I must say pouring into people,most especially those on our level or downwards can be a true test of one’s growth game.
It’s like giving yourself a score card of how far you yourself have learnt and how serious you take your life. That was exactly what happened to me while mentoring Goodness and Ife at TFS.
I’m Abimbola and I was privileged to mentor along side Rosee for three weeks.
Mama had mentored the ladies for some weeks as well and then passed them down to us for a more practical session.
We were with the ladies for three weeks and every week was intense.
Like we have learnt from Mama, we put a proper structure and schedule in place before starting off the class. We don’t want want to look like jokers cos we frankly didn’t come to joke and so it was only wise to have a well laid down structure and even time for the classes.
You don’t want to be overly available for people and they think you’re not doing anything else with your life. The classes held 3 days a week for at least 2 hours.
For the first week, we discussed Time management, and the importance of living off a schedule. Because Mama had been with the ladies before, she had taught them how to live off a plan and so we just built on that and were practical.
We shared our daily musts with them and explained why we had XYZ appearing on the list. We made them come up with theirs and give a plan of how they would be spending the following day.
It was also important for us to do first what we were asking of them. So while we expected them to send in their day plan for the next day, we had to share ours with them.
As a mentor/leader it will be irresponsible of us to ask them do what we don’t do. That also placed a lot of responsibility on us to live what we teach, by the next day, they were expected to send in a report of how their day went and if their daily must was achievable.
Both of them shared with us how they were held accountable by the list they had created for themselves and even though they didn’t have it 100%, they were intentional about not wasting time and subsequently in the course of the sessions we saw them both speak on how having daily musts helped them live intentionally.
One of the ladies also asked about having goals and how that she mostly doesn’t have goals because she might not really know what she want for a particular quarter and we answered by telling her that we make our goals based on what we are working on or want to achieve. You project and set goals for yourself which is workable.
The other two weeks we spoke about prayer/reading and relationships/friendship respectively.
During the week we had the discussion on prayer, we spoke on the importance of having a prayer schedule and journals. we made them send a picture of their journals with us and also to have a prayer plan. We later agreed to pray together in the group and we all did.
The last week we discussed friendship. This was the most intense week we had because of the different questions we had on how a particular friendship had ended for them, the dramas and all.
We talked on how friendships are in season and how when we understand that, we’ll be able to discern when the season for a particular friendship ends and help to avoid grudges and drama.
The ladies came with their A game to the classes and we as mentors couldn’t afford to be jokers and slack. Even with our timing we had to make time for it and we had them do same as it wasn’t a joke.
In all, i learnt a lot from this. As a teacher that i am, when you pass knowledge consistently, you have mastery of your subject and so teaching what we had learnt gave me more mastery and it also felt good to see people take us serious and not come with excuses.
The questions, the contributions. Even Goodness had to make us keep her accountable for her book of the month.
It was really an awesome experience.
Bimbo.
