A Reflection On Peer Mentorship Experience
The purpose of this reflection work is to discuss and reflect on the learnings gained through this Peer mentorship experience. “My mentor said, ‘Let’s go do it,’ not ‘You go do it.'”, This quote by Jim Rohn is an excellent example of a healthy mentor-mentee relationship. One of the key objectives from mentorship stand-point for this experience was to achieve this level of understanding with the peers. I firmly believe that mentorship is about building up a synergetic relationship between two individuals with common goals and interests. Therefore, I approached my peers for this exercise with the same outlook.
Mr. Keval, Mr. Manmeet and Mr. Anirudh from the M.E.E.I course shared the passion for entrepreneurship and a desire to learn more about ourselves. With a more developed emotional account with them over time, we approached each other mutually for the peer mentorship exercise. Ambitious peer mentees push further than anyone else as they are going through something very similar and seeing the efforts involved and sharing the experience creates a subconscious need to move together as a team. Therefore, to reap the fruits of this experience, it is a responsibility shared by everyone involved to maintain a positive learning environment. Just acknowledging mentees dependence for guidance and personal development creates an obligation to improve ourselves to better contribute to their learning by educating ourselves to support them.
Along with this journey, there were a few downsides such as Anirudh had to discontinue the course due to his personal commitments. Likewise, in a real-world scenario, there is always something that could occur out of your control, but it is our choice to take away the positives from this experience. By seeking help and guidance from the batch mates, made me realize how many emotional accounts I have created along this journey. Receiving responses in such a short time was a positive reinforcement for the peer mentorship experience. Mr. Manu Moncy was working on a common goal 'Personal time management' and we also have some experience working together as a team previously. Keep these factors in mind; I chose Manu as my third mentee.
No two mentorship experience are alike; by sharing the experience based on one on one interactions and learnings shared with each person involved in this experience, will make this more insightful.
1. Manmeet B. Jandu (Health and Fitness)
Having known Manmeet for eight years, I had enough time to observe that he shares the same level of enthusiasm for fitness, but at the same time his approach to fitness is very different. Therefore, by being his mentor will help change the paradigm about fitness and health will be an exciting experience.
Reaching the targeted weight and health goals through many different personally applied approaches and few experiences of failing to achieve the results have enriched my knowledge about fitness and nutrition. These past experiences gained are solely from the perspective of previous health goals. Manmeet's principal objective was to gain lean body mass; therefore some primary research was required to obtain the necessary knowledge to support Manmeet better with his personal fitness goal. Joining the McMaster University Gym with him was to enable us further to monitor each other progress.
Having a reactive personality and minimal cooking/ meal preparation abilities were undoubtedly the primary barriers faced by Manmeet for achieving his goals. Leadership course helped us understand how a reactive person and proactive person tackles a situation or a task. Understanding our shortcomings empowered us to device a better plan so that external factors like the weather or urgent matters could not have much influence. Just by incorporating simple habits like making custom made weekly work out plan according to the personal schedule, learning simple-easy recipes and tracking daily calories intake easily tracked through fitness applications improved our control over external factors.
Manmeet has good workout ethics and always disciplined about the gym and regular exercise therefore in the gym I was there with him for moral support and helped him make this practice habitual. My principal responsibility was to help him track his progress and optimize the process along the way. Manmeet needed to understand that exercise plays only 25% in overall health and to achieve better results we needed to concentrate on the other 75 percent which is nutrition and lifestyle. By using time management tools we devised better workout schedules, I guided him in tracking his nutritional progress using tools, to approach the goal with a more proactive methodology. With detailed information, now he has better decision-making ability and control over the expected fitness results.
The first couple of weeks were used to understand his current abilities, goals (sub-goals) and identifying the limitations of reaching the goal. As we both had similar fitness goals, we adopted an approach where Manmeet will follow my diet plan and he will help with my workout plans. Over time and factoring in the different body types and metabolism, we came up with a more personalized workout plan and diet plan for our subgoals. Through this experience, I learnt a fundamental lesson which in any scenario of life can be implementable, i.e. although one might get results by the following something or believing it is the only way to achieve results. However, this might not apply for another individual. In reality, every person is different and every experience is an individualist experience. This limited thinking can be one’s downfall in the grand schemes of things. Just understanding and taking the time to analyze one's current standpoint in their goal is the most important step one can take to improvise.
2. Keval Gandhi (Emphatic Listening)
Keval and I share many similarities when it comes to the academic or professional background. Therefore, since day one of this course, we got along very well. The reason Keval choose me as his mentor was because he felt the enthusiasm we share was very synergetic and his opinion that I was naturally very good at listening to people emphatically. I took up his offer to mentor him on empathic listening. I knew this experience would help explore the art of empathic listening and improve my understanding upon the subject matter.
To help Keval with his goal, I needed to understand more about empathic listening and how an individual can practice empathic listening consciously. 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People' book by Stephen R. Covey was beneficial for me to understand this subject matter. Taking feedback from his current project team members and observing his behaviour in an official and casual environment was very important for me to guide him with better clarity.
After observing and working with Keval for a while, I noticed a few habits that were possibly limiting him in achieving his goal. During most conversations, the repetitive downfall was him auto profiling any relatable scenarios and probing thought in the other person talking to him. Being from a sales background myself, I could understand the thought process of a more aggressive approach towards listening and the subconscious need to make the conversation fruitful.
Utilizing the learning from this course and YouTube videos, we decided that the best way to start consciously practicing empathic listening while reducing the negative behavioural aspect was to come up with few simple steps to follow while listening to someone. Be aware of the surrounding environment and maintain a safe space so that the person who wants to talk to you feels comfortable. Try to converse more with open-ended questions to avoid probing. Body-language like posture, gestures and eye contact are critical; therefore, Keval had to make a conscious effort towards noticing his current body language and improve on it to achieve his goal.
Practising empathic listening is hard to do as it means to dissolve your ego while listening to the other person. Hence a person who is enthusiastic about helping someone can influence the other person with his emotions without knowing; therefore, one can have a problem practicing it correctly even with good intentions. Initially, I was helping him with the research and action plan, but with time I understood he could do these himself. I changed my role to tailor his desired outcome. I became a peer critic for him and started observing him from a third person’s point of view. Based on a few guidelines and rules we agreed on, I started giving him feedback on this progress. For Example: To manage his auto profiling behaviour we came up with a plan to penalize him if he auto profiles any conversation more than one time on a daily basis.
3. Manu Moncy (Personal Time Management)
Manu and I share numerous similarities when it comes to the attitude towards work culture and design. When Anirudh left and I needed to mentor one more peer, I selected Manu as I felt the problems he was going through with managing time was very relatable and as I was working on personal time management skill as my personal development goal.
My initial project idea was on optimizing existing time management applications; hence I had done enough desk research on existing applications and tools available to help plan time and tasks better. Even with that information, I was never able to stick with one single methodology. During the process of mentoring Manu, I started understanding that before using a tool we needed to comprehend how time works inside a human mind and all the stimulus affecting the way we perceive time. Therefore, to manage time better we needed to know how our mood or stress affects us on a personal level. Thus, with my understanding and approach towards time management helped him understand the different paradigms around time management using a few online resources and books.
A few barriers faced by Manu was his optimistic attitude towards assessing the workload, assessing the importance of the task with lack of information and procrastination in general.
The best to help him was to make him understand his shortcoming in achieving his time management goal on his terms. To accomplish this, I provided him with all the sources and books I used as a reference to reach this understanding. For assessment and management of the tasks, I helped him in using the covey's time management grid effectively to optimize productivity while still attaining a stress-free living. With a better understanding of his current limitations and with a better arsenal of tools to support him, I felt he could organically overcome his attitude towards procrastination essential tasks.
From this experience of mentoring Manu, I learnt that achievement is subjective to a person and dependent on what measurables he has set for himself to gauge his success. Manu and I both had very different end goals when it came to improvising our time management skills.
I understand that there is no single proven method for an individual to achieve greatness and a willing person will make use of any possible opportunity they have in front of them effectively. Peer mentorship has a more supportive nature compared to the traditional mentorship methods. In the middle of an obstacle or challenge, one can rely on your fellow peer mentor who is going through something similar and the assurance from them can be a positive reinforcement. I want to think of this peer mentor experience as where our paradigm shifted dramatically; we were willing to explore something new together whereas maybe we wouldn't have done so on our own, as metaphorically we were on this journey to make ourselves better together for the past couple of months. On a personal note, I feel by helping fellow peers become more capable and support them with their goals is vital to provide more value to society and build a more responsible future.
