7MTJ - 7 Mindset Tips Journal

While keeping the beginner’s mindset, the day will come (or it already did) when you take the responsibility of developing someone on a specific domain, whether it would be at work or in personal life. Here are some of the sentences I constantly repeat to the people I am in charge of, all about the relationship of a trainer and his trainee

Recently, in both my professional life and physical training activities, I had the incredible luck and honor to become in charge of several interns or trainees. Far from being a master, I try to take on the sense of responsibilities to at least act as a correct instructor. Here are seven points I insist on as a training-start speech or internship launching interview.

1. “Track incremental learning”: (Force yourself to) take regular notes of what you learn, even if it looks ridiculously small or if the effort of writing it down largely overweights the likelihood of reading it. Journaling is not only about the written content, it is also a way to keep yourself in the mindset of learning, somehow forcing you to mentalize the workday/training session into lessons.
2. “Commit to…yourself” : Training/Internship objectives are yours, not mine. I am here to help you fulfill your Ulysses pact, that is to say, I will keep you tied to the mast of training/learning every time you lose sight of your objectives and self-control. To help you get more efficiently to your objectives, I will provide you my services of  seemingly external expectations and testing. I may know paths of results which will make you feel consistent in your effort, but what will keep you rolling on these paths is  your growing willpower and commitment to yourself. It is only when you have objectives on your own that we can work on common goals.
3. “It’s going to feel slightly uncomfortable”: As far as I can, I will keep you slightly off your comfort zone, just beyond what you know and what you expect, but close enough not to have you completely lost. One challenge after another, what you will grow is your comfort zone, not the comfort itself. Expect the unknown, therefore, expect the unexpectable.
4. “The experience we live is an exchange”: You learn as an intern/trainee, but I also learn as an instructor. Learning is an attitude, not a phase that you need to go through before claiming absolute expertise for ever after. Feel free to criticize and question, I prefer it to shallow silent and deep imbalance. I will do my best to explain to you why the methods are consistent with the common goals (of the point 2), and if not, then I might be the one changing and learning from you. Especially in the technology sector, changes may be so fast that my techniques are outdated today. Technologies are mortal, just as us, and as our strongest habits. Do not expect absolute truth from me: this is not a task I can perform, I can offer you guidance to consolate. Therefore, you must also understand the other side of being free to criticisize: the responsibility (towards yourself and the others) to define your own way.
5. “An opportunity to learn…to appreciate”: Mostly, whether as trainee or as intern under my responsibility, you will have to work hard, or at least harder than whatever you knew before (that’s my objective, check point 3). On top of that, reward might be less salient as a big salary or short term easily measurable physical results. Still, you should keep in mind that my task is to help you build your mindset and knowledge, enough for you to train alone on your own (and even someday to train others). Of course, I know that from a very external (not counting the mindset part) point of view, you are probably below average bargain on “the market”. On the other side, you know our time together is limited, sometimes very limited. Think of it as the limited time under which you will learn to love life for itself, and learn to appreciate what you have instead of being obsessed by what you appreciate.
6. “Change happens beyond the training grounds/company”: If you put a glass bowl on top of a flower, for sure you can admire it from outside, but you will lose its perfume, and also priving it from the necessary carbon dioxide. Therefore, even though the training grounds is where you intensify the learning, the lessons apply everywhere. Open the positive learnings to the rest of your life, so that it can spread like a flower’s perfume, and let the flower live. Else, containing what you learnt to the training grounds is only going to dissipate it slowly. Please note that the word lesson encompasses both spreading positive things and containing the negative ones. If you do not keep a fire out of oxygen, it will spread on the surrounding fuel. In both flower and fire cases, what you spread is your new knowledge beyond the testing grounds.
7. “Thank you for the meaning”: Last but definitely not least, and even probably the most important (at least for me), I thank you for the meaning you give me through learning (or reacting). Everytime you learn something from me, it gives an additional meaning to my own hours of toil and training. I am definitely not here to show off, I am partly here to show you what worked and did not work for me (and this distinction can be questionned when applied to you). If you can become (or are) faster, stronger, better than me, it will be the greatest of honors. While you have the satisfaction of taking, I get the joy of giving. Somehow, you are giving me the gift of receiving, like when you eat the meal that someone cooked for you with efforts.

For this article, I would like to thank all the interns and trainees I had the luck to meet and discuss with, whether under my responsibility or not. Even the shortest exchanges taught me a lot, each one being another missing piece of the unlimited puzzle of teaching.

Have a smiling day !