20 - Utilizing Mindfulness Strategies in Mentoring and Coaching Socially Vulnerable Youth

Summary

This chapter has a twofold objective: (1) to illustrate the role that mindfulness-based approaches can play in mentoring/coaching socially vulnerable youth and (2) to demonstrate how mindfulness-related concepts can assist mentor/coaches in gaining insight about themselves and maintaining a balanced relationship with such environments, specifically when working with youth. Though the impact of mindfulness-based approaches within various elite performance realms has been thoroughly covered in this book, this chapter offers application to socially vulnerable youth populations. We posit that mindfulness-based approaches and mindfulness-related concepts can be instrumental in shaping the interactions that define the nature of the relationships that develop between mentor/coaches and the youth they serve. Mentor/coaches are conceptualized as those who prioritize and foster the development of an accepting and collaborative relationship between the youth and coach (McCarthy, 2012). According to Karcher and Nukkala (2010), despite the different ways of achieving these relationships, it is these sorts of relationships that have the potential to be transformational. Being a mentor/coach then, is a function of the type of relationship being cultivated with the athlete or participant in a program. So a mentor/coach approach can be applied to working with socially vulnerable youth in a sport-based youth development program, but also such an approach, we argue, can be utilized in a variety of other sport settings.

While it is unlikely that coaches and mentors will suddenly begin to adopt meditative practices in any kind of wholesale or even holistic way, in this chapter we suggest that there is still great potential benefit to be derived from strategies and concepts that come from the Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions and the more recently acknowledged “science” of mindfulness; throughout this chapter, we will consider how to apply such ideas of mindfulness to the role of mentor/coaches who work with socially vulnerable youth.

While purists might argue that choosing select ideas from an entire spiritual tradition lacks a sincerity and thoroughness, we hold that even small steps toward these approaches offer potential benefits to both youth and the mentor/coaches who attempt to serve them. Ordained Tibetan monk and author Alan Wallace, who studied in the monastery overseen by his holiness, the Dalai Lama, is one of the foremost scholars of translation of Tibetan and other spiritual texts that explore mindfulness.