Mentoring Human Potential

From the Introduction: “I teach mentoring as a protected, supportive, mutually trusting, spirit-infused relationship between a guiding individual who shares experience, wisdom, knowledge, insight, and perspective with another individual who is committed to learn, evolve, and develop potential skills. These educators were particularly interested in the role spirit plays in a holistic approach to education. When I talked about mind, body, and spirit, they responded with great spirit of their own, and their enthusiasm re-ignited my own enthusiasm and spirit… “Mentoring Human Potential is a manual for mentoring and being mentored from the miracle within, where learning blooms through the powerful expression of spirit. To mentor from within, mentors should experience and communicate from the timeless center of all beings, where the breath of life dwells most freely and can guide most easily. The timeless center is the present moment, the only moment that has ever existed. “We are all miracles, each of us stunningly complex and mysterious, regardless of IQ and everyday abilities. The life force within us all, this little light of mine and yours, is the light within each of our trillion-member family of life on earth. We are all miracles, turning in perfect orbit around our life-giving sun. Experiencing this reality with everyday awareness helps summon the energy, dedication, and purpose needed to achieve our potential as students and as human beings. “This perspective is an important one to experience when mentoring. Honoring our shared miracle each day honors a powerful source of motivation, a source that engenders humility, gratitude, and a desire to not waste the gift of life. “It has been said there are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle. I choose to live my life as though everything is a miracle. This is the perspective I ask mentors and mentees to consider when mentoring or being mentored. “Witness the miracle. We blink into existence, into the arms of loving parents (if we’re lucky), nurtured through our early years with tender care and a growing trust that our survival needs will be met. As babies and as young children, we internalize the human clock, habits, values, and emotional range of those around us. We imprint their catalysts for happiness and unhappiness, their judgments and responses to frustration, their fears and daydreams. Our first mentors are family members who model ways of being in the world, which is why every parent or guardian has the potential to mentor with spirit. “If students are lucky enough to have had a few great mentors in the years leading to their first day at college, a student peer mentoring program is an opportunity to extend and deepen the teachings of former mentors, expanding their teachings with spirit. And if they didn’t have great mentors, mentoring can provide someone to help them successfully discover and blaze their own trail. “Mentoring programs can help students explore and achieve their academic and human potential, their spirited potential, and it is with this in mind that I share my experiences creating and supervising a student peer mentoring program.”