Ten Decisive Steps to
Motivating your Delinquent Teen to Action
(Page 4)
STEP FIVE
MENTORING
An emerging but by no means new paradigm is mentoring.
To mentor means to guide and that guide usually translates into
influence. If you can mentor
your teen or get a leader or positive role model to mentor your team,
then you are well on your way to motivating your teen to positive
action.
GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL MENTORING
·
The mentor must be
an influencer
·
The mentor must be a
positive role model
·
The mentor must be a
motivator
·
The mentor should be
a leader
·
The mentor should be
a team-player
·
The mentor should
model successful attitude and behavior and have a track record of
success
·
The mentor should be
disciplined and trustworthy
·
The mentor must be
credible
·
The mentor should be
results oriented
·
The mentor should be
compassionate yet firm
·
The mentor should
have connections (whether community or religious based or of a higher
hierarchy).
·
The mentor should
model positive social action
The success of the mentor is highly dependent on his
or her ability to positively influence the teen to change, to inspire
motivation for change and to interact with and engage the teen in
mentoring opportunities. The
key factor in this is to establish trust and guard that trust from early
in the relationship. It is
hard for a teen to trust an adult, especially one that he or she knows
is trying to influence him to change, but if the trust factor can be
settled form early in the relationship, then most of the mentor’s job
would have been done for him.
Another key issue in being
able to win the teen over to a higher motivated perspective is to be a
friend to the teen while maintaining careful boundaries.
If the respect and the trust is there and the boundary lines are
clearly understood, then friendship makes the process easier, and the
teen becomes more comfortable with any influence to change.