The Invisible Mentor

Archive for November, 2009

You may be wondering, what does enjoying the splendor and beauty around you have to do with mentoring? A mentor provides a guiding hand to help you to be the best you. Part of being the best you is to be aware of the simple things around you. When your senses are heightened, you’ll be able to spot the many opportunities around you that you often miss because of busyness.

When was the last time you went on a hike, or to the park and just BE so that you can connect to nature? There are a lot of wonders around us. Take a break and see what’s right under your nose and express gratitude for life’s simple pleasures.

Nearly every day I go for a walk for about an hour, and while walking I often get the most amazing ideas. And I often notice many things that humble me and make me want to be a better person.

What are some tips you can share with us to spot the many little wonders around us. Let’s keep the conversation going, please comment.

Please watch the video below with the astounding imagery. It’s a small step to appreciating the splendor and beauty around us.

A few years ago I came across the Rule of Five outlined in 1001 Ways to Market Your Books by John Kremer, a book marketing expert . Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen have also used the Rule of Five to take their books to bestseller status.

The Rule of Five simply means that each and every day you perform five activities that will assist you in achieving your core goals. So in their case they were trying to sell their book, Chicken Soup for the Soul, so one day they would send out five copies of books to be reviewed, another day would be calling five radio stations to get interviews and another day they would be sending out five press releases.

The Rule of Five can be applied to any goal you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to get a promotion:

• Who are five people who you could call for an information interview, who have already traveled the path you are on?
• What are five things you can do to get noticed in your company?
• What are five ways you can improve the way your work gets done?
• What are five things that you could do to make yourself more valuable in your company and industry?
• Who are five invisible mentors (unique leaders) you could study to model their behaviour?

What would your Rule of Five look like? Please keep the conversation flowing, please comment.

I saw the quote, “The best way to predict the future is to create it,”  by Abraham Lincoln. Isn’t it a beautiful quote? I think so, so I decided to write a blog post. Here  is what I think will help you to create your future and they are not in any order of priority.

1. Internalize the idea of excellence, mediocrity just won’t do
2. What is your goal, where would you like to end up?
3. Take your idea and run with it
4. Have confidence in yourself and your abilities
5. Adapt a self-motivated attitude, accomplished individuals are self-motivated
6. Create your success team with people who have done what you are trying to do, and who you can call on when necessary
7. Have stick-to-itiveness
8. Have singular focus
9. Blaze your own trail
10. Have fun

What would you add to the above list? Let’s keep the conversation going, please comment.

Photo Credit: via Apture

Recently I received a course catalog from The Teaching Company in the mail and I took my time going through it. Anyone who knows me knows that I am big on continuous learning. I particularly like this catalog because they didn’t have the regular run-of-the-mill courses, and many of them fascinated me — Change and Motion: Calculus Made Clear, Understanding the Brain, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond, Understanding Complexity, Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft. Aren’t these fantastic names for courses?

I was interested in nearly all the courses listed, but that’s not practical. One course which fascinated me was Life Lessons from the Great Books. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful course to take? And the amazing thing is that the catalog has courses on DVD, with each lecture 30 minutes long. Most people can sit down for 30 minutes, couldn’t you dedicate 30 minutes each day for a course, if you could apply the concepts?

The following are the Course Lecture Titles. I must admit that most of those books I have never read, but after reading the copy in the catalog I wanted to take the course and I wanted to read the books. Has that ever happened to you?

1. On Providence (Annotated), Seneca
2. The Gospel of John (The Gospel of John)
3. Conscience, Boethius, (The Martin Luther King, Jr. Companion: Quotations from the Speeches, Essays, and Books of Martin Luther King, Jr.) Martin Luther King
4. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky
5. Night (Oprah’s Book Club), Elie Wiesel
6. Schweitzer—Out of My Life and Thought
7. The Sufferings of Young Werther, Goethe
8. Hamlet, Shakespeare
9. Ajax, Sophocles
10. Epistle VII (The Seventh Letter (Illustrated)), Plato
11. “On Old Age”, (Treatises on Friendship and Old Age) Cicero
12. The Penitent, Isaac Bashevis Singer
13. Alcestis, Euripides (Three Plays of Euripides: Alcestis, Medea, The Bachae)
14. Medea, Euripides
15. Tristan And Isolde, Von Strasburg
16. Antony and Cleopatra (Folger Shakespeare Library), Shakespeare
17. Macbeth, Shakespeare
18. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
19. The Odyssey, Homer
20. Philoctetes (Greek Tragedy in New Translations), Sophocles
21. Chivalric Adventure, The Song of Roland (Penguin Classics)
22. Chivalric Romance, The Nibelungenlied: Prose Translation (Penguin Classics)
23. The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806
24. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph: The Complete 1922 Text, T. E. Lawrence
25. The Eleven Comedies – Volume 1,The 11 Comedies – Volume 2
26. Menander : The Grouch, Desperately Seeking Justice, Closely Cropped Locks, the Girl from Samos, the Shield (Penn Greek Drama Series), Menander
27. Mandragola, Machiavelli
28. The Praise of Folly, Erasmus
29. Utopia
30. Animal Farm, (Animal Farm and 1984) George Orwell
31. The Jewish War: Revised Edition (Penguin Classics), Josephus
32. Cato a Tragedy, in Five Acts, Joseph Addison
33. George Washington’s Farewell Address
34. Abraham Lincoln, George Patton—War
35. An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt
36. The Wisdom of Great Books

Professor J Rufus Fears from the University of Oklahoma teaches the DVD course Life Lessons from the Great Books. According to the website of The Teaching Company which sells the courses:

“What Makes a Book “Great”?

According to Professor Fears, four characteristics define a Great Book:

• Its focus on great themes such as love, courage, and patriotism
• Its composition in a noble language
• Its ability to speak to readers across the ages
• Its ability to speak to readers not as groups, but as individuals”

How many of the books above have you read? Would you willingly want to read them? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please comment.

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Further Reading

Thirty Great Free eBooks for Innovators
Adventures in Learning: Books to Read in 2012
2011 Books for Mentoring

Book links are affiliate links.

Image Credit: Flickr (http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3268/2913652472_47ea419f37.jpg)

American thanksgiving is coming so much attention is on gratitude, but gratitude should be an every day thing, not just a day or week. In Canada we celebrate Thanksgiving in October. In Jamaica where I was born, the church celebrates harvest and they have Harvest Supper, which happened this past weekend. I try to express my gratitude each day, sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fall short, so I try to do it as life unfolds and things happen and that works for me. Here are seven things that I am grateful for.

Family: I am grateful to my family for loving me, even when I screw up and screw up badly. They may lecture me, which I do not like, but I know their hearts are in the right place so I listen and don’t have to agree, but I know that all is well.

Good Friends: I am grateful to true friend who keep me grounded, who give me the space when I need to grow or figure out things for myself.

Health: I am grateful for my health because when I am in good health I can do many things.

Another Day: Each day when I awake I realize that I have been given another day on this wonderful day to do something remarkable and I am eternally grateful even when I do not live each day as if it was my last.

Opportunities: I am grateful for the opportunities that present themselves in my life because they allow me to be remarkable, as well as of service to others.

Freedom: This is something that many take for granted, including myself because we live in a free state. In Jamaica they have a saying that you never know the use of a half until you lose it. This should be a reminder to us that we shouldn’t take what we have for granted.

Adversity: I am grateful for adversity – it took me a long time to figure this one out – because it brings tremendous opportunities. The past five years have been challenging ones for me, but I have grown so much, that I would never trade thge darkest period of my life for promises of sunnier days. I know myself so much better and I am also a better person. It’s a humbling feeling when things fall apart and the good thing you get to put it together again and this time you can use a different template or pattern. My writing has more depth because I been to the School of Hard Knocks.

I am sharing a piece of me with you, what are you thankful for? This is my entry to the 7 Things You Are Thankful For Group Writing Project 2009. Let’s keep the conversation flowing like a river, please comment. Also consider contributing to this Writing Project, what are 7 things that you are thankful for?