MY EXPERIENCE IN MENTORING THE “TRIOS”

I was assigned wonderful “Trios” to be their mentor during the Annual Mentorship Program in August 2015 coordinated by the KenGen Foundation. Led by Mr. Anthony Igecha, I was among a group of 25 staff who had been invited to be briefed on mentorship during the students’ Annual Mentorship program after which we would be linked up with our mentees.

The trios were Robert Kasolo, a form four at Makueni Boys School whom I designated as my “First born”, Justus Sanda, another fourth former at Machakos’ School who became “second born” and Edward Kariuki, a form one also from Machakos’ School who automatically became my “Third Born”.

Since then, I have experienced an interesting journey with them over the last two years.

It all began by self-introductions as I set the ball rolling on how the four of us would “walk the talk”. I introducing myself and explained what it meant to be their mentor. We also set the foundation of the relationship, values, beliefs and boundaries. To me, the purpose of mentoring was to support them through good advice and to create friendship and trust.

I set out encouraged them to set their individual goals and timelines of what they aimed to achieve, to invest time and energy to their course and to create safety and security, both physical and social within their environment.

 My experience with the Trio’s so far…

From the onset, I asked each one of them their values. They came up with the following; respect, openness, cooperation, discipline, positive beliefs, honesty and positive attitude among others. And collectively, we came up with our cores values which are: T – Team spirit; A – Attitude Positive; I – Integrity.