I am running behind with my blogging this past week. The pressure has been on to get the 1st draft done for our Grad Sem research paper, so my usual schedule got reshuffled to accommodate this deadline. It got done on time and handed in yesterday afternoon, sure felt good.
Last week Eddie Johnson came in and spoke to us on his experiences in taking on leadership roles. I found him to be very refreshing, he came across as a very gentle soul, but very brave. It was very inspiring hearing him freely talk about his dyslexia and how he faced that fear, tackled the demon and re-invented himself. The book I am reading for this class is "Feel the Fear and do it anyway" and the author talks about the only way to over come ones fear is to face it and then it is not a fear anymore, I would say that is what Eddie did and he succeeded. He is such a soft spoken man, but I would say he had every ones attention as there was not much in the way of restlessness going on around the class room, in fact by the end of the talk, it was dead quiet in the class room. I think we were all riveted to what Eddie was saying. He said a lot of things, but a couple of things that really stood out for me were that he too knew he was a leader and that he didn't want to accept that. Wendy said the exact same thing, I am guessing that natural leaders don't necessarily want to be leaders. The other thing that impressed me was Eddie talking about stepping out of the norm and changing the traditional way by believing in his artistic vision . The canoe that he and his dad built is very graceful and he sounds very proud of his creation, which he should be. It sounds like his dad and others were able to accept Eddies artistic style which to me looks like it's an evolving 1st Nations artistic style and I think that is healthy as change keeps things moving so that things don't become stagnant.
The second class of the week looked at conflict and how to deal with it. It was interesting hearing Jim mention that a boss he had would intentionally bring conflict in to help create new and innovative ideas. There must be a particular way one would conduct a session with conflict as not everyone is comfortable in dealing with it. I am sure it would be a good exercise to go through in understanding a healthy way of dealing with conflict. There must be boundaries in place and conditions laid down as far as respect and emotional control towards the opposing opponents. It was interesting to hear Rushkia state the he likes conflict, my understanding would be that he is comfortable dealing with conflict. I am off the other side of the spectrum, I don't like conflict, but I do need to deal with it other wise it chews away at me. I have to work on my EQ though as I am a pretty emotional person and one area that it comes out in, is in my voice which becomes shaky!
Hope everyone is taking some time off this reading break and having fun. I drove into Nanaimo today not realising that it was snowing cats and dogs down the road from me. It was chaos on the roads, fender benders everywhere and traffic backed up. They ended up closing the highway out of Nanoose for awhile. Lucky for me I got through just before they decided to shut her down.
I am posting a link here that some of you maybe interested in. Wendy told us about the the Link Project - Vancouver Island Economic Alliance project that she worked on last year. ViEA is hosting an initative called Linking Island Businesses which will be held April 13, 2011. The main aim of this project is to encourage local businesses to build and develop stronger trade relationships by expanding their traditional boundaries. Check out the links, the first link takes you to the main page and the second link takes you directly to Linking Island Businesses. (You might have to copy and paste them in).
http://www.viea.ca/
http://www.viea.ca/index.php?page=80
That it for this week, see you all next week. Have fun, stay safe.
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