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Learning to Mentor

By Amy Nielsen

As I get farther along in my schooling I find that what I have to share as a mentor is pretty open ended and can be tweaked to help me work well with different people.

I don’t want to specialize in a specific disease or condition. I feel that limits the kind of mentoring I can offer. Instead, I want to work with individuals who suffer a wide range of ailments and need a path to follow and hand to hold.

Now, I need to solidify my concepts, choose key words and a graphic to tie the concepts together between levels of classes I want to lead and the individual clients I want to mentor. I need to solidify the concept so other people will be able to understand it easily and quickly.

In other words, I need to meme it. It is fun to see the evolution of ideas that come early in the process of developing a teaching plan. I really enjoy the open thinking and connecting the far flung dots to make a connection. I am a very visual person. The only sense I couldn’t live without is seeing. So I do a lot of my work using graphic organizers. I started a long time ago with felt boards and magazine clippings, and my house looked like a hoarder’s home.

Then, I found my new darling, Pinterest. It is my favorite site for visual dreaming and has a neat feature where you can set your view to show your items in chronological order. Reading back on it is like having a conversation with myself. I love it. I get new information from things posted months ago that now resonate in a different way with new understanding. I can see how I built up to an idea and where I got sidetracked by the pretty shiny graphic. Getting sidetracked by so many options is easy. Focus and clarity are hard to come by when you have a new idea forming in your head. I know what I want to do, but I can help so many different kinds of people that choosing who not to help is frustrating and daunting.

How do doctors decide what specialty they want to practice when they are in early medical school? Some have a specific disease they want to cure or ease, some have a specific population they want to help, others are in it for the greatest amount of impact they can make. I have heard the same sentiment in the voices of the women practitioners I met at a recent conference.

I am confident that the ideas floating around in my head will consolidate to form a coherent and successful overarching concept. I know that the science and the spirit is out there to support this path.

Like ripples from a pebble on a pond, as I describe these concepts to my supports, my tribe, all nod and agree it makes sense in a new way to them. When I toss out the ideas to those farther from my center, they all agree it sounds like an interesting idea that might fare well in their communities as well. The question becomes, how far can I stretch the concept to meet the needs of that community. I chose my own mentors because they are specific to their teaching but understand that information can come from many informed sources. One of the best things I have learned is to use my resources. I am

visual, I like memes, I like succinct. So perhaps that is my answer. I teach what I live, in a simple colorful manor with cross-referenced resources. Because, that is how I know it. I can’t teach it any other way.

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