Defining Roles and Leadership Conference

Hey Everyone!
I am sure you all were extremely upset about not having class last week and all are anxiously awaiting class tomorrow night! :)

On Friday, I attended the Biofeedback session and like the others who attended the session it was not what I was expecting, it turned out to be very interesting when I thought it was going to be extremely boring but I am glad I choose to go to this session. The session walked us through an orientation view of what the Student Counseling Service would do for you if you went into seek help. The program offers many different things to students in different types of counseling, if you get really stresses before tests and need a place to go and relax and really get your mind of things this would be an excellent place to go. I thought the Friday session was very interesting he said he was willing to come present to groups of students on campus to show what this program has to offer and to reach out to more students on campus who are unfamiliar with the services, I thought this would be a great idea to include in next semesters Hixson class with the incoming freshman! :)

On Saturday I was not looking forward to getting up early and going to listen to presentations but after I got their I was very thankful that I went and spent some time listening to the presenters. The keynote speaker David Coleman was fantastic he was an awesome speaker. He talked about a lot of things that I never think about and he brought up some very good and interesting subjects. One of the things that I took from his speech was when he said every one in the audience should go APE and it stands for, Attitude, Preparing and Effort. For my follow up session from the keynote speaker I went to David’s second session and it was also very good, the first activity that we did was very similar to the one we did in class the first day where we all wore note cards with a name on it that we had no idea what it was and we were trying to figure out "who we were" I thought this was a great game to play to show how some people react to different people, the stereotypes, or the things they had written on their names tags. Overall I thought David, was a great presenter and I am glad that we got the chance to be involved.

The last thing to discuss is Chapter 3. The chapter discussed defining roles and the one thing that really sticks out to me and can be hard for some people to accomplish is becoming a trusted friend, we all are going to become mentors to a group of kids and spend time with them each week helping them the best we can but we all have to remember that we are in a leadership role and we cannot let the students get to comfortable around us to not listen to us or to behave in an inappropriate manner. Every time I see my old peer mentors on campus we talk to each other but we aren’t hanging out on the weekends together I think it a good thing to have a little fence between the friendships with your mentees!
Hope everyone had a great weekend, see you tomorrow in class!! :)