Mentors: How to help and be helped

Here are some notes I took from Russel Brand's book, "Mentors: How to help and be helped."

Addicts are not enslaved by drugs. Drugs serve as an escape from the false ideals of a materialistic society.

Mentorship Programs

All successful systems/programs of mentorship have these things in common:

Mentor
Mentee
Method
Institute

Observe those around you

Note the people around you - Do they want you to grow, or do they want you to stagnate and diminish. Observe them. Who do they want you to be? You may not need to eliminate them from your life, but you will need to renegotiate.

Gratitude

Gratitude of others is a good way to build self esteem. If you regularly help others, the tendency to think of yourself as worthless or not good enough diminishes.

Intention and Attention.

Where your attention goes, so shall you become. As you intend to be, so shall you be.

12 Step Program

We know these programs work - for alcoholism, overeating, and more! Going through the steps is a humbling but uplifting process.

We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable. Admit you have a problem
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Believe in the possibility of change
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. Ask for help and follow suggestions
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

System of prayer

Here is a system of prayer, presented in the book:

Gratitude - Be thankful and list them
Courage - Ask for courage and think where you will need to apply it
Healing - Pray for the healing of people who need it
Synchronicity - Ask to see the signs and guidance of the unseen world - look for coincidences
Alignment - Be in alignment with the greater will - have purpose

My distractions