Suggestion 3: Always ask. The most they can say is NO - but don’t be defensive when they do.

My mother always used to tell me this - and it was validated when I was a senior in high school. My grades were just under the A- line which identified the group that was required to take the National Merit Scholarship test while it was optional for others. Thanks to my mother, it was a test I did take. Only the class valedictorian and I had test scores giving us Letters of Commendation.

So you should always ask - for an informational interview, for help connecting you to a colleague of mine, for consideration for a job. You never know what the person will say - and it could be YES....

But don't be defensive if I do say No. It may not be the right time, the right place, the right skills fit, or the right person. Remember that there will be another opportunity.

Posted via email from suegriffey's posterous

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Mentor: Barbara Rawlins, Monitoring and Evaluation Team Leader, Maternal and Child Survival Program

Another feature of this blog is bringing you advice and perspectives from people who mentor, by answering 3 questions.
Here are Barbara Rawlins’ responses:
What are mentees looking for? · Career guidance · Technical advice · Moral support · Advice on how to negotiate politically-sensitive or controversial situation
What 1 piece of advice do you give every mentee you work with? Figure out what they want to do (in the long term) and what steps they can take to get there
Why are you interested in mentoring? To support younger colleagues, especially women, to help attain their career goals

2017 – Sue’s Year in Review

The last time I did a Year in Review was at the end of 2014. (See Sue's Year in Review, http://www.suementors.com/2014/12/sues-year-in-review.html.)
It was one of my first real forays into better communications and dataviz – and I have learned more since then. It’s been helpful that so many evaluators and others are blogging about improvements in communicating our work and even offering free courses and YouTube videos.

The infographic shows what I’ve done and I’m so really happy that my blogging is back – and on the upswing! It’s been wonderful to be able to use my mentoring skills in so many different ways this year - and even to start working on a second journal article.
But doing the review also made me realize what it doesn’t show from 2017: -14 weeks of hospital and acute rehab weeks and 6 of rehab-on-the-mend weeks (including 1 missed-vacation-in-Florida week because I couldn’t fly) for hip-related care -30 days of vacation trips in Wisconsin, St. Thomas (during Hurricane Irma …

Realizing a BIG goal - or What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Since I formally incorporated providing external mentoring about a decade ago, I have had a goal of reaching a wider audience. I kept up on various technologies and mostly kept a list of ideas every time I saw an opportunity for a 1-to-many outreach. I thought about doing 30-second daily mentor tip using SoundCloud (audio recording) after seeing how Baratunde Thurston was using it to reach people. Then I explored hosting a Google Hangout to 'broadcast' to anyone anywhere but the initial Hangout software wasn’t really very user-friendly. I even got Snapchat glasses a few years ago thinking they might help me make video clips to share, but they weren’t a solution either.

Well, I never got very far on any of these or others although I did expand my mentoring 'coverage' to working with more formal programs as well as mentoring individual clients.
Several months ago, I was able to expand the mentoring seminars, workshops and consultations I had been doing with my public healt…

Sue Mentors: Jobs, Careers, Lifework...

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