced about 4 mins into the 1st quarter
Then back to our regular mentoring routine - I make it sound regimented but Ive noticed that it works when you have a fixed schedule. We have decided to meet twice a week - Mondays at the library to do homework and Thursday to run. Yesterday was our first running day. Went pretty well - hit the YMCA only to find that the running track was under repair so ended up running 30 mins on the treadmill. My mentees pretty good. Stayed with me for about 15 mins then had to slow down but finished the 30 mins. I love it when pride keeps them going. I guess thats what drives my mentee - so I think I will use his pride to get him to be better at whatever he does
Well next we tackle his schoolwork - lets see how that goes