Role Models, Mentors, and Catalysts

I am a slow learner. Even after earning a Ph.D. I still had a difficult time identifying who had been my mentors. Was I ungrateful or did I not have any mentors at all?

In one of my roles at the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, I organized and managed several mentoring programs. I finally had to confront the question: “What is a mentor?” Marion Wright Edelman’s wonderful book, Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, was an important resource for the programs and for my own understanding. Edelman redefines the concept of mentor away from a narrow, career-focused instrument, to a notion of the “critical influences of the natural daily mentors [who] . . . all stressed how to make a life and find a purpose worth living for and to leave the world better than I found it” (xiv – xv). Edelman revealed the concept to me by identifying her parents and the women of her community as early mentors. Mentors, according to Edelman, “expressed no sense of limits on my potential or who they thought I could become, and they engaged me as a fellow wayfarer and struggler. What they all had in common was their respectful treatment of me as an important, thinking individual human being” (xvii).

OK! Now I see! My inability to identify my own mentors was based on two conditions. First, I was thinking too narrowly. Secondly, I had few opportunities in my small world to find guidance of the sort typically called a mentor. Instead, I had an array something like Edelman’s lanterns. They could all, potentially, be grouped under the title of mentor, but I can better express my gratitude by thinking of these varied inflences as role models, mentors, and catalysts.
Role Models: Those we are attracted to because we see ourselves heading in the same direction or life path. They provide an embodied vision of our own future that we can aim towards.
Personal Mentors: Those we seek out for advice and discussion of life dreams and goals, more personal than professional, and the strategies we can use to get there.
Career Mentors: Those who engage with us for career development and decisions.
Catalysts: By their words or actions, catalysts motivate us to shift course, rethink commitments, break a habit or make some other dramatic change.

Any of these may never know the power of their influence, and often we don’t even know how influential someone has been until years later.

Anna McGuiness may have been my first mentor, although I didn’t realize this until I read Edelman’s book. She was old when I knew her, and I was just a kid, maybe ten or twelve years old. I was already a voracious reader and she was a retired teacher two houses away with a wonderful library dispersed through every room of her stone house. My mother wisely sent me often to Mrs. McGuiness on neighborly errands which would stretch to hours as I browsed among the books, plunked at the piano, and had a cup of tea or cocoa at her kitchen table. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I felt like her equal, like we really connected. She loaned me Frank Baum’s Oz books, all of them, one at a time. She encouraged my mind to follow its inclination in many directions and not to limit myself. After Mrs. McGuiness moved away, I don’t know if I had a mentor again for many, many years. I made many important decisions alone and by default, like choosing a college by finding the catalog a classmate abandoned on the windowsill in math class.

Mary Bartolone was a role model. She was herself an Italian-American with a traditional family, like me. She still lived at home with her parents when she first came into my life as a young English teacher when I was in seventh grade. To the dismay of my siblings, I brought her home to dinner to meet our parents. I could see myself following in her footsteps—here is how an Italian girl can go to college and become a teacher. The women in my family had worked in the garment industry in New York. Miss Bartolone was similar enough, but different, too. I could imagine my future by learning about her life.

Joette Warren was a factor in many life changes as my therapist, but I still recall four words she said that catapulted me into immediate action. I had applied and been accepted into graduate school at Fordham University. I was thinking of delaying matriculation for another year; the obstacles just felt so overwhelming for a married woman with two children living in upstate New York. One day she said to me, “It is too late,” meaning that I could not, even if I wanted to, matriculate that fall. “Too late!!??” I remember the shouting inside my head at those words! I mobilized all my skills and friends and, within days, managed to activate my matriculation, secure a leave of absence from my teaching job, and make feasible travel arrangements. It surprised me that all fell into place once I over came inertia because of the right catalyst.

I was very fortunate during my career to have the opportunity to be mentored by Darrell G. Kirch, M.D. during a fellowship year at the Penn State College of Medicine and Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. A good mentor, like Dr. Kirch, invites participation in his or her thought processes, includes you at meetings where strategy is debated among equals, and nudges you out of the protégé “nest” into real responsibility. He would say, “Go and meet all these people and then let’s talk about your sense of what we can do in this situation.” I learned the most when he turned problems back to stakeholders for a solution.

Marion Wright Edelman reminded me also to count friends and family in my list of “natural daily mentors.” Mother, Father, siblings, cousins, dear friends who get wiser year after year, and my husband, Vincent, who taught me (among many other things) to consider whether “better is the enemy of the good,” and even better than this, to enjoy a “both/and” approach to life.

As I sit writing this in the public library, I glance up to my right and see a poster for a mentoring program sponsored by the American Association of University Women. Sometimes it is crystal clear when we are entering a mentoring relationship as the mentor or as the protégé. The rest of the time, we may search for the seeds of our achieved dreams and know, that in those moments, we were in the presence of influential role models, catalysts, and mentors.

For your writing:
Identify a mentor, a role model, and a catalyst in your life and write about how each one influenced you.

Quotation for Percolation:
“Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us-and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning.”
Louisa May Alcott