One of my mentors in high school was actually a man who was a marriage counselor. I know it sounds strange but he took me under his wing and talked about life and how to succeed in it. See, he dealt with people in marriages but more so he dealt with how to successfully talk and work with others. I was kind of a shy kid and my dad was friends with him so he had me talk to him a few times in order to help me break free of my shyness.
I remember the first time we talked. I was about 15 and scared to death to go to his office. However, my dad forced me to go so I’d really didn’t have a choice. I thought I’d go there and he’d be lecturing me on why I need to get over my social anxieties and give me a few pamphlets and send me on my way. However, I was surprised that when I got there, we played video games the whole time. He didn’t give me one piece of advice but just hung out with me as a friend. It made me feel really good inside and I started to get more and more comfortable being around them.
Probably a month or two after seeing him at every Sunday where I started to talk more and tell him a little bit about my personal life in school. He listened and listened and listened. That was what was so great about him. Just like my father, like I mentioned in a previous post, he was such a great listener. I could feel that he wasn’t judging me or putting a label on me whenever I was telling him whatever I was telling him. He just listened and tried to soak in everything I say. It really made me feel good because as a kid, adult hardly ever listen to you.
The following weeks after that he started to give me advice on how to get over my anxiety and how to talk to other people. In fact most of the lessons he gave me were examples from the marriages that he was dealing with at work. Since this is the case, I came to know quite a bit about how to handle conflict especially in marriage. It’s kind of funny because here I am, this teenager and we were talking about how to be more sympathetic in a marriage, but it totally applied to other relationships in your life as well and I think for this reason I started to develop a lot of friends and people around me liked to be around me more.
Breakup Hub of is a site that I mentioned a while back. The site revolves around how to get your ex back, but also simply how to deal with relationships. One of the ideas they talk about is that of listening to listen. In this article called how to save a marriage the author talks about how you should listen and stop thinking of things to say when you are listening. This is so true. That was one of the first lessons that my mentor always told me. Stop listening to the thoughts and her head and just be in the moment.
So that’s all for now I’m sure I’ll bring up more examples with my mentor in the future but that’s all for now.
