Leadership. What does it take?

At first I was a little concerned about these two conferences. Not because I didn't want to go but because I was intimidated by the title of these opportunities. I was nervous about not being able to correctly contribute my thoughts to our discussions, but I knew that this was going to be beneficial even if I had just sat and listened.

Mid-Year Institute:

At the Learning Community Mid-Year Institute conference I attended two sessions. The first, called "Habits of Thinking", was a session in which we examined different traits thats are important for peer mentors to have and how we can incorporate those thinking habits into our daily lives to help improve our mentees. After lightly discussing all of the habits of mind that we had to choose from, our group decided to really focus on responding with wonderment and awe. I thought it was very interesting that out of empathy, communication, persistence, emotions, humor, creativity etc. that responding with wonderment and awe was the key one we wanted center. It also intrigued me because I found this one as a habit that most would not instantly think of when discussing leadership and mentees but after our discussion I realize that it is in fact very crucial.

To mean responding with wonderment and awe means that one is able to step back, just breathe, and really feel and take in all aspects and degrees of the situation in order to generate a truly empathetic response. Even if no response is needed I still feel that being able to just sit back and think about everything that has been accomplished that has made the current situation possible. This aspect is very important because it allows you as a mentor to see different perspectives of each and every situation. Having this habit allows you to stay humble and gives you the ability to utilize every one of your senses to fully experience and express the possibilities. In order to incorporate this into my everyday habits of thinking I would start by physically taking the time to just sit and think about how I got where I am and trying to include my senses in decision making allowing myself to stay humble and personable.

The second session I went to was purely on strengths. I had heard of this but wasn't entirely sure of what it consisted of, but I had learned that everyone has top 5 strengths that go along with their personalities and being able to make use of your strengths and they can interchangeably work with the strengths of others allows one to collaborate. When doing group activities it is important to have diversity within the group because having a lot of similarities might make an activity easier or better but it will not produce the best results. Knowing your own strengths allows you to also be able to find your role within a group setting and even using different strengths of yours to make the group more well rounded. I feel that I would like to find out my own strengths and learn how to fully utilize them myself.

I.S.L.E:

I was very fond of the keynote speaker at I.S.L.E and I actually enjoyed this conference a lot. I loved how he turned his key concepts into applications through showing us them in action in some of our favorite movies of today. He did leave me with a lot of quotes that I had written to always keep reminding myself of. In my apartment, I have a wall that is completely covered with a collage of quotes and he gave me so many that I will probably end up filling up the entire wall. Some of my most favorite are:

"Leaders don't wait for things to happen, they make it happen."
"In order to create harmony you have to have diversity."
"If two people are the exact same, one is unnecessary."
"Great leaders focus on the internal victories instead of the external rewards."
"Human Beings are just like wheel barrows, you only go as far as you're pushed."
"Give people room to fail, anything worth doing is worth doing badly until you get it right."

I have learned so much from him alone at this conference that I am very glad I decided to attend the keynote speaker. I will always keep my notes on how to be a good leader with me because reading them on a daily basis and seeing them often will put belief into my head that that is who I am. I also really wanted that book he was selling butt they ran out.. SHOOT!

After the keynote speaker, I attend the UZOO session. This session taught us about what personality type we are and how "predictable" our personality types can make our actions. First we tallied up our scores and then the highest 2 or 3 people from each type was sent out into the hallway where we had to come up with an event. Any event you could think of. Then while we were outside the students inside were being taught about what personalities will come up with which kind of event just because of the nature of the personalities. I found this to be super interesting because I didn't realize how predictable our actions really are and how we can accomodate our personalities with others.