Our weekly Mentor Meeting happens as a natural part of our Sunday morning routine. For over twenty years now our family ritual has been a yummy Sunday morning breakfast, full of our favorite eats, sprinkled with a whole lot of chit chatting. It‘s a soulful morning for us, a time to reconnect and get what I like to call our “juice” from each other. So when it was time to incorporate Mentor Meetings into our home school, Sunday morning was the natural time slot to pick.
Our children were already conditioned to coming together and talking about their life. Since school is not separate from life, our conversations as they grew, naturally progressed to organizing their interests and studies.
Before our daughter wakes on Sunday mornings, my husband and I head to the lanai, we sit in the sun and drink our coffee. This outdoor space is our meditation and reconnection place and, we love being there. Our round table (as we affectionately call it) is on our lanai and is the favorite gathering place. It frequently comes alive with juicy conversation, intense study, business work, dinner parties, and much laughter. This place, where we gather, holds the sweetest memories in our home, making, the round table the perfect place for our Mentor Meetings.
View from the table.
We gather our day planners, or notes from the week and the home school lists...
In the fall, after the holiday’s and at the beginning of summer we have a goal setting meeting and put together a “big list” of what we would like to study and accomplish this year. Each of us does one individually, and then together we do one for the family, included is the books we want to read individually and in our family reading time. We bring our TJEd planners, any note we took during the last week about what we wanted to discuss, the lists and we use them as a foundational guide for our weekly meetings.
Our teen has a dry erase board in her room that she has the list on with a minimal weekly schedule and some doodles to inspire her main course of study this year, which is music. Having it on a white board enables her to see it at a glance. The way she organizes her time and reminds herself is her own expression and completely different than my idea of time management and daily planning and I am learning not to ask her to do things my way. This is probably my biggest challenge as a parent Mentor.
During the week as I watch our home school and I note if there is something that needs to be addressed on a tablet that we keep on the kitchen desk for this purpose. This way I will remember when Sunday comes around. Also, this gives me an opportunity to contemplate it for a bit before we talk. Waiting until Sunday eliminates interrupting the flow of the days with constant tweaking.
My husband and I start our early Sunday morning meeting discussing our relationship, we check in on our goals, we organize our up coming week and then we move on to the kids, the grandchildren, and our home school. This process enables us to present a united front, develop a plan and to go about inspiring each person in our life according to our goals.
Our daughter (the only child left in our home) joins us when she wakes and while we eat the conversation turns to, how was your week honey? What have you been thinking about? Anything you’d like to do, learn explore? How’s the schedule going? Are you meeting your goals?
I have learned the hard way to keep these meetings short and sweet, and more conversational, less business like. I try not to vent or complain about what is wrong, instead we are focusing on the positives as much as possible. It becomes self evident when a goal is not being met and most times there is no need to even voice it out loud. My goal is to keep the joy present. If the energy starts to shift negative, we shift the conversation, switch topics and return back when an opening arises.
I don’t want the children dreading our Mentor Meetings, I want them to be a time when they get full of inspiration and sweet family juice!
Once we are done and before we move on to the rest of our day, I sum up what we decided the plan for the week would be for all of us, then we go to our calendars and put reminders in if needed.
I am modeling this habit of summing up our talk for my daughter and in the near future I will start inspiring her to be the person who sums the meeting up, since she is showing signs of needing ownership of our meetings, plans and ideas. I’ve already started inspiring by pretending I don’t remember something and asking her.
Many times these meeting turn into a fishing expedition, as I like to call it, and we find sometimes that we have spent the entire time just doing a bunch of brainstorming. At first this felt like it wasn‘t productive that we didn’t get a schedule in place, etc… but I learned to trust the process and once I started honoring the fishing expeditions (brainstorming) we became more productive, just at a different time and my daughter owned the lessons and process more. 
I now believe that putting feelers out and trying different things on is just as important for life learning as the organizing of time and studies is.
How to know when your child is ready for Mentor Meetings?
She will begin to set goals and stick to the goals for more than a couple days at a time.
She will show determination and endurance toward goals.
She will start using lists to accomplish daily tasks.
Her curiosity and desire to know about things will increase.
She will start developing a sense of her own future.
You will notice a decrease in daily play that is replaced by more reading, practicing of an instrument or art and more projects that are being done.
She will start organizing her social life, home school and learning environment on her own more and more.
Once you decide your child is ready to participate in Mentor Meetings, I suggest introducing the concept of a meeting slowly. Unless of course you are starting while you have wee little ones that you can condition a ritual of coming together for talks as natural part of their life. Remember keep it joyful and something you and they will want to do and that everyone gets “juice“ from.
If you don’t have a time when you gather naturally, try setting up a date with your child.
In the beginning make it mostly about praising her efforts and studies. 
Ask her how she is doing, what is she interested in… make it all about her and make it a great time. Use stories, telling about how you set goals and accomplished them. Tell her how excited you are for her. That you see her changing and growing and that sometime in the near future she will be a scholar. And how she will fall more deeply in love with studying and learning, Oh yeah, and feeding her, her favorite foods while meeting doesn’t hurt either. LOL
Do a few dates like this before you start getting into the meat of organizing, digging deeper into her studies, character development and daily planning. Move at your child’s pace and when the time is right suggest she make a list of her goals for the next year. A gift of a daily planner might be good at this point. Write her “big year list” in it and then the monthly and weekly goals.
Receiving a daily planner as a gift (some would say it can be inspired as a rite of passage) worked really well for quite a few families I know. For my daughter this just scared her into what her previous conveyor belt education looked like, busy work. Something about organizing that way felt like giving up control, so I let her come up with how she organizes herself. It is also a good idea to use classic books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens and other adult Mentors to inspire the same tools you are.
Our daughter is ever so slowly, moving away from that thought, that a daily planner is busy work and she is getting a little bit more comfortable with planning for success in traditional ways, using common tools. 
It was some trial and error that we had to thank for the change in understanding. I have also learned not to “run a meeting” with her. That a friendly chit chat with some inspiration goes a long way to her authoring how to manage her life and goals.
Inspiration is key to her owning the lessons of goal accomplishment and time management, So more and more I am stepping back and allowing natural consequences to teach lessons. Doing this makes it imperative that we meet weekly, so we don’t fall to far in another direction and develop possible self image issues and/or bad habits. Also, it is very important that her father and I have pre-determined, where we want to lead her and what we want her to discover. We want to have solutions and ideas already in our minds before we talk to her.
We go over the big list, to see if the main goals are being accomplished based on the monthly and weekly goals. It becomes very clear if there is anything that needs attention, and that issue is what our Mentor Meeting will focus on.
For instance this week we wanted to inspire her to see that she really does have more time for reading than she thinks. She has a list of certain books she wants to read this year and is moving through it ever so slowly. She will not be able to accomplish her goal if she doesn’t tweak how she manages her day. We started hearing from her, some excuses, and unclear thinking about what it takes to accomplish this goal.
We came to the conclusion that all she needed was a clearer vision of how and why meeting this goal was a worthy effort.
We decided to use a project she just worked on to show her she had time in her day to tie in the need for a great education that teaches you to think. We praised her accomplishment of the project, told her how impressed we were with the way she managed her days and,all that she learned going through the process. We reminded her that since the project was over she had time for more reading now. What happened next was the size of the books became daunting to her, think War and Peace and Les Miserable’s. We took the amount of pages in Les Mes and did the math to figure out how many pages a day she would have to read to accomplish finishing the book in two weeks or one month. Not so daunting once it was broken down and the pages were lumped together, the visual really helped. 
In the end she was excited to get back to reading more. She picked a new book to read this week, we broke it down into so many pages per day, which would take about two hours each day in order to complete the book in a week. We picked completion in a week after determining that she would need to read one book a week (with lots of days off which happens a lot in our home school) for her to get through her book list. She is going to try and read the amount of pages we estimated and we’ll re-evaluate how the reading flowed into her day based on her experience this week when we meet next Sunday.
Note that we didn’t then tell her to read for two hours at a certain time every day. How she manages the flow of her time every day is up to her, we want her to learn form our inspiring, our modeling, other Mentors in books and in person... but, most importantly, to learn through failing!
What I do require is that she follow our family schedule of going to bed and waking at a certain time each day. That chores be done by a certain time and that from 9am until 9pm, minus meals, chores and any scheduled classes is when the allotted study time is.
She decides what she wants to accomplish in that study time and designs how she will do that.
The hardest part of this for me, is that I can see already that she will not be successful this week and I want to just go in and tell her to do it this way, and that way, and, all will be well. But she hasn’t asked, and she needs to OWN the learning and this process will teach her to think for herself.
So my mantra these days, is PATIENCE… Frequently, the title of a book that inspired me long before this daughter was born, comes to mind: What Is It You Really Want For Your Child?
And I answer,... I want her to own her own education.
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