Mentoring

I’m speaking at a panel tonight at the Marymount Manhattan College’s Psychology Alumni Society on Women and Holistic Leadership.  The topic is Mentoring. I’m curious to see what I learn, and in the interim, here some thoughts on the topic. 

 

I’ve met some pretty fantastic people, men and women, both in my personal and professional lives. Some I only realized later had been mentors; some were clearly in a mentor role to me from the start. I thrive to emulate what I admire or value in a mentor the most and try to apply it to my own live where possible. I feel however, being “infatuated” with a person and wanting to be just like your mentor, no questions asked, is not a mentor relationship, that’s just being a groupie or member of a fan club.

Identity and the Other – Synopsis

Here the (current) Synopsis for my next film Identity and the Other:

 

How Swiss are Muslims living in Switzerland, how Swiss do they want to be and who decides if they are Swiss enough?

 

Identity and the Other explores the lives of several 2^nd generation, millennial, Muslim immigrants, which represent a section of a culturally, religiously and ethnically diverse Switzerland many Swiss feel uneasy about.

Megatrends

I came across megatrends repeatedly doing research for my next documentary Identity and the Other and decided to do a bit of further digging. I found different definitions for different countries and cultures, no surprise there. The following seemed the most comprehensive. 

 

Megatrends are defined as forces (i.e. trends) affecting all aspects of our lives over a long period of time. Factors are:

Violence

I just got home from an extended stay in my native Switzerland and came back to Harlem New York a week ago to a flurry of Google-Group messages from my building about a recent killing on our block and the aftermath thereof. Last night, a few minutes after I got home and after a day of seemingly peaceful block party a man got stabbed and bled to death in front of our building – it was 8 PM.

Violence is obviously something that finds you everywhere but we prefer to see it on the screen, not in front of our own houses or towards our loved ones and ourselves.

Violence perpetuates violence. But where does violence come from? Violence is a preemptive strike against fear. Fear of what? Fear of being ‘dissed’, or fear of being violated first; a verbal menace getting to the point where action needs to be taken to not lose face; a situation seemingly out of control being controlled by violence – on the street, in war, at home.

America has a huge tolerance for violence on the screen. I hear mothers tell me that they’d rather have their children see violence in movies, TV shows and video games than a naked body or an embrace. I could not disagree more.

Violence perpetuates violence. If children play violent games and watch overly violent shows that perpetuate violence as cool – no wonder there is such a lack of respect for other’s wellbeing. Especially if there is no parental guidance to make sure children understand what is real and what is not, and what the consequences of their (potentially) violent actions are.

I’d rather have children (and I have none) see a naked breast and an embrace on TV than violence.

The Cyber-Gap

The internet has opened up doors to unimaginable wealth of information, education and commerce opportunities; it has enabled emerging pro-democracy movements in Egypt and Algiers, has empowered dissidents around the world and is closing geographical and physical gaps around the world.

The Internet is hands-down a great enabler. At the same time the gap between educated and under-educated, poor and rich, rural and urban, empowered and disenfranchised is growing – rapidly.

How are young people around the world going to engage when they have no internet access? No access to on-line education, commerce, potential jobs and clients, information, social exchange, passing of ideas, or civic engagement? The more our world moves onto the internet the wider the gaps becomes between the haves and have not’s of internet access and economic power. This is also a problem for large patches of rural areas in the United States.

There are huge patches of land, some spanning entire states with a few urban exceptions with no cell phone and internet access through wireless towers, cable or T1 lines. In the US Satellite dishes are the only solution for those remote areas, if they want internet access. Satellites are expensive to install and their monthly fees can be too much of a burden for a house hold budget.

If we want to keep up economically with the rest of the world (Asia foremost and Europe too) we have to make sure that all areas of the United States have access to broadband internet. The lost potential of talent is too great to ignore.