A Conversation with Jamie Bautista: Tips for Mentors

This is part 3 of my conversation with Jamie Bautista which is also the last of this series. Here, he shares five tips for mentors, supervisors and teachers of young people. These are the links to Part 1: Art is Creating an Emotional Response and Part 2: Art as Force for Good.

What are your five tips for mentors who are mentoring young people (context is the creative industry but you can also add something for business people)?

My first tip would be to have the mentoring be framed as peer mentoring. I feel it’s important to let young people know that even older folks like me have a lot to learn from them, and that a mentorship benefits both parties. When I mentored Kat, while she learned from me writing and literature techniques, I learned more about how her generation thinks and what resonates with them. That is what was wonderful about our process for Triggered where both the mentors and mentees had to create outputs. I would ask her advice in my own creative choices, which I felt built her confidence and also helped her to see my own creative process without me pushing it on her. It also made the relationship feel more like one of mutual respect.

 Another tip would be for a mentor to spend more time listening and finding out what is important to their mentee. When Kat and I would meet up for our mentoring sessions, maybe half the time is us just chatting about our lives and getting to know each other. But in the process of her ranting to me about teachers and problems in class, I would learn about her fears about writing, why she found it intimidating, and what aspects of storytelling she found interesting. I would learn about her work habits and that helped me come up with activities and advice that could directly address those specific issues. One example was that she mentioned she was afraid of writing because some of her other teachers always put her writing down. So I made it a point to give more positive feedback and I would often share how even I often got criticized and was hard on my own work, but it was OK and that I still found ways to power through. By listening and learning more about a mentee, it also becomes easier to find activities that encourage them to find solutions and learn things on their own.

 My third tip is to find ways to change the way young people see the creative process (or even a business process). For many people, a lot of the slog of doing creative work or even running a business become evident after one starts. The excitement of doing something “creative” wears off and that’s when procrastination sets in. The challenge is to find ways that make the process seem fun again by finding new ways for a mentee to see a problem. In Kat’s case, she had a hard time visualizing the setting of her story and how her characters would move logically around the scene. So I proposed we actually draw a map of the setting and since her story was about a pair of assassins, we would plan out the assassination on the map as if we were the characters. It both helped make her story clearer in her mind and it was a novel and fun way to go about writing by pretending to be the characters themselves plotting a crime. For business, imagine making accounting or planning operations more fun by framing them in a different way. Then even entrepreneurship becomes creative (which it actually is).

L-R: Jan Ong, Patricia Narvasa, Samantha Chiu, and Amiel Deuna

Tip number four is give regular feedback and monitor constantly. Not only does this make sure a mentee is constantly doing the work and thus is sharpening their skills, it also is a way of expressing genuine care. I’ve had students who were surprised by how detailed my feedback was and how quickly I would give it since they said it showed that their work seemed valuable to me since I set aside time to check it. On the flip side, I’ve had students also comment how they felt their work seemed unimportant when I took too long to give feedback. Kat and I would schedule regular meet-ups and promise to send drafts to each other at regular intervals, which both kept us working but also kept our mentoring relationship consistent and strong.

Finally, my last tip is to have fun and always make clear what your shared purpose is. No matter what the expected output is for a mentorship (for Triggered of course it was stories that had to be good enough for publishing), the most important outcome are two people who have grown because of the mentorship. The relationship between peer mentors should be fun because it encourages both people to want to learn more. But beyond just enjoying each other’s company, the goal of any mentorship should be to have both parties come out as better people. So learning to enjoy the process and knowing what kind of people all involved want to be has to be clear and shared.

Where to buy Trigerred: TRIGERRED: Creative Responses to the 

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