Peer mentoring is a valuable way to learn from others, share experiences, and support each other's growth. But how can you keep your peer mentoring sessions fresh, engaging, and inspiring? Here are some innovative ideas that you can try with your peer mentors to spark new insights, challenge assumptions, and foster creativity.
Brainstorming is a common technique for generating ideas, but it can also be boring, repetitive, or unproductive if done in the same way every time. To spice up your brainstorming sessions, you can use different tools that stimulate your imagination, such as mind maps, word associations, random prompts, or visual aids. These tools can help you and your peer mentors explore different perspectives, connections, and possibilities that you might not have thought of otherwise.
Great question! One of the courses I teach is Project Management. As the Director of Mentorship, Project Management Institute's Pittsburgh chapter, each spring we connect mentors and mentees who are in industry for the most part. But I also assign mentors to all of my students in this class. While they can meet with their mentors, generally once a month, and discuss course material, they can also gain insight on soft skills, resume writing, interviewing, job searching, just to name a few. I have had extremely positive feedback regarding this program and including my students. My students tell me that they have never been connected with somebody in industry and are thankful to have this opportunity to learn from somebody who has been there.
Another way to make your peer mentoring sessions more innovative is to experiment with different formats and methods of communication. For example, you can try switching roles, playing games, using stories, or creating scenarios. These formats can help you and your peer mentors break out of your comfort zones, challenge your thinking, and have fun while learning. You can also use different media, such as video, audio, or chat, to communicate with your peer mentors and share your ideas in different ways.
Taking roles in conversations when creating new we ways to mentor works wonders. The perspectives of diverse people sitting in a room and working on new mentoring methods go a long way in helping each mentor grow and in turn help their mentees grow.
Feedback is essential for learning and improvement, but it can also be biased, limited, or outdated if you only rely on your peer mentors or yourself. To broaden your horizons and get fresh perspectives, you can seek feedback from diverse sources, such as experts, customers, colleagues, or friends. These sources can offer you different insights, opinions, and experiences that can enrich your understanding, inspire your creativity, and motivate your action.
With your peers, sharing and hearing experiences of what worked and what didn't - at work, at home and everywhere in between - can help give you and your peers increased perspective and motivation. These perspectives can be highly motivating as you work to make important changes.
Design thinking is a creative problem-solving approach that involves empathizing with users, defining problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing. You can apply design thinking principles to your peer mentoring sessions to tackle complex challenges, generate innovative solutions, and learn from failures. By using design thinking, you and your peer mentors can develop a user-centric mindset, a collaborative attitude, and a flexible approach that can help you adapt to changing needs and situations.
One of the best ways to spark innovation is to learn from other fields and disciplines that are different from your own. By doing so, you can expose yourself and your peer mentors to new ideas, concepts, and practices that can inspire you to think differently, cross-fertilize your knowledge, and discover new opportunities. You can learn from other fields and disciplines by reading books, articles, or blogs, watching videos or podcasts, attending webinars or workshops, or interviewing experts or practitioners.
Finally, an innovative idea that you can share with your peer mentors is to reflect on your learning and progress regularly. Reflection is a powerful way to consolidate your learning, evaluate your performance, identify your strengths and weaknesses, and plan your next steps. You can reflect on your learning and progress by using tools such as journals, portfolios, or feedback forms, or by having discussions with your peer mentors, mentors, or coaches. By reflecting, you and your peer mentors can celebrate your achievements, learn from your mistakes, and set new goals for your continuous improvement.
Inspiring people us a head and heart activity. We need a vision of a better future before we can accommodate and apply the steps. We work close to the issues on a daily basis, so providing space, or even a moment in time to elevate our views on what we 'should' do, to what we 'could' do is time well spent if it takes us closer to our goals, not just for ourselves, but for the greater good.