Teaching our craft to pass it on – a guest post from Pepper Cory

Pepper Cory has a few thoughts of her own following Scott’s post on Monday about mentoring. Follow along below.
Teaching and passing on a craft is a subject we hear a lot about, but often don’t do a lot about. And that’s too bad. When I learn about a quilt shop that doesn’t teach, I am sad to hear that.  Sooner or later, I’ll likely hear that shop’s gone out of business. As with most stores that supply and support arts and crafts, if you don’t teach, you miss your best opportunity for customer service and building customer loyalty. But teaching retail customers aside, in this posting the subject is a special kind of teaching, called mentoring. You may assume you understand what the word ‘mentoring’ means, but truly comprehending the term is worth a little consideration.

The term ‘mentoring’ is grounded in ancient history. The 8th century BC to be exact, when the poet Homer wrote Odyssey, the story of the wandering King Odysseus. When Odysseus leaves home, he entrusts the education and guidance of his son, Telemachus, to his tutor named  Mentor. The word crops up again in Elizabethan English and by the 1700s seems to have become an accepted word in the English language.
I have been lucky in that I have had several mentors in this business. Two older salesmen took me under their wings when I had a shop. They taught me about ordering and looking at the business records of the suppliers I dealt with. A more experienced quilter, in a kind and gentle way, made me realize I needed to expand my sewing skills and from her, I learned to piece curves and bind a double wedding ring quilt with all its weeny points. Another friend, who was a quilt collector, taught me to learn ‘with my hands’ as I felt the surface of a vintage quilt and determined how to recognize its age and origin.

Mentoring is different than simply teaching and also different than mothering–which is where many of us get into trouble when giving/receiving advice. We need more conscious mentoring in this industry. We need mentoring between older shop owners and younger people getting into the business. We need mentoring from shop owners to employees and from older, more experienced teachers, to newer teachers. Along the way, we might even be able to address some fringe issues. For instance, from time to time, you might have witnessed some irritation between traditional quilters and modern, as in MQG, quilters. Respectful mentoring could go a long way to heal that rift.

Once at Quilt Market, I was an uncomfortable observer of a spat between mother-daughter quilt shop owners. Predictably, the mom was saying, “My experience tells me that you ought to…” The girl wasn’t having any of it. She angrily shot back, “I’m so tired of the same old thing!“ This was not a working mentoring relationship. Perhaps the same young woman might have done better with a mentor who had experience but was NOT her mother. Mom might have been able to share words of wisdom (without sarcasm), if her protégé was not her own daughter.  How is the protégé (the person receiving mentoring benefits) described? If there’s a mentor, is there a ‘mentee’? According to some texts, mentee is indeed the right label for the advised person and certainly sounds less pretentious than protégé, so that’s the term I’ll use from now on.

How is the word ‘mentoring’ defined, especially as it relates to our business, in the craft and sewing industry. It literally means being a trusted guide and teacher. After a lot of reading on the subject, here’s an outline of four qualifications:

1) To be a quilt shop mentor, you have to have a mutual relationship with your mentee. A mentor isn’t assigned by a roll of the dice or chance. You may be friends with the family or have mutual interests. In other words, there’s reason and a history to the relationship. Both people involved must recognize, accept and want the relationship. You can’t hit someone over the head with your advice, even if you think it’s golden.

2) The relationship has needs to have respect on both sides. Some ground rules for an interchange between a mentor and a mentee are useful. These might include: meeting at a regular time and when talking also pausing and taking time to listen. Answering a specific question from a mentee rather than holding forth generally on a subject is a mentor’s task.  Both people need to stay focused on what the relationship’s about. Here’s what a mentor-mentee relationship is NOT about: your love life (yours or hers), money woes, political leanings and husbands/kids (yours or hers). Here are some subjects worth exploring: factual sharing of experience dealing with vendors, customer relations, how to deal with employees and setting up store policies.

3) It’s a good idea to mutually set a time limit on the mentor/mentee relationship, as in “Let’s revisit the subject of our relationship in six months and see if it’s worthwhile to us.” Just like completing a quilt needs a deadline, so too does the mentoring process need a time limit.

4) Discuss the issue of boundaries before getting started. Boundaries are for the good of your own relationship (“No, it’s not OK to text me after 11 PM at night-in fact I don’t text so let’s meet in person-“).  Above all, confidentiality ought to be sacred in a mentoring relationship or there’s no trust.

Speaking honestly, boundaries, or lack of them, are often at the root of female communication issues. When an older woman gives advice, it’s tempting to fall back into the “Mother says so” mode.  A younger person will likely reply in kid-speak “Don’t tell me what to do!” Very shortly thereafter, neither one is listening!

Every generation must, to some extent, rebel against what the parental generation has done. Consider the Modern Quilt Guild using terms like “not fussy, clean, straight-line quilting and negative space” to describe their quilt aesthetic. Don’t for a minute deny that they aren’t reacting against the every-bell-and-whistle style of some of our most accomplished quilt artists. Beading, trapunto, a riot of print fabric embellished with outrageous feather quilting comes to mind. You would be kidding yourself. But styles can co-exist and thank goodness we have traditional quilting, art quilting and modern quilting all going great guns right now. Finding ways to communicate is essential to the continued growth of this craft. For me, mentoring is an important bridge.
If you’re available to be a mentor, consider what you do best and present that talent as your gift. I’m good at marketing, addressing personal relations issues, teaching others how to teach and encouraging the shy student. I’m NOT good at financial projections, heading up production work or day-to-day shop maintenance. Warning: there will be some bumps along the way. A mentoring-mentee relationship will have its ups and downs. Roll with it—a mentor is as likely to learn from the experience as a mentee. Above all, stay open-minded.

What do you do well that you can pass on to someone just getting into this business? Think about becoming a mentor and experiencing the joy of passing on some of your knowledge to someone younger.