Day 335: Sharon Mast

August 31, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“… people would say to me, ‘You see possibilities in everyday relationships and experiences,’ and I guess that’s something that I pass on to others just in my own behavior and in my own attitude and hope that, you know, those are things that they then carry on and pass on to other people … kind of like a pay it forward type of thing.”

.

.

Right click here to download…

.

Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Sharon, for agreeing to be part of the Project today, and before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Sharon Mast: I’m Sharon Mast, the Director of Volunteer Engagement and Youth Development at the United Way of Berks County.

Toni: Well thank you for taking time out of your schedule to be part of us.

Sharon: Thanks!  This is awesome.

Toni: So Sharon, when you think of that word inspiration, who do you inspire, and how does it happen?

Sharon: You know, when I first heard that question, it was really difficult for me to think about that because as I was growing up, I was always a very happy, outgoing child and a good student, and I got along with everyone.  And really, you know, my parents taught me to treat everyone fairly, but you know, I was blessed with so many good opportunities.  However, my father was very strict, and you know, if I got kudos for doing something from a teacher or an award or whatever, he would sit down and lecture me on the virtues of being humble.  And he did that because, as he said, he didn’t want me to get a big head.

So for years, you know, I never thought about inspiring anyone.   I just was me and just being who I was and took those positive risks and opportunities.  And I don’t think it was until I got married that friends would say to me, “You know, you’re such an inspiration.” I’m kind of like, “Why?” and they’d say, “Because you have such passion and you have such a sense of hope for the future and you give people hope.”

And I thought, wow, I just kind of never really thought about it that way.  It was just being who I thought, you know, I really needed to be.  As I was, you know, kind of going through that process, then, you know, one day I sat down with my son and he said something to me about what an inspiration I am to him, and again I just kind of looked at him funny and asked why.  He said, “You know, nothing was ever easy in your life, and yet you always had this happy face.  You always made things work.  You always made it look easy, and you never said ‘no’ in terms of helping people.”

I didn’t have the luxury of going to college as a typical college student at 18 and going off in living in a dorm and so forth.  My parents didn’t have, you know, the affordability to do that, and so, you know, even though I was accepted at five schools, I worked full-time and went part-time.  I started with an Associate’s degree and a Bachelor’s and finally a Master’s.  Along the way as I had staff in different positions that I was in, they would say the same thing.  It’s like, “You help us see that even people who are, you know, have adverse situations in their life, they can overcome them.  They can come out on top if you don’t look at things as a victim.”

I never played that role well, the victim role.  I never felt that was my color, you know?  I would always see … you know, people would say to me, “You see possibilities in everyday relationships and experiences,” and I guess that’s something that I pass on to others just in my own behavior and in my own attitude and hope that, you know, those are things that they then carry on and pass on to other people.  You know, kind of like a pay it forward type of thing.  So I think a lot of people have done that for me.

Toni: By being this way, Sharon, and living your life this way and getting that kind of feedback … first of all, to get that kind of feedback is very cool …

Sharon: It is.  It is.  It’s very humbling.

Toni: Yeah, absolutely.  And so I’m wondering how do you think by being that example allows other people to explore their potential?

Sharon: Well, as anyone who knows me knows I’m a great talker.  I’m a relationship person, a people person.  I love to engage with others, but I also love to listen and that’s feedback that I’ve gotten as well over the years.  What I’ve realized, how critical a skill that is, and how important it is for all of us — whether it’s personal or professional relationships — is to really listen and not from our own perspective, but what … you know, having that sense of empathy.  Where is somebody else coming from?

And so, I’ve really tried to hone in over the years of reading people’s body language, listening to their tone, their hesitations, their choice of words, and facilitate discussions.  So I think, you know, that I explore their potential … help them explore their potential, because I … I ask a lot of questions.  I’m curious by nature, and with my counseling background, you know, really able to ask sort of pondering questions.  Not so much to have them answer for me, but to have them go deeper inside themselves and explore possibilities, explore opportunities, explore where, you know, there’s sticky points that they have where they may not understand something.

And that day that we’re talking, they may not understand, but you’ve created a space, an openness for them to … and in a sense planted a seed for them to begin to mull over what you’re talking about.  And I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, you know, I’ll see them on the street and it’s like, “You know, I still remember something you said to me two years ago.”  I’m like, “What?”

Because you … you know, when you can do that, it gives them … in a sense, it opens a space to give them permission to look beyond today or look beyond the tunnel vision that they currently have.  And I think that’s something that, you know, you open up, you allow them, you know, engage with them and you reach new heights because you allow them to believe in themselves and their abilities.

Toni: Absolutely.  And what I also hear you say is that as curious as you are by the way that you engage with these people, I would imagine it opens them up to being curious about themselves again.

Sharon: Yes, yes.  And you know, they start asking questions.  I want to say maybe for the last 20 years that I’ve had staff under me and, you know, my door was always open and often they would come in … with my kids as well.  You know, no one wants to be told what to do, you know?  They want to be able to have someone that they can relate to and sort of just pass things by, and as I said, ask questions that allow them to just go a little bit deeper.

To me, that engagement creates synergy, and that synergy is what allows them to begin to explore themselves further.  And that leads to change, to improvement, to potentially transformation.  Or to say “You know what?  I like who I am and this is where I’m going to stay, but wow, I understand why I do what I do now.  I understand what my triggers are.  I understand that my personality has me … you know, gives me … is responsible for some of my perceptions.  Okay, now how do I deal with those things, and how do I relate to others, knowing myself better?”

Toni: What inspires you, Sharon?

Sharon: You know, there are so many things that inspire me.  I’m such a simple person.  I grew up in the middle of an urban area, very poor.  But quite honestly, I had no clue I was poor because there was a richness in our family of a lot of love and a lot of support.

Right now, I live up on a mountain, in the middle of a mountain in an old farmhouse, and I think one of the basic things that inspires me is truly nature.  I love to go out and hike, and that gives … and I love to walk on the beach, and those two things give me the space to be quiet.  I find that when I’m, you know, really overwhelmed with a life situation, whether it’s personal or professional, I will often find myself, you know, putting on my hiking boots and going into the woods because it allows me to just quiet myself, my inner voice and my mind.  And that quietness and listening to the birds and just, you know, looking around and realizing that you are one small part of a huge universe, suddenly, you know, things just start to unfold and become clear.

You know, when they say be quiet and that’s when you hear and that’s when you see things, I really, really believe that.  Music does that to me.  You know, I can listen to a piece of music and be absolutely inspired to begin to create and design and think about, you know, building and making things better.

I’m also inspired by watching people, many, I think, of whom have very little in their life but they have heart.  I had one woman … I was teaching a parenting program, and this was for low income families that were prior to school age.  And a local school district had told us that approximately 70% of children entering the school district lacked one or more of the skills they needed to be successful in school, which was mind boggling.  If they were one year behind, they could catch them up.  If they were two or three years behind developmentally, they really, really couldn’t.  And that was a slippery slope then, not being able to bond with your school, never feeling connected or engaging and becoming truant and dropping out.

At the United Way, we began a Right From The Start initiative that really focused on parents of young children.  And I remember, you know, we were teaching the parenting skills to parents, but we tried to do it in a way that really was strength-based and solution-focused.  So we didn’t come across as a teacher telling them what to do.  We went back to that questioning, you know, and that pondering and wondering, and “What do you know about this?” or “What do you think about that?”

I remember one mother coming up to me after class one day and she said, “I am learning so much.”  She said, “I don’t have … I didn’t have the luxury of, you know, going to school and learning all of these things, and I didn’t have a good childhood to have parents that taught me these things.”  She said, “But one gift I can give my children is I do have a lot of love, and I know now that what I’m giving them, even though I couldn’t give them these other skills that I’m just learning now, you taught me that that love is absolutely critical.”

She walked away with such a sense of pride, and I was so inspired by that because I felt that, you know, in everyday occurrences there are those little nuances, that, you know, you … you can open that space for people, you know, to have that power to take that on.  Authentic people inspire me.  People that truly help others see and feel.

I had the opportunity this summer to do two things – one was to create a new camp for teenagers around volunteerism, but I really felt that the camp couldn’t be just about volunteering in the community.  I needed to give them a visual of what were the community conditions that created the need for them to volunteer, whether it was around education or whether it was around homelessness or, you know, other people in need.

So we had … the walls were adorned with all types of statistics that was their community.  And for many of them, they had no clue, because they lived in this little isolated community within the community that they never experienced, you know, homelessness or being low income or whatever the situation might be.

And then we had them out in the community and we would do volunteer work and bring them back and give them time to truly reflect on what they saw, what they felt, what they were thinking.  At the end of the week, I mean, it was amazing the feedback from the kids that this was such an opportunity that opened up so much for them in terms of how, you know, their own behaviors and their attitudes and what they thought about things, and breaking down judgments and breaking down perceptions, and I was in awe of that.  I truly was.  But it was … again, it’s that I was inspired by the fact that creating that space for them to be mindful of situations and people that were different from themselves.

Most recently, I had the opportunity to work with a local hospital that was collecting school supplies for low income students in our city, and you know, again they were thinking well this was a nice thing to do.  But I went into every department prior and I gave them a picture of what the community looked like, you know, that 70% of children going into this district lacked the skills.  That, you know, on any given day, 1,400 people were utilizing emergency food services, and I threw out different numbers for them to visualize why what they were doing was so critical and the impact that it was going to make in the community.

I have to tell you, last year we stuffed one bus, and that was a community-wide effort.  This one organization in one day’s time stuffed a bus, a full size school bus, a bus and a half, just one organization, because they felt it and they were able to really see the impact and how it was going to help others.  It was pretty phenomenal, and I walked away saying, “Wow, the power we have to change our communities is huge.”

Toni: It absolutely …

Sharon: We just have to take … you know, we have to put ourselves out there to do it.

Toni: Absolutely, and you can tell that you’re very passionate about that, and your stories are incredible, they truly are.  I know that … it’s almost like I’m wondering if you’ve got this collection of stories that you’ve written down somewhere because …

Sharon: I do, and you know, I was thinking about … somebody said to me a couple months ago, “You know, it’s time for you to write a book.”  And I said, “What?  No, I’m not …” because again it’s that humility that comes back.  I’m like, “No, no, no, no, I don’t have …” and they’re like, “No, what you’ve done, the stories that have been told to you because of being mindful of other people and creating those spaces.”

And you know, it really got me thinking that yeah, there is the possibility of doing that because we all need champions, and there are so many champions out there, but they don’t know where to begin, or they’re told, “No, we can’t do that.”  We need people to be able to say, “Yes you can, yes you can.”

Toni: Absolutely.  Sharon, the final question of the Project, and unfortunately, you know, we are on this time constraint and just listening and you just get … you can listen forever, can’t you?  I mean, I can.  But what are you doing now to continue to explore your own potential so that you can be that advocate for people who want to change and grow?  What are you doing now?

Sharon: Well, you know, this last year I really struggled because my job has changed several times over the last few years, and I came into a space where, you know, I was no longer doing what I was truly passionate about.  I was doing good work, but it wasn’t me.  And I kind of went back and asked a lot of people, because I lost a little bit of confidence and a little bit of feeling that, you know, like what’s my value here?

I asked people what they saw as my value, what I brought to the table, both professionally and personally.  And not from an ego standpoint but truly from the point of, you know, reinventing yourself, and I think it’s important to keep, you know, reflecting on what you’re doing.  Are you still doing what you’re passionate about?  Can you reinvent yourself?  What else might you do?

And so, you know, the process of going through that for myself really made me step back and realize that, you know, I can do this work, and I don’t need necessarily an agency or a container to hold me back.  And so over the last year as I explored my own potential, someone had said to me, “You’re a spirit whisperer.”  I thought that’s an interesting word, and basically they defined it as someone who quietly opens the space for others to explore their potential, and I thought, “Yeah, that’s what I do,” whether it’s as a program or an agency.

So I’ve been exploring going out on my own, contracting with other organizations that I truly am inspired by the work they do, and trying to look at how can I be an advocate for them or another voice to get their work out into new avenues.  So as I go forward the next few months, that’s what I plan on doing is to just get out there on my own and, you know, let that spirit soar and see where it takes me, because I truly believe that God puts you where you’re meant to be, and I’m not done yet.

Toni: Fantastic, and you know there’s a lot of people that will be listening to this interview and they’re going to be wondering in four months’, five months’ time, “Where did she go, what is she doing?  I want to know.”

Sharon, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to be part of this Get Inspired! Project, and all of the wisdom that you’ve shared in this interview has been fantastic, and we can’t thank you enough for being part of it today.

Sharon: Well thank you.  I just … I’m inspired by the possibilities that will come out of this Project, and just giving people, you know, the opportunity to believe that they can, you know, and to inspire hope, you know, in others, so good for you.  Kudos to you.

Toni: Well thank you, Sharon, and take care of yourself, and we’ll talk soon.

Sharon: Okay, thank you.

___________________________________________________________

For more information about Sharon Mast:  www.uwberks.org/wwwpub

.