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On February 22, 2020, the SHIELD Mentor Program held the fourth session for the 12-week program, SHIELD Saturday Leadership Academy. The session began with the 20 minutes of yoga led by the instructor, Jennifer Jennette of Grow Yoga Together. In this session the mentees focused on breathing and vision. To help the youth participants understand the importance of having a vision, Jennifer used Michael Phelps as an example. She helped the youth participants imagine what Michael Phelps envisioned before he competed to win the Olympics. She led the youth participants in exercise where she asked each person to close their eyes, think of their goals and make a vision in their mind of what their success looks like. She asked them to think about the ultimate goal and the steps they need to get there. She asked them to think of every detail and how it feels to be that close to what they want to accomplish. They finished the session with stretching and affirmation.
Chris Logan, entrepreneur and President of Square of Truth, LLC., started the presentation by giving the youth participant's the definition of vision. "Vision by definition means a long term strategy for obtaining a goal by linking the present with a better future.", he exclaimed.
Based on his own vision in his career in boxing, he showed the kids a pie chart about what he knows, what he doesn’t know, and things he knows that he doesn’t know. 75% were things you don’t know that you don’t know, 15% were things he knew and 10% were things he doesn’t know. He used this to emphasize how the mentees can set their vision.
Chris then shared stories from his past and growing up in the country and how it related to his vision. Particularly he remembered getting involved in a lot of fights in school. He said that his school was told by the principal that for every day that there was no fight in school they could have a hat day. He said that the entire year, his school only had two hat days. There were fights regularly. That’s when he had a moment where he wanted to change how he lived in life and knew then he wanted to be successful. He knew he wanted to go to college. The path to success had challenges along the way due to his environment.
When he got to high school Chris, decided to change his environment. He was determined that nothing would stop him from success. He spoke about having a good work ethic to become extraordinary. “don’t expect people to understand your grind when they weren’t given your vision” said Logan. Even with a good work ethic, Chris told the mentees that it’s still important to have balance and take care of personal health.
To close out the presentation Chris got everyone involved in an accountability exercise by writing down 5 people in their inner circle. He instructed the youth participants to think about the right people who support their visions. Check out the Facebook Live video to see our mentors sit down to talk to Chris.
After the guest presentation, the mentees and mentors were assigned to their mentoring cluster groups, which they will remain in these groups until the completion of the program. Mentoring clusters are made up of six mentees and two mentors. Each mentoring cluster has returning participants serving as peer mentors to share from a young person's perspective what they gained from participating in the SHIELD Mentor Program.