Skills vs Mentor....

I recently noticed that my skills in martial art is regressing at an exponential factor. Of course, I mean, I don't train or practice anymore, I only teach that one Friday night class, I should be thankful that I can still throw a high kick. To stop myself from growing into a useless inactive fat blob, I started looking for a new Dojo to train, and this time, I decided to train in the most traditional art of Goju Ryu Karate (剛柔流空手道), the training was great, I am slowly gaining back my "instinct" of a martial artist, my speed and strength improved dramatically, which is exactly what I was looking for, so its great.

The Sensei is a middle age man who is passionate about Karate, he is fast and strong. The one thing I like about this dojo is that he use a more traditional way to train us, before and after each class, he make a small speech, something inspirational, related to either our training or day to day lives, how we balance ourselves in Karate to ensure we have a good balance of techniques and everything, and how that related to real life. Just a great man to talk to.

Hi inspirational lecture got me thinking about a simple thing in life, which is still related to human evolution.

We learn from our experience, surrounding, atmosphere and people around us. That is how we grow. People around us influence us base on his/her experience, their current knowledge, which was a result of their own evolution from the fore-mention events. Experience really would also house the interaction with a third party, but it also has to take the experience of the interaction involved.

We evolve to the person that train us, this is how our life work. For the most part we have good enough judgement to determine what is right and what is wrong, but for area where we lack experience, we tend to take suggestions from our Mentor. Assuming that our mentors have more experience, we usually follow their foot step when it comes to matter that we think they did well on.

Does that mean we grow to be like our mentor? In a way, it does. There will always be a bit of change, which is a result of your own personality and character, as well as a bit from your own experience, and other external factors/limitation.

So, in general, what I am trying to say is that, your mentor, or leader, is the one person that potentially engineer your survival or death.

At work, it is the same thing. In an organization, your boss assume the role as your mentor, while the company expectation is that you are the mentor of your direct reports. As a result, one's competency has a direct downstream effect toward his/her staff

Working with a lousy manager/lead/mentor is unhealthy. It usually will toss and smash your sense of accomplishment towards a brick wall. You can usually identify these kind of people by a certain generalized trait:

- He or she doesn't like to get involve in anything you are doing, but will react when people ask question about your work
- They will not ever read or response to your email, when they do, its usually 6 months later
- They are usually not in the office at an off site meeting that you didn't know the location to
- Their planning usually conflicts with previous plan made by her
- They will give you conflicting direction to what was previously planned, and be really upset at you during the course of discussion of why you steered off planned
- They won't tell you what their expectations are, and how to achieve it, its usually "Do this and figure the rest"
- You can catch them socializing for the most part if they do show up at work
- They like to use multiple big words in a sentence that combine to mean nothing
- They blame you for things that she told you wrong

Could you imagine, if you are to follow the foot step of a boss like that, what will that turn you to???