WHO DO YOU WANT TO BECOME?

Use inspirational quotes from famous people and fictional characters as mentors for individual or group self-improvement.

Life can seem like a mystery – until you work out who you want to become.

How did I end up creating these Mentor kits?

I had the pleasure last year of doing a Tony Robbins’ course. It was fun watching all the excited people online dancing and having fun and one really weird thing is that a friend of mine from Florida – Pam – kept appearing on the screen. There were hundreds of thousands of people online, but somehow Pam made an appearance a few times!

One thing that I did like from the Tony Robbins course was his Priming video. In that he has everyone take three sets of ten really deep breaths. Then he has everyone raise their hands as they breathe in. This is brilliant because just the act of raising your hands in the air gets your heart pumping and your blood flowing.

Then once you are in this state, he has you reflect on what you are grateful for. You think about times when things have really worked out well for you. Then you imagine yourself succeeding in achieving your future goals in a similar way.

What’s wrong with Priming?

The Tony Robbins’ Priming takes around ten minutes and you are supposed to do it daily. I don’t know about you, but I am often a bit rushed in the morning and squeezing in another ten minutes is hard. So I thought I would create my own Priming audio that is only 5 minutes long.

That got me thinking. When thinking about what I am good at and what I enjoy, I remembered how much pleasure I have gained from researching real people – reading biographies and so on – and then using these famous people as characters in some of my mystery party games. For example, I have sixties celebrities like Elvis in “Celebrity Celebrations” and 1920s celebrities like Mae West in “Poetic Justice.” I remember how much I enjoyed reading Mae West’s autobiography.

So that got me thinking and I ended up stumbling upon the idea of using famous people and male and female role models as mentors for self-improvement and self development. 

So what do the Mentor kits contain?

At first I started writing pages of information about each famous person. I was going to record it as an audio or a video. But who has time to listen to all of that? And at times I felt like I was just re-hashing what you could read for yourself by researching the person’s Wikipedia page.

Just doing this research did provide me with a few insights of my own. For example, I noticed how common it was for women to be stuck with a financial mess after they trusted men with it. Ever wondered why Doris Day made so many TV shows? It is because her third husband died and then she found out that his business partner had squandered her earnings, leaving her deeply in debt.

But I digress. I decided that rather than make you read or listen to all of this information, I would condense it down to three questions that you could use to reflect on your own lives. 

Of course, sometimes the question arises based on the experiences that the famous person has had. In other cases, I use their own words – the famous person quote – as a basis for the question. You will speak the words of a famous person. They act as self improvement quotes.

And to make it more game-like I added a crossword puzzle item for each mentor. This allows you to use your brain power!

Why do the Mentor kits contain exercises?

Like Tony Robbins, I realize how important it is to get the blood flowing in order to make your ability to think to be enhanced. And research has confirmed this.

But rather than just always using breathing as the way to do this, I have created unique exercises for each mentor. Sometimes they relate to the mentor’s profession. For example, for Doris Day you get to stand up and sing your favorite tune. This is also a lot of fun when you do this with a bunch of other men and women (or just women) and get into pretending to be these famous role models.

But do these self-development kits really work?

Anything that gets us to take a fresh look at our lives can help us to understand who we really are. If you love mystery party games, then you probably also like pretending to be a famous person and saying inspirational quotes from famous people. So saying self improvement quotes out loud in your own voice.

New research is showing that imitating someone is a great way to learn how to be like them. Ever noticed how young children love to copy what you do? Well even as adults, copying can help us too.

Annie Murphy Paul in her excellent book “The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain” https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Outside-Brain-Annie-Murphy/dp/0544947665 details a lot of the new research on this area. 

Research by Dr Ellen Langer even found that if you asked people to put on flight suits and to pretend to be Air Force pilots with twenty-twenty vision, their own eyesight improved when guiding a simulated flight.

So pretending to be an extremely successful person like the famous inspirational people in our Mentor’s kits can really help us.

How will the Mentor kits change me?

If you say the self improvement quotes with passion and really take the time to answer the questions in the Mentor’s kits fully and honestly – not lying even to yourself – then you should see some results.

These fresh perspectives and insights will hopefully change how you act in the world from now on. Now you may not end up writing a 86 books like Agatha Christie, and selling over 2 billion copies of them or creating artworks that sell for $44.4 million like Georgia O’Keefe, but that doesn’t mean you won’t change the way you live your life so that it’s more enjoyable and fulfilling.

Are you ready to become one of those inspiring people in history as a Mentor, and play a mentor game that may change your life?

Can these Mentor kits be used as team building activities?

You can use these kits individually for your own personal self-development or with friends or family. It is a lot more fun and more inspiring if you do it with friends. Or you could use them as office team building activities.

However, if you are using them as a team building game, participants should not be pressured to share their own personal insights that they have gained from answering the questions. Sharing must be purely optional.

Dressing up as a mentor and doing the warm-up exercises together will be more than enough to develop a team spirit.