This is a toolkit for "staff faculty, and leaders interested in being mentored." The toolkit speaks directly to the benefits of being a mentor, determining your needs, reaching out to mentors, improving communications, and ending relationships appropriately. A representative tool is the one related to listening skills:
- "Listening Skills The best questions in the world are useless unless you can actively listen for the information that will be helpful to you. Here are four points to bear in mind to help you listen:
- Listen for central ideas. Listen for ideas that your mentor repeats and provides examples of. Typically, when an idea or concept is core to us, we will repeat and expound upon it to ensure another person understands us.
- Determine what is of personal value to you in your mentor's conversation. Once you've identified the central idea, consider how it applies to you. This will help reinforce the learning, since you can now better identify with your mentor's message.
- Identify and eliminate as many of your "trigger" words as possible. Almost everyone has certain words that cause an emotional reaction. These emotional reactions can cause us to get off track in our listening and our thinking. To combat these reactions, become familiar with your trigger words. Keep track of your next few conversations to see what words or phrases trigger an emotional reaction in you. Give some thought as to why those words trigger those reactions. Once you've identified those words and phrases, you can be more conscious when you hear them, and you'll find it easier to maintain attention and concentration when you do.
- Learn to keep pace—speed of thought vs. speed of speech. Most people can think five to six times faster than another person can talk. Regardless of how interested we are in the speaker, this difference in pace of thought and speech often results in daydreaming or mind-wandering on the part of the listener. Consider ways you can stay engaged when your mind starts to wander."