Mid-year institute and ISLE

Over the last few days we have had a couple of different opportunities to learn about different aspects of leadership and how we can apply them in as peer mentors and in our own lives as well.  Friday during the Iowa State Mid-year Institute I was able to attend the highlighting your peer mentoring on resumes and in interviews by Roger Bently.  Not only was this session pretty informative, it was partially interactive too.  We had the chance to talk to some of the other learning community members in the room using some action verbs that were provided.  I think the most important thing I got out of that session was S.T.A.R. which stands for Situation, Tasks, Actions, and Results together these make a framework that can be used to answer interview questions.

The second session I went to on Friday was Community Building in Your Learning Community by Andrea Ramos and Kari Teitjen.  There were a couple of things that really stuck out to me in this session.  One of these was the number of trainings that the WISE peer mentors take some of which may benefit us as Hixson peer mentors.  The second thing was Intent vs. Impact in communication.  Intent is what we mean to say where as Impact is what someone else gets out of what you are saying.  Sometimes these two things are not the same thing.  An example would be when people use the word “gay” when they really mean dumb, unfair, etc.  These are things that many of us do without even realizing it or how it could affect someone else and until you make the conscious decision to stop using such words.

Saturday was ISLE at the MU.  The beginning key note speaker Dr. Darin Eich was very interesting to listen to and his energy made me excited about the day.  The first session I attended was Maximizing Leadership Potential and although it didn’t sound like I would be interested in the topic I found it very useful.  We were given several chances to go through our elevator speech which is something I’ve never worked on before.

After a delicious lunch of free subway, I went to “Say Whaaaa??”  (Which if you were near me you probably heard me say the title reminded me of the minions from Despicable Me because I love them.)  This session reminded me a lot of the second session I attended on Friday and in fact it was actually taught by one of the ladies who taught the Friday session.  This one was more focused on the Intent vs. Impact. We did an exercise in which we looked at a list of phrases/words that can be offensive to groups of people.

The final session of the day I attended was about emotional intelligence.  This is a topic that I feel very familiar with yet I felt that it was still important to go and refresh my memory.  One thing I learned was that you should try to turn a complement into a request when you are working with others to try and minimize potential conflicts.

I had a great time in all of the sessions, but I think my favorite part of the day was winning a subway gift card.  I mean who doesn’t like winning things. J