Being All You Can Be

       Hey everyone, I know you all are just as sad as I am bout not having class on Tuesday and not being able to see every ones bright and beautiful faces, hope everyone can survive til next week.  Anyways, this weeks blog is a combination of a couple things, chapter 3 reading and the leadership sessions we attended. Last week on Friday, we all had to attend a session, I choose to attend the session about Biofeedback: What your mind is telling you body. While my initial guess of what the session was going to be about was that it was to be based on the science of how your mind makes your body react to things and etc, it turns out the session was actually about how you can control the involuntary actions your body does and how this can help you. At first I thought it was going to be SUPER boring and stupid, but as the session went on it got really interesting about how simple things can elevate your heart rate and cause a Fight-or-Flight reaction in your mind. Once your mind does this it pretty much shuts down the frontal lobe of you brain, which is in charge of problem solving, analysis, judgement, and even memory. This effects us because if you consider yourself a bad test taker it turns out your body is probably reacting in this manner. With biofeedback you can learn to control your heart rate and mind and calm yourself down during a test and be able to rock it. Pretty cool I thought
       On Saturday we had to attend another leadership session. The main speaker, David Coleman, was a really good speaker with a lot of great information. The movie Hitch was actually based off him and his job. In his speech he talked about how today while our generation is incredibly smart that a lot of people don't know how to talk to people in person or be leaders. He also brought it to our attention just how sick our generation is with taking so much on our plate that a lot of times we will just skip eating or something so we can get more things done. David brought up the point that most companies say it is only as strong as its weakest link, but he thinks this is a load and that a company is actually only as strong as its strongest link. He said he would bet everyone in the room was probably a good person, but just how good? We did a little exercise that showed us while we are good people, we still do things we shouldn't like deliberately litter, talk about people behind their back, etc. After his talk I decided to go to his small session as well. There we learned that even though you may not treat someone who is different from you much different, over the course of the day if everyone does that then it just gets beat into them and they notice that they are different. Overall he did a great job talking and to anyone who missed him I feel bad for you.
       Now to the reading, in the reading for this week its main goal was to help us understand defining our roles as mentors and how to do that. In the book it talked about how there is kind of a check list that you can try to use to help yourself be a good mentor like using: First impressions, charisma, courtesy, gratitude, etc. Now that I'm in a leadership position where I have to lead and teach others, I understand better just how hard it will be to try and convey the message that I'm trying to get across. It actually kind of made me open my eyes to just how hard a teachers job probably is. Trying to get 300 people to understand the material your teaching probably super tough. I just hope I can convey the good advice I have to my students. Have a good one everybody. Out