I am the one who organizes the meetings/brunches for my mentoring group. I used to be very on top of organizing them, but as the years have gone on I have gotten a bit worse at coordinating. Fortunately, the group understands that things come up and that’s why we have stopped doing our brunches every other month and now try to do them 3 or 4 times a year. But I still feel a bit guilty when our brunches are overdue and I haven’t been able to coordinate it.
This time, the brunch would have happened right in the middle of the election, so I knew it was going to have to be pushed back. Everyone else had conflicts in August, so that delay was for the best. When we were trying to figure out what dates would work in September, there was one date that seemed to work for almost all of us. So it was easy to pick which date we would end up meeting. We ended up having 5 out of the 6 people in our group there that day.
We went to our usual brunch place, Rush St., which has been a good place for us to meet over the years. But it is a sports bar/restaurant, and since it is football season there were a lot of people inside watching the game. We had a reservation for the group and they were able to seat us on the patio, so it was much quieter for us. We usually sit outside, so it was also a nice change from our routine and we got to enjoy the nice day we were having.
As our meetings usually go, we all went around and took turns sharing what we had been up to since our last meeting. Since it had been a while, we all had a lot to share. We don’t always share work-related things as the group has become close friends. But a lot of things we shared were about our careers. And as always, I was so inspired hearing what everyone else had been up to. It’s so interesting to be able to watch someone’s career grow over the years and see what is behind the idea of an overnight success story.
When it was my turn, I mainly shared things about the election. Since most of the group are not actors, they weren’t seeing the stories that I had been seeing every day. So I also filled them in on some of the crazy things that happened as well. I think they were all pretty shocked about how things went and the stories that came out. But at least now being past the election things are a bit funnier and not as stressful for me. I also shared about the little things I had been doing for my career, but they all understood that the election dominated my time and I hadn’t had time to do much else.
Even with all the things we had to share among the group, we still had plenty of time to be silly and socialize. And I think we have found a great way to balance out the point of these meetings and making them more of a hangout. Once we finished going over our individual updates, it just naturally turns into a hangout and it’s so nice that we can do that. And sometimes someone will add a career update or ask for advice while we are doing more socializing, but that’s fine. We have reached a comfort level with each other that we don’t have to feel as strict with how our meetings go. When we started out, we also have more people and we had to make sure that the meetings didn’t last for hours. Now with only 6 of us in the group, it’s easier.
We ended up being at brunch for longer than expected, but I think we all missed each other and we wanted to take advantage of being together. And to have 5 of us at the meeting is hard to coordinate so we wanted to make sure we spent time together. Maybe one day we will be able to figure out a day and time that works out for all of us, but with everyone having such busy lives it’s not easy. But we try our best to make it and it makes me so happy to see everyone else being as committed to maintaining these meetings as I am.
At the rate we’ve been going, I don’t know if we’ll have another brunch before the end of the year. Maybe we could figure something out in December, but it’s so hard with the holidays. So if this is the last mentee meeting of the year, we ended on a high note. And if we have one more, I know it will be just as great as this meeting was.
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