[blox_column width=”1/1″][/blox_column][blox_heading title=”Everything changes during the holidays…” size=”h3″ style=”style5″ animation=”none”][/blox_heading][blox_text animation=”none”]
…Have you noticed that? In our American culture, we celebrate an extended holiday season over the next five weeks from Thanksgiving to Christmas to the New Year. These changes can evoke memories joyous or jarring; wondrous or woeful. They also offer the best of mentors fertile possibilities in mentoring for the holidays. Let’s take a look…
Our Shifting Whole Life in the Holidays
I write these words just a few days before the busiest travel weekend of the year in the United States…the days immediately before and after Thanksgiving Day. Most of us will take some days of break from our work and calling during the holidays. For some, this may be the only break taken for the entire year. Our vocation changes during the holidays.
Holidays can arouse powerful emotions we don’t experience during the course of the year. For some these can be joyful emotions from wonderful memories. For others, they can be associated with wrenching sorrow from awful memories not yet forgotten.
Holidays offer unusual outlets for our creativity. The neighborhood’s most fabulous house decoration…the unusual and memorable dish for the table…the music unused for twelve months that emerges from a dusty cabinet…the zany and surprising method for presenting a gift to a loved one. What creative juices flow from you during the holiday that might otherwise be dormant during the year?
Only in America…the holidays are launched with a day of Thanksgiving followed by the heaviest shopping weekend of the year. These few days of heavy consumer spending can make or break the year for some retailers. They can also add some challenging choices and risk of some financial difficulties in the New Year if we make the wrong choices.
The lower tempo and longer breaks during the holidays can offer a rich time of intellectual stimulation and the ability to ponder and pursue topics unexplored during the hectic humdrum of our normal life. I often read 4-5 books in the week between Christmas and the New Year, at the confluence of thoughtful gifts and a lower life tempo.
It is no surprise that commercials for—and spending on—diet plans and fitness programs explode right after the New Year. The holidays, beginning with Thanksgiving, offer many, many opportunities for us to forego the discipline of the physical regimen we follow during the rest of the year. (Oh, come on, Murphy…don’t lay a guilt trip on me two days before Thanksgiving!)
The breaks, travel, lower life tempo and additional time of the holidays can give us some valuable…and needed…time of deep rest and extra-meaningful moments with friends rarely seen during the course of the year. Our social life takes on a different and refreshing character during the holidays.
Time with our extended family, like the emotions of the holidays, can rekindle profound and wonderful memories…or deep and painful wounds can be reopened by the time we spend with those closest to us during the holidays.
Mentoring for the Holidays
Every dimension of our whole life takes on a different and unusual bent during the holidays. This offers the best of mentors a rare opportunity for exploring depths of a mentoree’s life that might not be available during the course of the normal year. Three areas are of particular interest for mentors:
- The emotions, changes, joys, sorrows, opportunities and difficulties of this season offers a mentor an unique look into the belief system and core values of those they mentor. At LDG, we encourage mentors to make a special effort to journey into the core of those they mentor and help them discover where their core is thriving, and where it is telling lies that prevent them from living fully into all they are designed to be.
- The holidays bring more than their share of personal and family crises. The best of mentors are prepared for crisis and work hard to be available to deal with expected and unexpected crises in the lives of those they mentor.
- That crucial dimension of family and marriage is very often at the forefront of the joy or sorrow, comfort or crisis we all experience during the holidays. The best of mentors will take these opportunities to spend an extra amount of time on this key life dimension.
Over the next three weeks, we will take on these three topics…the core, mentoring in crises, and family and marriage in the holidays…in a deeper way. We hope you will join us for some thinking on these subjects together.
What About You?
How does your mentoring change for the holidays? What things do you need a mentor’s help in facing during the holidays that you do not during more normal times? We would love to hear from you in the comments section below.
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