639 blog Reflection 4

My mentee missed my weekly call last Friday 3/12 and then missed my Monday F2F meeting on 3/15. I am a little disappointed in this, but again, he has personal issues right now with his family so I can't really blame him. We do talk on IM, but it's not the same. I would like him to at least call me, or email me to cancel our call, or meeting. I'm VERY worried that we will not meet our goal, but again, I really need to think of it as me being his 'therapist'. So today was a very 'bad' day at work for our group. Our immediate manager was being 'reassigned' so now I will report to someone else. We also had alot of layoffs at work today so it was very stressful. One of the reason why I made a curriculum that my mentee and a few of my co-workers could participate in is because of the recent layoffs. I wanted the team to be CISSP certified so that IF they got laid off, they would be 'marketable' when they are looking for a new job. Reflecting back to the readings that we've done (which i've completed), I now see the battles and hills in front of me. I see that there are so many intangibles out there that would make our mentor/mentee relationship 'skew' away from where we'd like it to go. BUT life is about 'possibilities' right? =)

MT OUT!

639 Reflection 3 Post for Mentoring

I had my one on one with my mentee this past Monday. (3/1/2010) I was asking him why he was behind in his readings and why he didn't show up to the 'kick off meeting' the past Friday. Little did I know, my mentee was experiencing some personal issues as of late. This new information made me decellerate my stance. I now know that I will have to 'support' him and I offered him my 'ear' so that being the mentor, I am really here to 'listen' to him and offer him any assistance that he needs. We are definitely going to have challenges meeting our goal that we made for him. Basically, our curriculum that we set out for him to have all of his readings and for him to take his CISSP test in June will be at risk. He has a family of 6 (including himself and wife) and they are going through a rough patch right now. Now I have to shift my focus on the set goal that we had, to more of a passive listener and more of a 'friend' than a mentor that is helping him focus on his career. The next day (Tuesday) we were 'back to normal' as a co-worker/friend but I now know his personal issues and it's a little strange for me, but I will try to still help him out as much as I possibly can.