Mentoring - Challenges And Fails

"Not your typical LinkedIn article", huh? Indeed! We mostly see success stories and achievements of all sorts in this space. But something I choose is to show all the sides of a story, stay true, transparent and human. After all, aren't mistakes what makes us all human (but are also our greatest teacher and progress catalyst)? Following the mentorship series, this time I'd like to focus on the less pleasant moments - missteps, as well as on hurdles of teaching.

I remember clearly the day I got the call from Inga Tarelea with the invitation to take the reins over her Front-End Developer course at Orange Digital Center: a mix of excitement and fear with a tinge of hope and new perspectives.

Up to this day I'm not entirely sure what let me stay so confident I'll manage to get through with the course, considering I already had a full-time job, a little kid to take care of 24/7 and the fact that the course had to start in less than 2 weeks (so you can only imagine the level of unpreparedness and anxiety).

And the new perspectives included me being pushed so far out of my comfort zone, that the zone itself looked like a dot to me. Here goes challenge #1 - socialization. Having a prevalently introverted type of personality, you can easily imagine my terror of even interacting with other human beings, let alone with lots of them simultaneously. Now, add overthinking to the equation and you'll get about a quarter of what I've been going though. I know it's an over-used meme, but capture this:

What helped me overcome this? Time and people. On one hand, I've always had the support of my course partner Iuliana Ste?enco, who was nice enough to not only give me constructive feedback, but to encourage me and ensure everything was really fine. On the other hand - I asked my mentees for feedback on a regular basis. It's been supremely important for me to know how they feel, how is our interaction going, are they ok with the speed and intensity of the lessons and also ask questions and express their possible struggles and dissatisfaction. You're probably wondering what made them feel free in sharing all of this? Anonymous feedback. It created a safe space where everyone could say what they wanted to, especially if they were too shy to say it out loud during the lessons. I also tried integrating quizzes at the end of a good part of the lessons with funny questions not necessarily related to the topic and a "Word Cloud" exercise as the cherry on the top (mostly with open and/or funny questions).

But things haven't always been smooth. I mentioned it briefly on the discussion panel during the Tech Women Moldova summit, but here's a deeper dive. Here comes challenge #2 - lack of mentoring experience, at least in such a format. That has lead to a massive fail on the third week, which probably cost me a couple of students (I can't be sure, as they left the course and never reached out anymore, but Elena-the-overthinker perceives this as her fault). The thing is, when you have to explain someone a concept, you have to first adjust and align to a language that is understood by both sides. What's crystal clear to you should also be quite clear to the other one, without you acting superior for knowing something someone does not know yet.

A little side story: I'm the oldest one in a family of three kids, therefore there were instances I had to help out my brothers with their homework. And oh boy did I not understand the importance of "speaking the same language" back then... I think both of them have childhood trauma of their sister being the unpatient monster behind "It's so easy, how can you not get it?!" ??

The situation: I was explaining the matter too fast (partially because I thought those were pretty straightforward concepts and partially because I was still very much nervous presenting in front of the class), jumping from one thing to another and probably confusing my students, especially in the attempt to give them the most of everything during a two-hour lesson. You could cut the despair with a knife: theirs - of probably not being able to "connect the dots" on such a high speed, and mine - of seeing the disaster. After the lesson ended, I left the class completely crushed. My body reacted immediately and two days later I was even unable to get out of the bed, I've been that stressed out. I couldn't properly sleep, I couldn't focus enough on my job tasks or even on the daily routine ones; it's safe to say I've been a complete mess.

I had to cancel our next lesson and you could only imagine how guilty that made me feel. Nonetheless, I tend to see myself as a fighter and I was not willing to give up. It was important for me to have an open discussion with my class and "come clean". At first, I thought I'd leave them a message in our group chat with all the apologies and clarifications (I even prepared the text for that, but never hit "Send"). Instead though, I gathered myself and started the next lesson with a whole speech (and it was not the scripted one). I publicly admitted I messed up and went into detail on what I identified as errors, took a step back and just stated that I'm a mere human and I make mistakes, but I also take responsibility for those; that I'm not used to practicing mentoring in such a way and sometimes I even don't know the answers to some of their questions, so I struggle a lot and that that is okay. I wanted to lower the stress level and also our expectations of each other - mine of them, theirs of me and for each of us - the expectations of ourselves. It's okay to misstep, it's okay to not know now, because if you're willing to do this - you will learn later and you will master the x and y and z skills. I was petrified going on stage to say all this, but during the speech I noticed some of them seemed curious about what I'm saying, some of them were even smiling and I think this was the exact moment we "clicked" for the first time.

I know lots of my students are reading this right now and I just want to thank you for your openness, understanding, patience and trust. ?

You see how despite sincerity being the solution for the challenge/fail, it also included people yet again. And communication. And I emplasize this for a reason.

Moving forward - the next challenge was to keep a straight face and a light mood every time something did not work. Literally: the mic, the screen, the code. I think out of 50 lessons, there were just about 3-4% of them when all went smoothly. This is a rather funny challenge, just imagine having to perform tasks in VS Code and parallelly display it in the browser on this screen (the black part is a non-functional one):

Jokes aside (or not) - we managed to overcome this as well and it was a good preparation for a developer's life: all will work terribly when you have to present your screen / the feature you've worked on will uncover 2 more bugs exactly when you release it / the mic will break specifically in the moment you're asking an important question and so on. ??

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To somehow summarize the bit of challenges and fails presented here, I'd say that it's what made the mentoring experience so great and memorable. I can't speak for everyone, but in my case - I tend to learn a lot more from mistakes and failures rathen than from constant success and things going well as a default. Screw-ups test you to the core: who are you when things go the wrong way, what do you do to fix that and what skills you develop in the process. And not just that, of course.

How's your relationship with failures? Which one has been the biggest / the most recent one? How do you cope with unsuccess?