Mentors Hold Up A Mirror and Lift Our Gaze So We Can See More Clearly
UNC’s Friday Conference Center
I want to tell you about a recent experience where the past and present collided and flooded me with gratitude.
It was an unexpected reminder of where I have been, how much I have changed, and the people that spoke the truth to me. This truth has echoed and has influenced the type of mentor I am to my students.
March 22, 2023, at 9 am I walked into the Friday Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Now an Assistant Professor at the Duke Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, I was there to record the video I described in my last post IDD, Dismantling Oppression, and Why This Takes All of Us. But, as I walked into the front doors of the Friday Center, past memories flooded my mind of walking through those doors and being in these walls.
One cool morning in November 2010, I walked into Friday Center for the well attended UNC School of Medicine The Mind-Body Solution 2010 Conference on Women’s Mental Health and Wellness. It would be a full day of talks on important topics including eating disorders to be given by national and international experts. We were committed to helping primary care providers and specialists in the community provide high value evidence-based care so eating disorders could be identified and addressed earlier so hopefully higher levels of care at UNC and other centers could be prevented.
But…
I was a listed speaker too. This was to be my first professional presentation as a nurse practitioner.
My mentor Dr. Maria La Via and I were co-presenting “Medical Management of Long-Standing Eating Disorders in Primary Care” in Grumman Auditorium.
Just under a year before, in 2009, I had started my first nurse practitioner job as UNC faculty within the UNC Center for Excellence for Eating Disorders (formerly known as the UNC Eating Disorders Program). My clinical practice included providing medical and psychiatric services for patients who needed care for complex eating disorder conditions in the inpatient unit, partial hospitalization program, through research, and outpatient.
I recognized this work was important and there were more patients needing care than there were centers and providers to do the work. I took this work very seriously as I saw incredible suffering and seeing the mental health and food-related battles people were facing, which are serious and life-threatening. I had learned a LOT since starting this role. I still had a LOT to learn.
I felt unprepared when Dr. Cynthia Bulik, PhD invited me to co-present this lecture with my other mentor Dr. Maria La Via, MD. To put this into perspective, they are both nationally and internationally recognized eating disorder experts. If you have not heard of them, look them up. And know that if you or one of your loved ones have received eating disorder treatment it is very likely that they benefited from the work Drs. Bulik and La Via have done so through their research and clinical practice improvement efforts.
I made excuses —
“I’m still new”, “I don’t know enough yet”.
I was confident I was not an expert by anyone’s definition and certainly including my own.
But, I remember how Dr. Bulik responded. She said —
“You are ready. You know more than everyone that will be sitting in those seats. They will be there to hear and learn from you. Remember that”.
She assured me that I was ready and by the time the presentation came I would feel prepared. Not surprisingly she was right.
But I needed to hear her words. I needed that invitation and the scaffolding she and Dr. La Via provided me to gain expertise… This gave me the opportunity to further develop my expertise and begin to see myself as having expertise.
It is critical that we surround ourselves with mentors that we can trust and that help us lift our gaze. Mentors help us look beyond what we currently see as our limitations or those limitations placed on us by external factors. They hold up a figurative mirror for us so that we can see what they see. The parts of us we have not seen or dismissed and the potential of what is ahead if we will just take the next step… no matter how shaky it seems.
I have been fortunate to have many great mentors not just professionally but also personally. I hope you have some in your life.
I can think of many reasons that it is critical to have a mentor but here four that Drs. Bulik and La Via showed me. These are the reasons that flooded my mind as I again entered the halls of UNC’s Friday Center.
Mentors are valuable because:
#1 Mentors remind you how far you have come.
A good mentor does not let you become overwhelmed by focusing on what you do not know. They remind you how far you have come. They remind you what they see in you and give you opportunities to see your growth in new ways.
#2 Mentors don’t let you avoid opportunities for growth.
They don’t let you avoid the discomfort of doing something you don't “feel ready for”. Frankly, do we ever feel “ready”? We will always feel like we need to know more, prepare more, have more time, etc. At least this is my experience. However, an effective mentor recognizes this as resistance and doesn’t let us avoid experiences that are going to be the exact things we need to help us get to that next level.
Dr. Bulik knew that giving this presentation would be a way for me to further affirm what I knew. It would help me synthesize this information for an engaged audience, and I would have a new way I could see the impact of my work. By contributing to increased awareness of evidence-based medical care of patients with eating disorders, it would be worth the discomfort and the risk.
Her words have echoed in my mind many times since 2010. “You are ready. You know more than everyone that will be sitting in those seats. They will be there to hear and learn from you. Remember that”. These are words I remind myself of. These are words I have said verbatim to my mentees. Our words matter and they shape our identity and those of others as well.
#3 Mentors position us for success.
Dr. Bulik was also strategic by inviting me to do this presentation alongside my primary mentor Dr. Maria La Via. I had the opportunity to work alongside her to prepare this and witness it coming together. I didn’t have to “go it alone” the first time. But it was important that I did it and that I had sections that I led.
#4 Mentors inspire us to push further than we would on our own.
This early exposure into what it meant to generate research and evidence to inform clinical care, to build a center committed to excellence, and to be leaders in the field of psychiatry left an impact on me. I see now it was one of the first times I could see how these puzzle pieces fit and how critical it was to make a difference in the lives of people needing this care. I saw how generating research evidence which then informs clinical practice and health policy was critical to achieving its intended goal and fully realized impact.
So, in 2023, I walked into the Friday Center, now an expert in intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). I’m still a nurse practitioner, but now also a researcher, and leading research studies and interventions that are and will continue to change practice. I am now giving talks to national and international audiences. Part of me still doesn’t believe it and the responsibility of it keeps me humble (and often angsty!).
I still get nervous. But I am continuing to remind myself that getting the nerves to go away is not the work… it probably is not even possible. Showing up is the work… and it is required. Doing the next right thing, no matter how small and how shaky the step, matters more than we even know. And maybe it
Mentors lift our gaze.
Figuratively speaking, they also hold up a mirror for us to see ourselves more clearly. They point out what we may have missed, dismissed, or secretly wondered about but haven’t had the confidence or direction to know what to do next.
How have mentors held up a mirror for you to see the potential you had not seen in yourself?
As you reflect on the mentors you have had:
what made them good mentors?
what about their mentorship did you take forward with you?
Isn’t it amazing how when others hold up a mirror for us to more accurately see ourselves, we can in turn do that for the next person?
