Clean Run Magazine - August 2007 - 65

© PHOTOGRAPHY BY LESLEY Mentorship and Motivation Part 2 By Lanny Bassham Mental Management In the previous article we deﬁned a mentor as a capable, caring individual—one in whom you could conﬁde and trust not to do anything that would deter you from your goals. We deﬁned the mentorship experience as one where a mentor and an apprentice meet for a teaching moment. By that deﬁnition, the mentor experience is both a rare and personal relationship between mentor and apprentice. We have many teachers and instructors in our lives but few mentors. This is unfortunate. Let’s look at the three reasons for this and what we can do about them. ® #1 We are looking for information instead of teaching moments There are many ways to learn about agility outside of working our dogs. We attend seminars and clinics, read articles and books, watch videos, and listen to audio recordings. All these activities bring information from the vast agility universe into our small piece of it. We like books and articles because we do not have to expose our faults to a written page. We like sitting in class and letting someone else ask a question because we do not bring attention to ourselves that way. We can even sit on the back row and hardly be noticed at all. But these are only information-gathering sessions and not teaching moments. A teaching moment occurs when you turn your instructor into a mentor by taking that one-on-one or small group lesson. Oh, that is risky! Now we have to show just what we can do and what August 07 | Clean Run we cannot. This takes courage and we risk looking stupid in front of the group and the instructor. Our ﬂaws are exposed to others. We desperately seek conﬁrmation that we are doing this correctly, but risk criticism if we are not. But, that is the very deﬁnition of a teaching moment. It occurs when you risk falling in order to walk. It happened when your mentor let go of your two-wheel bicycle for the ﬁrst time with the training wheels removed. It happened the ﬁrst time you let go of the side of the pool in deep water and swam to the other side. A bird cannot learn to ﬂy in the nest and must be pushed out by its mother to either ﬂy or perish. Teaching moments occur when a student who is ready to learn is willing to trade where she is for where she is going. I encourage you to go beyond the books and articles. Sit on the front row. Ask the ﬁrst question and raise your hand when the instructor needs a volunteer. Get to the seminar early and stay late. Seek out the teaching moments and you will increase your speed toward your goals. #2 We are looking for teachers not mentors In the past several years we have been honored to have been asked to present Mental Management seminars to agility groups around the country. For us to travel to present a seminar, someone has to act as the host of the seminar. The host aids us in ﬁlling the classes with students, in getting the venue for the event, and even picking us up and hauling us around. The host receives two compensations. First, the host attends the sessions for free and we do our best to 65

Clean Run Magazine - August 2007

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