Note: This Spring Break, I am serving as a small group facilitator on LeaderShape, a six-day immersive leadership experience for college students. This is my first time working with a LeaderShape experience, so I want to record and process my reflections and learning here on my blog.
This semester has been a whirlwind so far, as spring semesters always are - my students that I work with on the Union Board turn over in January, so that month is spent meeting and beginning to train those students. February is full of more training, student programming, and IU's higher education & student affairs program (from which my office gets its graduate assistants) interviews. March is Spring Break and conference season, leading into April, which is full of the Little 500 races at IU, and then... boom. Finals week and summer. As I've gotten older, life has moved faster and faster, and spring semesters are especially NOT the exception to that rule. I've had to consciously practice taking time to stop and smell the roses, which is not something that I'm naturally good at. I like to be concerned about the future and where I'm going, instead of being present where I am.
This year, I have the opportunity to be a small-group facilitator on IU's LeaderShape Institute, a six-day immersive leadership retreat that encourages college students to work toward creating a thriving, just world; that teaches them that everyone is a leader regardless of position; and that gets all its participants to create a vision and action plan for the kind of future they would want to see.
Accompanying all of this are a lot of truisms that play into the LeaderShape experience. It's an immersive, "mountain-top" experience that gets participants to examine themselves deeply and ultimately ask the question, "Who do I want to be?" As someone who has a LOT of experience with immersive retreats, I love this format, but I also dread it. My natural tendency, especially in a facilitator position, is not to "stop and smell the roses" as I said above. I like to know what's next; I like to be self-assured in the material I'm covering; I like to step back from throwing myself into the experience in order to allow the people for whom I'm facilitating to have a more immersive experience themselves. But LeaderShape is NOT the kind of experience that allows that, and that's what I had to learn on Day Zero (faculty/facilitator training day).
One of LeaderShape's most-used truism is to "Trust the Process." Time and time again in my life, I've had to do that - with my graduate school search, with switching graduate assistantships, with my job search, with transitioning into being a young professional... and yet I never quite let it click for me until after it's all over. I worry and I stress, and I look to what's next instead of what's happening in that moment... and then I miss some absolutely critical, meaningful, and magical moments.
So that's one of my biggest challenges to myself this week (or, as LeaderShape calls it, a "GAG"- Going Against my Grain) - to live in the moment; to not stress about what's next but rather to be present in the here and now. In working with the participants from Day One through Day Six and beyond, I don't want to stress or to worry, but rather to experience this wonderful, reflective, challenging retreat alongside them.
I look to my fellow faculty members, and even my own small group (shoutout to you, Divergent!) to hold me accountable to this GAG, because I know it's going to be a challenge. But LeaderShape is about stretching yourself to allow for what could be... and the future is a bright one.
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