|
CallaFirestormBW -> RE: The concept of mentoring (8/3/2009 9:17:36 AM)
|
quote:
What does a mentor provide that can help resolve those fundamental requirements? Is a 'mentoring' spanking a good benchmark that you'll like spanking? It would seem that without emotions, any sensation, giving or taking, is irrelevant. Add emotion and the mentor/student dynamic is outside the definition. At least the definition everywhere except in this case.
What happened to just being friendly, open, and willing to share?
Friendly, open, and willing to share is great -- but what do you do with someone who is friendly, open, willing to share, but -crappy- at explaining how xhe got from A to B to C? This is where mentorship comes in, because good mentors are not only successful at what they do, but are also good communicators in explaining the underlying dynamics and "subtext" of the interactions in question.
I think that it is primarily in BDSM environments that the value of mentorship is so heavily discounted. In business, it is accepted that one's progress will be enhanced by working with at least one, if not multiple mentors. In parenting, if one doesn't have the advantage of one's own parents to mentor in parenting skills, it has been shown to be very beneficial to find resources elsewhere to be able to learn the global skills that enable a person to parent well. Even in artistic pursuits (which are -highly individualized), it is understood that finding and working with a mentor improves an artist's chance of success and improves hir chances of making good connections in the art community.
The difference between mentoring and friendship is that mentoring doesn't -have- to have a social component to be valuable. I can dislike my mentor vehemently, but if xhe has been proven to be successful at what xhe's doing, I will suck up the fact that I don't like hir for the opportunity to learn what xhe knows. Case in point -- I am currently working with an author whom I don't really like much, as a person. However, this author is -very- successful in the genre in which I write, has over three dozen published novels and hundreds of short stories both in and out of genre, and a sustained readership for every one of her storylines/worlds. I -know- that there are flaws in my writing that make it less readable than it could be, and I know where I need to tighten things up -- but I don't know -how- people do that... what techniques or tools they use to refine their work to the point where they can draw a reader into their stories and have them surface hollering for more. I may not like this person -as- a person, but I value this author's skills. Though she can't teach me to -write-, it has already been established that I have the necessary skills, creativity, and raw talent (I have two published novels, and have sold 2 more that haven't been published yet, and have a half-dozen published short stories)-- what I -need- is refinement, and -that- is something she can provide... I've seen her work, read her writing, seen her numbers, and listened to her fans for over a decade, and -that- provided me with the proof I needed to determine that she had what I needed to progress in my own writing... and so, despite the fact that, as a person I find her... challenging to deal with and not someone I would choose to have as a friend, I asked her to mentor me.
Mentoring really isn't about obtaining or nurturing the personal side of a relationship. It isn't about the things that make a relationship unique. It is about the -common- things that make the difference between a -successful- dynamic or a -profoundly successful dynamic- and a mediocre or struggling dynamic. It is also about self-awareness, and realizing where ones goals and ones comprehension aren't moving in the same direction.
Mentorship isn't suitable for every situation or for every person. There are -many- things that mentorship -can't- do, and it isn't a 'catch-all' for "I don't know what else to do with myself in the community." Not everyone is going to -need- or -want- a mentor... and most people who -do- need/want one only need a mentor for a brief period, to get through some -specific- area that they can't seem to get a handle on or progress past... but for those who want one, and who have a goal that is suited to mentorship, and who have access to an individual who has shown, through hir own successes, that xhe might be able to provide insight into meeting that goal, mentorship is, and has been, a valid tool for making progress just about everywhere in human history where "success" was one of the goals of the individuals involved.
quote:
I can understand that if you wanted a mentor you would want someone who excels in whatever it is that you want to be mentored in but then how do you judge that? So often here I see success measured in longevity 'I have 15 years experience' great, that doesn't mean that you are any good at anything just that you have been doing it a long time. We see every day that peoples idea of what D/s means or s/m means or BDSM means or whatever varies between individuals so how can you teach something so contested, therefore how many things can you really be mentored in that will apply to most relationships in the future when it is such a personal thing. I do not think that you need a formal set up to learn, there are things in life that I struggle with as I am sure everyone does but that is kind of what life is about isn't it?
How do you pick a good mentor? You watch the people in and out of your community. You look for those whose experience and skills in the specific areas that you're wanting to make progress represent an improvement over where you are right now. One person may not be the ideal mentor in -every- area that a person wants to make progress in, so it may be that, in the course of one's participation in the community, one may have several mentors in different areas. Sometimes, there just -isn't- anyone in the immediate community who is suited to the skill-set that one is looking to work on... and that may mean looking elsewhere, or looking completely outside of the BDSM community (if it is a skill that is universal rather than BDSM specific) to find someone who -can- mentor in that area.
In the same way, if you look at things a specific way, and those things are relevant to how you want to progress, then you need to choose a mentor who shares your philosophies. However, philosophy might be irrelevant for some things that one desires mentorship on. Perhaps one desires mentorship on, say, setting 30-day short-term goals. The style of D/s practiced by the individual one chose for mentorship wouldn't be important here (in fact, you might choose a mentor who wasn't even IN D/s... maybe somone skilled in FC Goalsetting or something). Whether they understood your -relationship- goals would be less relevant than whether they could successfully express the ideas necessary to break down longer-term goals into their short-term counterparts -OR- assist someone who had never -set- goals before in actually figuring out what their goals -were-, so they could build short-term goals.
Learning -is- what life is about. The point of mentorship, though, is that learning doesn't necessarily -have- to be a struggle to figure things out on your own -- it is more of a task of figuring out how to -find- the resources to help you move forward. Of course, we are -always- entitled to rail against the storm on our own, but if we have the resources available, why not use them and make the road a little smoother and, perhaps, even go a little further towards assuring our eventual success.
Dame Calla
|
|
|
|
