The Hero’s Journey
The Call to Adventure: You life is sailing along when you receive information that can possibly change your life. What do you with this new information?
Refusal/Acceptance of the Call: You can ignore the information and do nothing, or you can accept the call and take action. Many of us refuse to accept the call not knowing that refusing was never really an option to begin with. Things get exceedingly worse until we are forced to accept the call.
The Journey: We accept the call to go on the journey, which is filled with many bumps along the way. The hero in us soldier on, and we often get assistance from an unseen mentor, who helps us to overcome the hardships and challenges along the way.
The Transformation: We reach the end of that particular journey, and realize that we are changed by the experience.
Self-Mentoring
According to Saundra McGuire, a professor at Louisiana State University, self-mentoring is
“A type of mentoring in which an individual cultivates his or her own professional growth through self-tutoring activities and resource-finding techniques. Self-mentoring requires the individual to be highly motivated and self-disciplined. The individual increases job effectiveness and augments professional talents by building a body of knowledge and skills without the aid of other people.”
This means that we all have the capacity, if we have the right tools, to foster our own professional development.
The Hero’s Journey & Self-Mentoring
You realize that you are not progressing as fast as you should in your professional career. You recognize there is a gap in your skills and experience. You have new information. It’s up to you whether you accept the status quo, or do something to change the situation. If you accept the call for a change in your life, you have the option to get help from someone like a mentor, or you could mentor yourself.
Whether you decide to get a mentor or mentor yourself, you still have to be clear on what your mentoring needs are. See DIY Mentoring Program blog post. Let’s say for argument’s sake, you cannot find a mentor so you have to mentor yourself. You can either take a course to fill the gap, or you can find the information you need for yourself. Either way, you are more successful if you immerse yourself in a learning odyssey.
In a recent information interview with Sandra McGuire, I learned about Bloom’s Taxonomy, which is a major part of self-mentoring. Learning is seldom an easy process, and when you have to learn information that’s critical to your career, rote learning is not the best learning. You want to be involved in learning that allows you to create something new. You want learning that transforms you, and that’s where Bloom’s Taxonomy comes in.
When learning, you want to comprehend what you are learning, so it’s necessary to state it in your own words. You want to find ways to apply the information, but you also have to relate the new information to what you already know. What new ideas have you identified from this new information? Connect the new ideas with other ideas to create something new.
With the aid of self-mentoring you have now closed the skills and experience gap and are now a changed person because of your learning adventure. We are constantly going on a hero’s journey, and reflective self-mentoring can make the journey much smoother and enjoyable.
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