In a mentoring relationship, mentors have the unique opportunity to demonstrate skills on a personal level and teach students how they should view themselves. Intrapersonal skills involve your inward communication with yourself and the way you face obstacles in life. Mentoring can motivate students to work on intrapersonal skills such as self-confidence, resilience, and overall control of their emotions.
Mentoring Increases Confidence
Trusting yourself and your abilities is not always an easy skill to have, but having a mentor can support you in this area. Self-confidence is an important intrapersonal skill to possess as it helps your work and your behavior toward that work improve.
In a recent study, we found that students who are paired with a Kids Hope USA mentor experience increased confidence (Greenway, 2022). This improved confidence is noticed by mentors, teachers, and family members of the mentee. In the words of a Kids Hope USA grandparent, “Kids Hope USA has done my grandson a world of good. His schoolwork has definitely improved as his confidence has increased.”
Mentoring Promotes Resilience
Resilience is another skill that students can work on in a mentoring relationship. Mentoring creates a space for mentors to help their students solve problems and continue to grow. This is what resilience is all about, getting back up and overcoming obstacles.
Through playing games or working on some extra schoolwork with their mentors’ encouragement to keep working at it, students gain follow-through skills to help them successfully finish assignments, read books, and much more!
“When you as a mentor show up, students can learn this ability to make a choice and stand back up, and not be knocked down.”
– Dr. Kathy Koch, Founder and President of Celebrate Kids
During our National Mentoring Month webinar in January 2023, Dr. Kathy Koch shared ways to promote this resiliency through a mentoring relationship. Using the eight ways outlined below, mentors can encourage resiliency throughout their mentoring relationship.
8 Ways to Promote Resiliency:
- Teach, so they can be successful
- Demonstrate unconditional love
- Build trust; keep your promises
- Allow them to struggle (some)
- Don’t rescue them too soon
- Help them to solve the problem
- Compliment them specifically
- Correct, don’t criticize
Each of these components is important in the success of a mentoring relationship. Elementary students copy behaviors quickly, so the way a mentor acts and carries themselves is vital to conveying these skills to their student. To promote resiliency in a beneficial way, students must be able to struggle a little bit before the mentor comes in and helps them solve the problem at hand.
Mentoring Improves Emotion Control
Mentoring also benefits students by encouraging students to better control their emotions. Controlling emotions can be difficult for many children, and they may need some extra time to work on this skill. Mentoring allows children to spend that extra time working on their overall behavior and control of emotions.
Through a Kids Hope USA Teacher Survey, we found that “86% of student made good or some progress in their behavior, self-regulation, and control” (Greenway, 2022).
Mentoring and Intrapersonal Skills
Mentoring allows students to watch and learn many intrapersonal skills. These skills are crucial to the development of a child, and mentoring can help support these skills and help a child grow in them. Self-confidence, resiliency, and overall emotional control are skills that students are shown during a Kids Hope USA mentoring relationship and are reinforced each and every week.
Kids Hope USA is a proven and established school-based mentoring program that connects community-focused church congregations with students in the local elementary school. Mentors walk alongside these children and provide them with another consistent and caring adult in their lives to build life-changing relationships with one another.
If you are interested in learning more about being a mentor at Kids Hope USA, visit our mentoring program page!