On Mentoring...

Recently, I received an unexpected request: Will you mentor me? The request was from a woman whom I had met once, and who was at the beginning of her career in a different field of health care. The request took me by surprise and I wondered how to translate what I knew for her. Although there are some similarities, the difference between our fields required me to think very expansively in order to translate my professional experiences and observations into something usable for her.   

I created and built my business from scratch. I have always felt very secure about my clinical abilities, and had always thought I would love to pass on the diverse knowledge I have and continue to acquire. What I never expected was how taking on the role of mentor would benefit me.

Mentoring has allowed me to take pride in my work in a completely new way, to see the career that I have worked so hard to build through fresh eyes.

That has been an incredible reality check, in the best possible way. Throughout the years I have kept very focused, concentrating on the individual cases of resolving people's issues that lie before me, and expanding my knowledge base, while never stopping to acknowledge the specifics of what I have accomplished up to this point. Now that I have begun to survey my achievements in this way, I have not only gained a healthy professional affirmation, but it has also allowed me to think critically about the new directions available as I take my practice into the future.
 

This renewed examination of my clinical skills has also offered a different level of analysis of the work I do as I break it down and make it translatable to someone in a different aspect of health care. What I have been shown from this aspect of mentoring is my effectiveness as a teacher. That has made me very happy, and it has led to a new, unexpected layer of fulfillment in my life.

Mentoring someone who, as it happens, reminds me so much of myself at the beginning of my career, has allowed me a feeling of "paying it forward" in the world. I love what I do and I know that I am lucky for that. I know that I have been given a wonderful gift in this life. Being able to help someone else eager to find a similar path in her life has made me feel even more grateful to be able to pay forward all the joy that my professional life has afforded me. That in itself is an amazing gift. This relationship with my mentee has brought me to a new level of appreciation for my life.  

From an early age, I knew that my life would be dedicated to service. Now, in my role as a mentor, I have just added a new layer of beautiful color and richness to that service.  

I hope that reading this post allows some of you to consider taking on someone to mentor. You have more to give than you know, and the rewards of this giving come back ten fold.

Lots of love to you...

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Dr. Lisa M. Avila affords her clients safe, guided passage from pain/dysfunction to knowing and understanding his or her own body and what that body is trying to teach them. 



Getting back on the "Wheelbarrow"

so much depends 

upon 

a red wheel 

barrow 

glazed with rain 

water 

beside the white 

chickens

- William Carlos Williams 

 As a part-time professor of English, I teach this poem every semester. Keep in mind many of my students have not been in a classroom for a number of years. The wide-eyed looks of bafflement never cease to put a big smile on my face. Never mind that every time I teach this poem it’s around 7 pm on a weeknight. I am fried, and so are they. Still, this poem tends to spark a much welcomed blaze of conversation. 

 I have to make it clear in the beginning of the lesson that this is, in fact, the ENTIRE poem. Much of William’s work is obscure but widely read and taught. “The Red Wheelbarrow” has become one of his signature pieces. The poem is a lightbulb-over-the-head inducing spell once the students learn that Williams was a practicing physician who became inspired to write this weird little poem while gazing out the window in a house of a dying child. 

William Carlos Williams

Suddenly, we are transported into ponderous discussions dealing with dependency, spirituality, need, grief, healing, uselessness, and hope - diverse facets of life that must coincide in order to make us human. Not bad for a 16 word poem. Poet Wallace Stevens referred to Williams’ poems as “rubbings of reality”, and Williams indeed gives you little snippets of landscape and bits and pieces of the human experience. He leaves it to you to put the puzzle together- if you choose to take the time. 

I think what makes this poem go from baffling to enlightening is the blending of the human condition. In a short amount of time and space, you are reminded about simple necessities needed for stasis yet easily forgotten and rarely appreciated. There was this man, William Carlos Williams, who on a daily basis was slapped in the face by mortality.

Whether he knew it or not, he wrote this poem to call our attention to the balance we need to obtain in regarding our passions and obligations - two things that are rarely synonymous.

A Balance Wheel

We have all felt like the red wheelbarrow - settling into the Earth, taking in whatever falls down on us, and not always feeling appreciated or purposeful. We often fail to dry ourselves after the storm of everyday and take the time to pursue our passions. Everyone has a passion, talent, or purpose that reaches beyond work and family. The problem is many of us think we have all the time in the world to look, and we don’t. 

Sooner rather than later, those “white chickens”, which can easily be seen as something angelic or divine, are going to come take us away. “So much depends/upon” the acknowledgment and acceptance of every fragment of consciousness that makes us whole. That’s when we find balance, and that is when we are able to stay on that purposeful wagon for longer periods of time. So who says little poems like this don’t make sense?

Danielle's Note:
This week we will are delving into the "relationship with self," and what better way to understand and refine that relationship than by rediscover our passions, accept all fragments of our sub/consciousness, and to recognize that we are only whole when we are carrying in our own personal wheelbarrow only those things that bring us joy while at the same time fulfilling obligation.  Thank you for this, Tara!

The Teacher I'll Never Forget

Mrs. Brischetto’s breath reeked of coffee and cigarettes.  Her face was inches away from mine, infuriated eyes glaring behind huge glasses.  Frustration settled in every wrinkle on her face and her arms flailed in the air.  My second grade classmates gathered around my desk watching me shrink smaller and smaller into my chair.  My math book sat opened on my desk and I stared at it blankly.  The unfriendly shapes and words started to blur together, creating a soup of ink on the page.  I don’t remember what my teacher screamed but her words were slicing me to pieces.  They belittled me, taunting me on my inability to figure out the math problem.  She had explained it to me over and over.  I just didn’t get it.  I felt stupid, embarrassed and more than anything I wanted some space.  Space to collect my thoughts, to regain my dignity.  I also wanted to cry but something held back the tears: the anger boiling inside of me.  To this day, I remember wanting to flip over my desk and run out of class, away from that barren room with little color, from the cracked tile that snaked throughout the old school building.  Away from her.  

That day started a life long hate of math.  I’ve never been good with numbers and that was obvious from an early age.  But my deficiency, I now realize, goes beyond a skill I’m not good at.  Mrs. Brischetto was an old school educator in Italy.  She believed that children were to be herded like cattle.  You sat them down, showed them how to do something and they’d move along to the next thing.  When I didn’t fit that mold, she couldn’t deal with it.  Her angry words struck me harder than any hand could, planting the seed that told me I wasn’t smart, that I would never learn math.  Her fury and disappointment launched a life long panic every time I walked in a math room.  I would start each semester just knowing that I’d fail, that I’d flunk each test, that the teacher’s lectures would sound like ancient Latin.  And I did fail, very often.  

Looking back to the foundation of my fear, the seed that grew to become a tree of negative self-esteem was the outcome of a terrible student-teacher relationship.  I was a painfully shy and insecure child and starting school at five years old, a year younger than the rest of my peers, presented a huge emotional obstacle.  My early encounters with Mrs. Brischetto gave me a profound distrust of teachers. Mostly, it gave me a fear to learn.  Slowly, that low self-confidence bled into other areas of my life.  I just thought that I was never going to be good at learning, that it would take too long, that I’d have to work too hard, to truly excel in school.  It took me several years to understand that no one learns the same.  

A student-teacher relationship can impact a child with long-term feelings.  The American Psychological Association says “Students who have close, positive, and supportive relationships with their teachers will attain higher levels of achievement than those students with more conflictual relationships.”  Unfortunately, not everyone who chooses this profession understands this truth.  

There are many jobs that require a true humanitarian heart, a love for people and for kids, and a gentle spirit.  A doctor, for example, needs to remember that a person is much more than a body with organs, but also an individual led by a spiritual soul.  He or she needs to understand the delicate foundation that makes us human beings, that tugs our heart strings, that makes us whole.  But none other will ever come close to the most important job of all: Teacher.  The person who spends more time with a child than her own parents do; the one who can identify immediately the boy abused at home; the person who sees his blank face as shame for not being able to learn like the other kids; not indifference.  The leader, the molder, the second Mother or Father.  The one person who can affect a child for the rest of his or her life.