What happens in a mentoring session?

At Flourish we’re well aware that once your young person has been accepted onto the Flourish mentoring programme, you, their carer, may receive little or no information about what actually goes on in their sessions.  When asked how the session went, the response may well be ‘OK’, and if you ask what they actually did, ‘stuff’ is a likely answer!  Whilst these are very normal teenage responses to any line of questioning, they can leave you feeling a bit frustrated, not knowing the sort of things your young person might be learning. To give you a little more information here is a short insight into what goes on behind the scenes of what happens in a mysterious Flourish mentoring session…

Firstly we make it very clear to each girl that the hour they have with us each week is their time.  We are here for them - to listen and reflect and help where we can.  We try and make them feel as safe as possible in the setting, and assure them that what they say to us is confidential, unless we think there may be something that is causing themselves or others harm - in which case we will discuss with them how we are going to proceed. 

From the start we try to put them at their ease with games, quizzes, crafts and stickers…we use a lot of stickers.  Each girl is given a folder in the first session which they are encouraged to decorate and personalise (which is where the stickers come in!) We try and learn a bit more about them in the first few sessions - likes and dislikes, hopes and dreams, friends, family, pets (we love pets at Flourish); we do a quiz to work out what sort of personality the young person has, and we normally laugh together at how accurate it is; we use emojis to work out how we might be feeling - after all starting meeting with a complete stranger can be really daunting and so it’s good to own that; and we establish what it is each person wants to get out of mentoring.  (And it’s fine if they don’t really know - we work it out as we go along.)

The middle weeks of the 12 week course are focussed on learning about self esteem and emotions.  Each girl comes to us as a referral because somebody thought they might benefit from mentoring.  This might be due to anxiety, or bullying, or anger, or behavioural issues at school - or a host of other reasons.  So we talk a lot about positive self esteem - what that is, what it looks like, how to improve it, and what it isn’t.  We talk about how valuable each person is, their unique qualities, the things that have made them who they are (good and bad) and all the amazing potential they have.  We talk with them about the hard things and start to uncover why they might be so hard, and then in the subsequent weeks we start to look at ways to understand and manage emotions. 

Emotions are tricky things for everyone, and we emphasise to each girl how normal it is to feel the way they do, and that together we are going to discover ways that can help to manage things like anger or anxiety.  And so we look at topics like how to scale emotions, self care, positive affirmations and what we can and cannot control in life.  Together we work out what strategies are going to work best for each girl and we help them create journals, or reminder cards, or bunting with positive words on them, that they can take home as a visual reminder of what to do when things get tough.

The last few weeks are focussed on building hopes and dreams, and then celebrating how far each girl has come in their journey with us.  We encourage them to dream big and to keep going.  And we remind them that learning is lifelong and that they have years ahead to discover more about who they are and how amazing they are.

At the end of the 12 weeks we give them their folder with all the worksheets and information that we have looked at together.  They also get a small gift from their mentor to remind them how valuable they are, and we send them off to use the skills they’ve learnt. 

We love what we do and we do it because we know it makes a difference, and so week 12 is always bittersweet because we are saying goodbye.  But we are also confident that each girl we see is better able to manage any difficulties she has because of the skills she has been taught.  But…we’re not miracle workers.  We don’t promise to ‘fix’ people, and if at the end of the course we sense that someone might benefit from ongoing help, then we flag that up to the school or at home so that other help can be put in place.

So that’s what we do! Hopefully that has demystified things and will help you on the journey to supporting your young person.