One form of mentoring defines the principles of living. Recently I heard a young man say, "My grandfather was everything to me. He loved me, and he taught me how to live." How fortunate to have an older person in one's life about whom you can say that. As we look at the Scripture for lifestyle mentoring, we immediately think of Paul and Timothy. From the text we don't know how much technical skill as a missionary Paul gave Timothy, but we do know Paul was an excellent sponsor. We know he was a father in the faith. He let Timothy observe him at work. Paul promoted him to the churches. In the broad sense, we could call Paul a lifestyle mentor to Timothy. This type of mentoring is a kind of parenting without the typical parental responsibilities. The real responsibility falls on the young person to absorb and to observe correctly. For years Zig Ziglar and I have met to talk. Zig gets out his paper and pencil, even though he has a far better memory for material than most people. When he and I discussed this chapter, Zig said, "Be sure to tell the person being mentored to make notes. No one should trust his memory with anything this important." Another friend, Dr. Ramesh Richard, will invariably put his electronic note-taker on the table as we begin to talk. He says he has a complete file of all our past conversations. For over forty years in observing my mentor, Maxey Jarman, I made notes of everything I saw him do or heard him say that I thought was meaningful. After he retired and I was in my sixties, I went alone to our place at the lake and transcribed all those notes. When I told him what I had done, his only remark was, "What a waste." He didn't see himself as a mentor in the normal sense. You had to watch to learn. When I asked him to review my notes, he offered to give me a memorandum amplifying anything he felt I had not seen fully. I put his sixteen-page memo with my hundreds of pages of notes and observations over the forty years of our friendship. The responsibility of the lifestyle mentor is to be open, real, and to consistently personify who he is so the young person receives a clear signal. The mentor must provide a comfortable atmosphere in which the student feels free to ask any question he needs answered. Sometimes it's profitable for a young person to make a list of questions. One of the men I've worked with for several years is coming to Dallas with a list of questions he wants me to answer before I go into the senile eclipse. These may be questions about the older person's life or questions the younger person is or will be facing. For example, the learner may want to ask the mentor, "What were the major decisions in your life? What were the circumstances and what were the principles involved in your decision-making? How did you evaluate the outcome?" These questions help in forming a case study. The more probing the questions, the better the learning. A good mentor never ridicules a question. He may choose not to answer it, but he is careful never to ridicule for questions are the pump that makes the answers flow. I'm an inveterate note taker. Rarely do I hear anything, read anything, or even think anything that I feel I should retain that I don't commit to paper. I've been doing this now for sixty years. The website, www.breakfastwithfred.com is the contemporary repository of all this note-taking. I very much want to continue mentoring through putting all these observations into the public domain. I have sought over my lifetime which is approaching 90 to distill life into principles. Since principles are eternal, they are always current. In doing this I form a mental filing cabinet for all information that passes through my experience. Some items interest me, others do not --- so there are no file folders for some topics. I was blessed with excellent recall, but I work on it. Lifestyle mentoring is mentoring through "coming alongside" in the day to day and developing a model by observing, asking, absorbing and putting information into a helpful form.
Lifestyle Mentoring
By Fred Smith
