Wash Your Face and Change Your Shirt: An Essay about Mentoring

These days you can’t cross the street without someone talking about mentoring. It’s everywhere.  At least the word is.  Actual mentoring, I think, is a different matter.

Most people think of mentoring as instruction – someone who is older and wiser reaching down to instruct and guide the young one coming up.  The mentor provides his/her wisdom and knowledge, the mentee gratefully soaks it up.  The mentee has questions, the mentor the answers. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I think this kind of mentoring is really important.  It’s how people learn their trade – whether they’re doctors or community planners.

But true mentoring to me isn’t about instruction.  It’s about handing over the keys.

 I can tell you the one conversation that transformed me from a smart worker bee into a professional.

 Many years ago I worked at the Social Development Commission as a researcher.  Asked to pull together stats for the director’s speech that evening to a large disability advocacy group protesting state budget cuts, I scoured the census and other sources to put together the most thorough paper ever on the potential impact of the cuts.   I took the document to the director’s office, only to be told that he couldn’t attend the meeting and that the Planning Director would have to attend in his stead.  But, oh no, the Planning Director was out.  Now really worried, I flew down the hall to Tony Maggiore’s office – SDC’s Director of Programs.

 Tony Maggiore – intense, inscrutable, demanding, and totally, 24 hours a day, non-stop committed to poor people – was the single most intimidating person in an agency loaded with powerhouses and he was the last person I wanted to talk to.  But he was the only brass left in the shop.  He had to go to the meeting and make the speech.

 “Can’t do it,” he said.  “Then who can do it?” I asked. 

 “I guess you’ll have to.  You wrote the speech.  Go give it,” he said, barely looking up from his papers.

 “I can’t.”

 “Of course, you can.  Do what I do – go home, wash your face and change your shirt.  Then go give the speech.”

 And I did.  Well, I didn’t do the ‘change your shirt’ part but I did wash my face and put on fresh make-up and then drove to the Sacred Heart Hospital auditorium so ill from fear that I thought I would faint.  I sat in a folding chair waiting my turn and eying the door.  But I didn’t flee or faint.  Tony Maggiore had sent me and I couldn’t crap out.  I got up, stood at a podium with TV station microphones clipped on the side, looked at the audience filled with anxious and angry advocates and gave my speech.

 Tony Maggiore didn’t mentor me in the traditional sense. He couldn’t be bothered spending time teaching me what was what.  What he did was trust me.  It changed everything.

 To me, good mentoring is all about knowing when to say, “of course you can.”