Category: Mentorship Journal

I am trying to compose myself after last night, which I apologize for. A lot of people are having similar experiences with everything going on in general, I sympathize with them and firmly believe that we will get through it all one way or another. With that out of the way, I have finished finding contact information on the various national governing bodies for the U.S. Olympic team. Those organizations make it very simple by having e-mail addresses readily available for anyone who wishes to reach out to them. Some just publish a general mailbox like info@briansiguenza.com (that is an example, not a real e-mail address, if you try to send a message there it will come back as undeliverable). However, most will have the address for each staff person, all the way up to the executive director.

The same cannot be said for the major collegiate conferences, which I have moved on to. Information for staff at your Power Five institutions is by and large restricted. I have a pretty good idea of why that is: sports fans are known to be a very vocal bunch, especially when they do not like how things are being run. Case in point, Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren drew the ire of fans when initially announcing that this football season would be placed on hold due to the pandemic (Higgins & Bachman, 2020). The decision has since been rescinded, and Big Ten teams will take the field this coming weekend. It would be extremely difficult for commissioners to communicate with who they need to if their mailbox is flooded with angry messages, so it makes sense that the conference would not make that information public.

Reference

Higgins, L., & Bachman, R. (2020, September 17). The Big Ten is tough. Just ask Kevin Warren. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-ten-footballs-new-leader-rides-out-firestorm-11600344000

It was going pretty good for a Monday. I managed to squeeze in an unusual weekday afternoon Chiefs victory, then went through more of the contacts at the various governing bodies for the U.S. Olympic team that we would use for Life After the Games. I was on a roll there for a little bit. Then I became extremely distracted by something. Not the other Monday night game, I did not see any of that. Instead, it was a personal matter. I tend to share a lot on here about my experience and I try to be very authentic in my approach. Sometimes I worry that I am a little too authentic and share things I should not. All of this is part of the process I am going through, however.

For a moment, I thought that maybe I have been trying to take on too much at one time between a mentorship, my full-time job, and the pandemic. The thing is that I have been able to balance work and school for a good three years, so I think it might be jitters over being so close to the end and thinking about what happens next. I know I should be thinking about the here and now and not trying to get too far ahead of myself but it is very difficult to do when you are seven weeks out from your MBA and working at getting those last hours in. Sorry that I could not be more upbeat tonight, I just had a lot to get off my chest there.

On this Sunday, I put the finishing touches on my report for the Life After the Games course and sent that on. In theory, I had completed it last night but I wanted to give extra thought to the question that had been posed about how sports fit into the curriculum. The name of the course is Life After the Games, so there needs to be some sort of a connection to competitive sport and as I determined previously, there is with the content we are presenting. With two weeks to go before the soft launch of the product, my part of the testing stage is finished. Next came some updates to the brochure based on new developments. It did not take nearly as long as I thought it would, but I have not shared it either. There is some biographical information I am waiting for with our new spokesperson before I do that.

Those items taken care of, I moved on to another task: compiling contacts from the associations that make up the United States Olympic Team. You would think that Team USA was just one big happy family like your favorite NFL or college team but in reality, each of the sports it competes in is overseen by a governing body. In some instances, there is one organization with jurisdiction over a sport, and the Paralympic version of that sport is assumed by another. The Team USA website lists dozens of sports in which it has athletes, so many that it would probably make sense for a separate entity to run each one.

Tonight I am finishing up with my review of Life After the Games. The length of the course was pretty much the same as last time, approximately 6.5 hours, so it can be completed in roughly one business day or if the student takes their time like I tried to, about one week. The next step for me will be to go back through the notes I had written and transcribe them so that they make sense to Dr. Tiell. I also need to answer whether Life After the Games has enough of a sports theme to it. I would say that it does, the focus has always been to prepare athletes to transition from competitive sport to a business career and the course meets that focus as it is.

Looking back at my time log, Life After the Games has practically dominated the entire month of October, so it is going to be a little weird to shift over to another task after two weeks of being in the course. My philosophy right now is to take everything one day at a time, and even one thing at a time. I am in a rush, but not that big of a rush to accomplish all that is left to be done. If I start to think about too much at one time, I will become frustrated. Spending two hours a night on these projects seems to be working so far, thus I can move on to the next priority tomorrow.

It is a quiet Friday evening, just me and Life After the Games on Moodle. I am going through all the exercises again to see if my answers have changed any from the first time I took it. Unfortunately, what I found is that the playbook needs to be downloaded onto the student’s hard drive, otherwise the information will not save. I have made a note of that and will share once done with the whole review (or I guess I am sharing it right now too, just unofficially). The one thing I did notice was different is that I scored as an INFJ on the personality assessment this time, which means Introverted, Sensing, Feeling, Judging. That is a lot more accurate than Extroverted, I must admit, and it must just have been how I answered the questions both times. It is pretty strange.

I also received some great news via WhatsApp earlier today, the spokesperson the ICC has always wanted is on board. That means I will be updating our collateral to include that information. I just need to finish up with the course review before I handle those changes. Dr. Tiell also shared a flyer that Tiffin created for Life After the Games, so I took a brief look at that as well. Things are really starting to come together for this initiative and it is great to see and have a role in that. Cannot fully celebrate just yet, however, because plenty still needs to be accomplished in a short amount of time.

I understand that there was a lot to choose from on television this evening: the President on one network, his challenger on another, and the Major League Baseball playoffs on yet another. I skipped all three in favor of Life After the Games. I received the word during our Thursday meeting that we will be soft-launching the product at the beginning of next month, with a full rollout in January 2021. It is thus imperative that I finish my review by the end of this week, that is the deadline that I have given myself. We have also identified other items that we will need to do between now and December, in reality. These include gathering contacts in the sports industry to who we should market the product.

We will also need to modify the brochure for information that has changed since we finished it and take a closer look at the ICC website for changes there. Suddenly there is a lot to keep me busy for the next week, so I feel a lot better about filling two hours a night with projects, perhaps even longer. The biggest thing now is going to be prioritizing each of these tasks and making sure that I do not stretch myself too thin. The work must get completed in a timely fashion, but I also have to be sure I take a little time out for myself to run errands if I need to or watch that football game. If I do not, then I will drag myself down and nobody wants that. I think I have a pretty good plan though to keep that from occurring.

I have sort of been stuck at just over 104 hours of performing all the tasks that I have documented in this journal. While that is great, it is still a long way from the 200 I need. So today, I made a conscious decision: the thirty minutes here and one hour there were no longer going to suffice. At fifty-four days to go before the mentorship ends, I need an average of 1.77 hours per day, which I might as well round up to an even two. The advantage I have is that there is nothing to distract me from accomplishing this outside of my full-time job. Thanks to COVID, the only places I am going to are work and the store, and I do not anticipate any trips far from home in the next seven weeks.

Additionally, after three years and several classes, this is the only thing left standing between me and a Master of Business Administration. Other than a few assignments for the mentorship course, I do not have any other projects to take me away from completing the necessary hours. In other words, I can devote my evenings entirely to the International Cultural Consortium. My first order of business under this new plan was to go through the Life After the Games course: again. There have been some edits made to the content, which Tiffin has placed on the Moodle platform it uses for distance learning. The objective is essentially the same as it was the first time, check for any abnormalities in the presentation. I am back in the game and enjoying it.

I am spending a few minutes of this Saturday evening looking back through the Life After the Games course itself, collecting all the notes I had written about what I noticed, and sharing the assessment with Dr. Tiell, Liston, Josh, and Ron Lonzo. In my e-mail, I mention what an honor it truly was to be the first to try out the product and that it took me over six hours to complete on the first go-round. None of my notes indicate any errors in spelling, just other typographical errors and minor inconsistencies. I cannot begin to imagine what goes into planning and writing a course. I got the easy part, reading through the material and all. It had to have taken a lot longer than six hours to build.

There has been some other behind the scenes stuff going on with Life After the Games. Liston is having high-level conversations with someone in the Olympic community about coming on as our spokesperson. It is neat to have an insider’s knowledge of what is happening with this project. Through all the excitement, of course, I have to be very careful about what I disclose to the public, but I feel that years of experience in journalism and communications have prepared me for such an awesome responsibility. That is what’s so great about smaller operations like the ICC and my current employer, you tend to know a lot more. In fact, I know we have come a long way just from May when I began this mentorship and we are about to go even further.

On this Friday evening, I am working on the penultimate unit of Life After the Games. If you look at the overview of the program over on the ICC website, it gives you a better idea of what kind of material you can expect in that section and all the sections. Unit 8, in particular, is about successful interviewing, basically things you should and should not do when going to an interview. It seems like common sense, but you would be surprised. A couple of weeks ago, I was in Dr. Tiell’s “Go Time” webinar where she spoke with the man who heads up planning for the Super Bowl and he recalled a group of students who showed up to last year’s event dressed in athletic shorts. Needless to say, he was not impressed in the least with them (D. Davis, personal communication, Sept. 26, 2020).

This is a shorter unit than most of the others and I have been reviewing one per day where I can. I suspect that I will have to consistently spend more than forty-five minutes a night on a project to get the 200 hours necessary to complete this mentorship. It has been difficult with Liston so busy on the campaign trail, likely so until Election Day in just over three weeks. By the time that is over, the seven-week mentorship course will be halfway finished, so I am starting to enter crunch time here and need to plan out how to get these hours in. I say it all the time, it is truly amazing how fast time flies.

After doing minimal work last night, I made sure to really focus on the Life After the Games course this evening. As part of my review, I have gone through each of the exercises in the playbook and given serious consideration to what they are looking for. It would be very tempting to just throw in a bunch of false information just to be finished quicker but I would be doing the ICC a great disservice that way, not to mention myself. The curriculum could be very applicable to me, so I need to put as much effort into the course as we hope the athletes who will take it later on would. Tonight I did the seventh unit of the course, which is about networking.

I do not want to tell you too much more about what is said concerning networking because again, we want people to take the course. It has become clear to me through the content just how important networking is to career advancement. I think it is a combination of both what and who you know. You absolutely still need to have the right skills for the job, but just as companies rely on testimonials from consumers to promote their brand, candidates need to rely on testimonials from those they have worked with to promote their personal brand. Unit 7 does a good job of taking students through the process of reaching out to people in their desired field. If I could offer that as a testimonial on behalf of the ICC, then I would.