Update on My Unleash Your Voice Experience

Last month we had Kathy Mellor come to our neck of the woods and train us in speech and debate. Here is her website so that you can see more details about her program. http://www.unleashingyourvoice.com/ The first day, she worked directly with the youth, and the second day she worked with the Mentor Moms. We had around 14 youth and 5 moms participate. (Dads could have come, but we didn't have any attend this time.) I learned a lot from the two days, and we will be integrating speech and debate into the upcoming year for our scholars.

One of the exciting things to see was Kathy's mentoring style and perspective, and I feel like I took away some great things from her. Kathy also brought her daughter to facilitate the program with her, and together they made a nice team. In fact, one of the things they had the Mentor Moms do was to practice tandem speeches. Working with another person to create a speech and present it was a great learning experience. One of the best things about the weekend was that we were able to get lots of hands on practice, both the youth and the Mentor Moms. 

My favorite take-away from the weekend was how both Kathy and her daughter offered feedback to the youth and Mentor Moms by first checking in and asking if we were ready and willing to have feedback. It is such a simple, but effective skill because sometimes a youth (or any of us really) is actually not able to recieve any feedback. By asking the question, it allows the person recieving feedback to either say no thank you or to prepare themself for hearing what they could improve. I recognized that this is a skill I would like to add to my repertoire and work on. 

If you have the opportunity to attend an Unleash Your Voice program by Kathy Mellor, I would highly recommend it.