What We're Reading Now
Mentoring Insights from Musicians
21 May 2013
Allison read The Hook’s 25 April 2013 edition and found best practices for all mentors in the stories about two of her favorite local musicians.
Tags: allison read, john d’earth, leadership, mentoring, music
I always look forward to the coverage our local papers give to the ever-changing Charlottesville music scene and The Hook’s 25 April 2013 edition had just the kind of diversity I enjoy. But what struck me most about this particular edition were the great examples of mentoring from two of my favorite local musicians.
photo by: Tom Daly
People sometimes ask me what to look for in a mentor and how to be a good mentor to others. Some of my answers to those questions are in a post I wrote on mentoring last year. In addition, many of the best mentors I’ve had or heard about over the years have a lot of the qualities that came out in The Hook's stories highlighting contributions to our community by John D’earth and Damani Harrison. If you’ve never heard John’s jazz trumpet or Damani’s hip hop beat, then you need to fix that as soon as you can. Your musical life will never be the same.
Damani Harrison, center, works on a radio program with CaTech students taking the Music Technology and Industry course he teaches.
article and photo by: Courteney Stuart
I imagine The Hook's Arts & Culture Editor, David McNair, included John in his cover story because no coverage of the Charlottesville music scene would be complete without insights from “the musical mentor of mentors.” And Damani’s work at our wonderful Music Resource Center is certainly a story about mentoring young musicians that should be told far and wide. As I read each story, these were the great mentor qualities that popped for me from the quotes by and about John and Damani:
- generosity of spirit (happily sharing time, talent, lessons learned, and connections),
- genuine desire to help others achieve goals,
- joyful celebration of the mentee’s accomplishments,
- ability to constructively describe needed changes and opportunities for improvement,
- fair and open–minded, but also able to articulate a clear point of view,
- access to the right resources and people and a willingness to make those connections,
- meeting the mentee where he or she is, but also able to steer them toward the right next step, and
- ability to realize when the mentee needs more support than the mentor can give.
What qualities have you appreciated in your mentors?
Comments
Our Comment Policy:
Our blog posts are only half of the conversation. What our readers have to say is equally important to us, and we're grateful for all the comments that continue the dialog.
To ensure that the discussion here is as useful as possible to all of our readers, please be respectful of our contributors and refrain from harassing, threatening and/or vulgar language. We reserve the right to screen and remove any comments from the site. If you have a question about a comment or want to discuss our policy, please contact us. We'll talk it over.
There are no comments for this entry yet.