Master Yoda was a mentor: he trained Luke Skywalker to become a Jedi Knight. Leigh Anne Tuohy was a mentor: she coached the athletic talent of Michael Oher, who became a top draft pick for the NFL. Lionel Logue was a mentor: as a speech therapist, he helped the King of England speak without stuttering. You can watch them work their mentoring magic in Star Wars (1977), The Blind Side (2009), and The King's Speech (2010).
When you mentor someone, you use the highest possible level of skill with people to benefit another human being, guiding him or her with regard to a particular set of challenges, usually offering specialized knowledge, and always in the context of a relationship. Many different kinds of professionals are mentors: For example, physicians give their patients medical recommendations; ministers guide their parishioners on spiritual matters; and lawyers advise their clients regarding legal concerns.
In The King's Speech, the therapist Lionel played a mentoring role for Bertie, a member of the royal family who became the King of England during the course of the film. Bertie stuttered so badly it was excruciating to hear, but he had to speak live on the radio during World War Two—while his entire country listened in! Lionel used expertise from his field of speech pathology to help Bertie overcome his shame and stuttering. As a result, his speeches sustained England's resistance to Hitler's Third Reich.
Mentors pass on more than knowledge. They believe in their protégé and connect on an emotional level. Yoda knew how to access the power of the Force, and he persisted with Luke's training despite the aggravations of dealing with a brash young man. Leigh Anne understood how to use Michael's quick reflexes and protective instincts in the game of football, but she also responded to his need for a loving family. Curing speech defects was Lionel's job, but he gave more to Bertie than he was ever paid for, including the gifts of understanding and acceptance. The task we will tackle in this blog is how to guide your child or student with regard to the challenge of choosing her life's work and preparing for future roles. What does she want to do with her life? How can she best hone her skills and connect her passions to meaningful work? What kind of training would make the most of her strengths, providing competitive advantage in the workplace? These are crucial questions. For me, they're even spine-tingling questions. However, the only person who can truly answer such questions is the student. When the time is right, a career development professional will be the ideal resource, but until then, your child is likely to look to you, a trusted adult, to get her started in a good direction.
Please note: Mentoring is not the same as telling a young person what to do. That's too much responsibility, and thankfully, it's not our job. To use a common mentoring metaphor, your protégé is like a seed, already containing what she needs to become a plant. You don't get to pick whether she turns into a poinsettia, a petunia, or a potentilla. But you do get to provide water and sunshine, so she can grow to be the glorious flowering plant she was meant to be.
While we're using metaphors for mentoring, let's add two more. We want to avoid the relational equivalent of grabbing our child by the scruff of the neck, bringing her too close and forcing her to comply. Mentoring is not a socially sanctioned opportunity to control or manipulate (which is why Leigh Ann made sure Michael understood that it was his choice whether or not he played football for Ole Miss). Instead, mentors hold out open hands, offering a gift the recipient feels free to take or leave. When we do our part well, our protégé will benefit. Maybe even as much as the King of England.
Your children and students will encounter change on steroids. Technology continues to morph and advance, pushing businesses to innovate and compete for skilled employees. It's now predicted that in high tech fields, skill sets will become obsolete in as little as three years; in other fields, workers may have a little longer before they need to retrain. In order to be successful, your child will have to hit the ground learning and continue to add skills throughout his or her career.
Workers can meet those endless learning challenges best when their job duties match their abilities. Talent is, in essence, the innate ability to learn to do something more quickly and easily than others. Talents matched to tasks therefore allow a person to fly with the wind and outperform the competition. Let me illustrate by showing how the Italian artist Michelangelo turned his strengths into job skills and steady employment, becoming the towering talent of his time.
Michelangelo, like all of us, was born with a pattern of abilities as unique as his fingerprint. Among other abilities, he possessed high-level aptitudes for eye-hand coordination, creativity, and three-dimensional thinking. Eye-hand coordination allowed him to more quickly pick up manual skills, such as painting and sculpting. Creativity produced a rapid flow of ideas that contributed to the originality of his masterpieces. He also possessed spatial visualization, the ability to think in three dimensions, very handy for producing the David from a block of marble.
But early on, when he was a boy, his abilities were merely a potential. His talent needed a focus, which he found in art. Although his father tried to discourage him, art became Michelangelo's primary interest, the subject he liked best and wanted to know more about. In his visually rich Renaissance world, he learned by observing the work of fellow sculptors; in the Florence workshops of master artists, he learned techniques such as fresco painting and marble carving. Self-study and apprenticeship turned his innate abilities into knowledge and skills, the kind of talent that employers seek.
Michelangelo's job skills were further propelled by the passion of his personality. He held strong aesthetic and religious values, which motivated him to create beautiful images of the divine. When someone is motivated, he or she wants to keep learning in order to attain greater knowledge and skill. Such a person is willing to persist until the job is done, despite the inevitable obstacles and setbacks encountered. Michelangelo is quoted as saying, "If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all."
Natural strengths, developed with the proper training and infused with the desire to solve a relevant problem, produce talent in the most complete and valuable sense of the word. Talent now means the whole person, who is not sitting around expecting admiration for being such a special snowflake but is instead directed toward solving problems.
When Michelangelo was commissioned to sculpt the David, he had several problems to solve. For example, he was given a stunningly awkward block of marble, so narrow that previous sculptors had hacked away at it, further limiting its use, and then given up. Since no one taught anatomy in his day, he had to resort to clandestine activities before he could give his statue its gorgeously detailed muscles. In addition, Michelangelo needed to please his employer, the city of Florence, a problem he solved by giving his David a feisty Florentine spirit, a symbolically defiant warning to rival city-states, a visual version of "Don't even think about messing with me!"
It was true 500 years ago and it's true today: Problem solvers get hired. Michelangelo earned an income starting at the age of 14 and worked until he was 88, as a painter, a sculptor, and an architect, for employers as diverse as wealthy families, town councils, cardinals, and popes. Your student can reap similar results in a world that is faster and more competitive now than it was five years ago, let alone fifty.
Your child will be able to leave home and buy his or her own cappuccinos when capable of solving someone else's problem. Simple as that. In this blog, we'll explore how your student can develop her talent in a process much like Michelangelo's, from recognizing her abilities to choosing a field to acting on her values to finding her preferred problems in the work world and then persuading an employer that she has the skills to solve them. And keep on solving them, because the speed of change will never allow her to rest on her laurels.
