Having just completed a year of mentoring 15 year old Georgina*, Cynthia Thompson, a journalist and Urban Synergy mentor says she has enjoyed the challenge of mentoring her first mentee. We caught up with Cynthia to find out what she thought of Georgina’s progress since the mentoring relationship started.
“Georgina is a wonderful young lady who has lots of potential and it’s been fantastic to watch her progress over the past year. We’ve worked hard on building her confidence and I’ve found specific things for her to help boost the confidence that she had lacked initially. For instance, I wanted to give her the experience of speaking publicly in front of people.”
“Georgina can be quite shy and we worked on this for several weeks but she really rose to the challenge by delivering an impressive speech about mentoring at Glaziers Hall in front of 200 members. She’s proved to herself that she can do anything she puts her mind to if she has a positive mental attitude. It takes guts to speak in front of people and hats off to her – she did it so well!”
Georgina has a knack for poetry and loves reading. “One of the reasons that Georgina and I got on so well is that we both love words. I’m a journalist and she’s a naturally gifted wordsmith. She entered a poetry competition and successfully got her poem through to the final stage. Her poem was then performed at the Urban Music Awards at the O2. I’m really proud of her for pursuing that dream and for sharing her talent with others.”
Summing up her mentoring experience, Cynthia said: “We’ve had some tough sessions but Georgina has been very mature about identifying her weaknesses and has taken positive action to overcome them. I’ve really enjoyed mentoring her this year – she’s been great and I look forward to tracking her progress as she is certainly on the path to success.”
*Name has been changed.
Edited by Claudia McKenzie, Urban Synergy