Iowa State Leaderhsip Experience and Week 3

On January 26th, 2009 I attended the Iowa State Leadership Experience. I had never attended the event before and so this was something new for me. The keynote speaker, Marsha Grady, told an interesting story that involved research done by Harvard on what children thought leadership was. They drew pictures and wrote captions and some of the things they wrote were very interesting. Such as "a leader is someone we follow" or "a leader is my friend." I always like hearing stories about Harvard studies that they do with children, the results are always interesting and a little unexpected.

I then attended two sessions, unfortunately I was unable to stay for the other sessions since I had another meeting I had to attend. The first session I attended was on Facilitation Virtual and Face-to-face Meetings done by Craig Ogilvie. In this session we brainstormed ideas to have maximal engagement even over virtual meetings.

The second session I attended was on Creating a Clutter-free Life led by Mary Sigmann, a Certified Professional Organizer. I took away some interesting things from this session as well such as the three S's: Subtract, Simplify and Systematize. Mary also said something that a friend had taught here that I think will go with me throughout my life: "I'll support you in your strengths, but not in your weakness." I can see multiple instances where I should say things like that to people instead of just saying yes all the time.

She had us set goals and an action plan. My three goals:

1. Time Management Goal: Learn how to say no
2. Organizing Goal: De clutter my desk drawers
3. Self-Care Goal: Work out 3 times a week

I enjoyed attending the leadership experience and think it was a good thing to require in this class.

Next blog: Learning Community Mini-Institute attendance!

Cheers!
Lisa

Week 1 (and a half)

This is officially my first blog ever! I'm finally getting organized and back into the swing of things. I'm excited for UST 311 and am looking forward to getting to know the other mentors better. It will be fun to have an outside of class social event soon.

The first week of class was very similar to other classes, go over the syllabus and assignments. It was nice to have a very complete syllabus that laid out the entire semester and all the course requirements. Having a complete syllabus really helps to get my calendar in line. I'm excited to see that events such as the Iowa State Leadership Experience (ISLE), the Learning Community Mini Institute and ISCORE are required so that I will make sure to get to them. All of these event should be interesting and a learning experience.

The book for the class, The Peer Mentor Companion, is an easy read and I have enjoyed it so far. Chapter one was a good introduction and I appreciated the self evaluation section. Although I have been an Agricultural Business Peer Mentor for the last two years I still feel like I have plenty to learn not only about mentoring, but also about myself and my leadership style as well. The self evaluation from pages 9-12 helped me to realize what my strongest areas were and then also what my areas for improvement are. I am very confident in my abilities to communicate, utilize campus resources, working with diversity and evaluation my mentoring. My weakest area, according to the evaluation surprised me, it was self awareness. I consider myself to be pretty self aware so I then looked at the sub questions. I see that there are a lot of terms that seem to go along with understanding self awareness. Since this is my weakest area I am glad to see the I will be a discussion leader for that chapter with Jenna. That should help me to learn a lot more about the topic.

All in all, I am excited to be in UST 311 and will now be reading for class tomorrow!

Cheers!
Lisa