I have always thought of myself as a leader; but not really a "loud" leader, one that lead by actions rather than talking. So when time came around to decide who would be the Chief Production Officer (CPO), I decided to step up to the plate, and rather willingly I must add. I have almost always been the leader of groups projects: I'm responsible, keep track of things, turn things in on time and I usually know what is going on most of the time, but I have never been leader of a project thats lasted more than 2 weeks (and this one would certainly last more than that). When I jumped at the chance of being the leader of my group, my teammates agreed because I am the most responsible of the three and I can keep track of everything but they also gave me one condition: I had to be more ASSERTIVE. This came as a shock to me seeing as I did used to have a problem with assertiveness as a child but I honestly thought I had come out of my shell. But alright, I was up to the challenge of becoming Paolo's level of assertiveness. The first meeting we had was the most stressful for me because I felt that I was being overpowered and shut-down by my teammates and their stubbornness was putting me on edge. So I took a 30 second walk to cool off and came back into the class ready to attack. Although they were still as stubborn as they had been before I left the class, I had a new attitude towards working with them: I was open about their ideas as well as they were open about mine, seeing as I had told them that that was what needed to happen if we wanted to be successful. Over the course of the week, I have found myself changing sentences from 'can you please do this' to 'please do it' or 'have you already done it'. Yes, I might sometimes give in to people, but being CPO has, and still is, helping me go from the "follow my actions and we'll be successful" leader to the "do what I say and we'll be successful" leader. Yes, this might sound bossy to some, but in reality, it is exactly what my team needs in order to succeed.
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We had a challenge, a mini competition so to say. But this was not about winning--it was about pushing ourselves to create the best product possible and presenting it in the nicest way with the best service we could offer. All I can say is teamwork. We only had to turn in a one-pager with the nutritional facts, price and a quick story about our product and its creation. As easy as this might seem, it was IMPOSSIBLE, because of one thing: TEAMWORK. Dividing work really is the best way to go because we all separately work on one thing and spend all our time and energy on it to achieve the best product possible. But we didn't do this for the more technical part of the challenge; we all worked on everything together and therefore the simple page we had to turn in, took us way longer to create than what it should have. I mean, looking for nutritional facts, prices, the shop and writing the story would be quick, right? Right, but only if we would have divided the work and each done a separate part. The night before the smoothie challenge, I spent almost 3 hours on Skype with Andrea trying to make the one-pager look simple and beautiful, perfecting the smoothie recipe, making a very engaging story about our product and finding the perfect location for SMOOTHIE GALAXY. By 11:30 I realized I had not yet finished annotating The Lean Startup (yes, very irresponsible of my part), and we had only accomplished 2 of the 4 things we wanted to accomplish. I very guiltily left Andrea alone to finish the one-pager and Keynote slide with the location of our smoothie stand. If we had separated all tasks into 4, we could have completed this task a lot quicker than we did. I'm still not sure who the winner of the smoothie challenge was but I learned a lesson (which I honestly thought I had already knew): when working on a team, DIVIDE AND CONQUER, not only will you be less stressed out, but you will focus your time and energy on one thing in order to achieve the best you can.
iWeek video here!
We've been together for 19 hours out of the 35 hours of the school week and we came up with a product. A product that would be a small act of welcome to new teachers, hoping to be able to implement it in coming years. I had been told of iWeek before school started and had come up with one or two ideas, one that I thought was more useful than the other, but in the end they didn't really solve the problem we had identified. I have always done well working in groups, considering that I usually become one of the leaders, but this time it was different. I was not in my comfort zone being in front of so many people and leading them. Either way, I would have to come out of it sooner or later if I wanted to be a helpful part of this group. On Monday we had to interview teachers, the first test I would receive on coming out of my comfort zone. I once stood in front of a large group of people and tried to say that once we start to come out of our comfort zone, it gets easier each time. Mind you, I was in front of around 200 people and I did manage to mess this one sentence up royally and said quite the opposite I intended to say, but my point was understood and it was the start of me leaving this zone that was, and still is, one of my favorite places. When we first started the interviews, I was in a group of five and I was completely fine with that because it meant that there were four other people that could talk with the teachers, but we were told that it might be intimidating for the new teachers if they had five students walking up to them to talk about being new, so naturally we split into a group of two and three and I was in the group of two... with the filmer, meaning that I was going to have to speak to the new teachers. We were assigned one teacher who happened to be busy all day and I was starting to get happy about that because it meant that I was not going to have to talk to her; but we also had a problem, we couldn't go back to class with no juicy information so we went on a quest to find another teacher. We ended up in the Libru, the Early Childhood library speaking with the new librarian. When we got to the Libru, Alex approached the librarian and asked if we could interview her about her experience in Peru. She agreed and the interview started. We had 5 questions that we had come up with as a group and were supposed to ask her. At first, the interview was awkward for me because I don't really have experience doing interviews and this was supposed to feel more like a conversation than a structured interview. It was also weird because we were both getting filmed and that is something that I'm not really used to, so it was adding another level of awkwardness to the interview. At the end, the interview started to flow a little more and seemed more like a conversation but it wasn't exactly a conversation and it wasn't really what we had in mind. We finished the interview and on Wednesday we had to go back out to conduct other ones with other teachers. This time, I was less nervous than I was before but again, we couldn't find the teacher we were supposed to interview but this time I was a little frustrated about it and happily went on a quest to find other teachers. These interviews were slightly different but were also slightly easier and I realized that if I would do this more often, it would eventually become easier. Like I once tried to say before, coming out of our comfort zone is hard, but once we start doing it more often, it becomes easier and it's not so bad anymore. We all have to push ourselves, we have to grow as people and do things that challenge us no matter how hard they seem because eventually they become easy and sooner or later we find that our comfort zone has expanded and we are ready to face new challenges. I actually thought that listening to a new song each day was going to be easy, but it turns out that it is not, especially if they were supposed to be different genres. Partly because, although a very useful app at times, Shazam sometimes doesn't save the songs that were tagged, making a certain user become a little stressed out. All in all though, this challenge/task/habit was very interesting, allowing for me to explore an area that I love but don't know that well. Below is the final list of the 30 new songs. Check them out! 1. Sia - Eye of the Needle
2. Lucy Hale ft. Joe Nichols - Red Dress 3: Fitz and the Tantrums - Fools Gold 4. Birdy - All About You 5. Maroon 5 - Maps 6. Magic! - Don't Kill the Magic 7. Calvin Harris - Summer 8. The Script - Glowing 9. Tiesto ft. Icona Pop - Let's Go 10. Clean Bandit - Rather Be 11. Shakira - La Tortura 12. La Sonora Dinamita - La Suavecita 13. Nek - Laura No Esta 14. Ricchi e Poveri - Sera Porque te Amo 15. Fall Out Boy - Young Volcanoes 16. Chayenne - Un Siglo Sin Ti 17. SPOON - Do You 18. Adelberto Santiago - La Noche Mas Linda del Mundo 19. Romeo Santos - Obra Maestra 20. Vance Joy - Riptide 21. Kako and his Orchestra - Shingaling Shingaling 22. Santana and Wyclef ft. Aviccii and Alexandre Pires - Dar Um Jeito 23. Tori Amos - Crucify 24. Daughtry - Homes 25. George Thorogood - Bad to the Bone 26. Curtis Mayfield - Move on Up 27. Barcelona Gipsy Klezmer Orchestra - Djelem Djelem 28. Susana Baca - Negra Presuntuosa 29. Edwyn Collins - A Girl Like You 30. Mat Kearney - Ships in the Night |
Author"Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light." Archives
June 2015
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