I take mentoring very seriously and I am on the board of an organization called Girls Write Now where we match teen girls and writing mentors because it changes their lives.
I was lucky that I met the right mentors and teachers at the right moment.
My success was due to good luck hard work and support and advice from friends and mentors. But most importantly it depended on me to keep trying after I had failed.
Emotional 'literacy' implies an expanded responsibility for schools in helping to socialize children. This daunting task requires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in the community become more involved with schools as both active participants in children's learning and as individual mentors.
The biggest difference is in the leadership. It was better for us. We had more coaches and mentors to help us. A lot of the younger players today suffer from a lack of direction.
The things I was allowed to experience the people I was able to call friends teammates mentors coaches and opponents the travel all of it are far more than anything I ever thought possible in my lifetime.
A lot of people put pressure on themselves and think it will be way too hard for them to live out their dreams. Mentors are there to say 'Look it's not that tough. It's not as hard as you think. Here are some guidelines and things I have gone through to get to where I am in my career.'
Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist in love with art smitten with art history. You're also a woman with almost no mentors to look to art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.
For my birthday my husband learned to cook and is cooking one day a week for me. But he only likes to do fancy dishes. So we end up with weird obscure things in the refrigerator.