Reflection Paper
1. Truth: Being truthful in all matters, played a crucial role in my development as a young leader. My friends naturally wanted to believe in each other. It was common to take the words from others as truth. Now occasionally, we would tell a half-truth until it was discovered. Once the truth was revealed, we came correct with everything. Sometimes, I discovered holding on to a lie, was damaging to one’s ability to lead. No leader is successful, if the troops who serve under them, can’t be believed.
2. Fairness: If one didn’t govern themselves with honesty, and played by the rules. It made dealing with others a lot harder than it should have been. As kids, we wanted to play with some type of honest standard. Kids just wanted to have fun. A sense of fairness was all compass we desired. Being a leader, I discovered that unfairness would lose you the confidence and trust of others. Be fair and honest with your dealings with others.
3. Friendship: Treating others bad and being dishonest, can destroy a great many friendships. Leaders are built on the ladder of friends. As kids, those who voted for you were your friends in the beginning. As you grew in grades and age. Your voters and believers were those who watched you grow as a classmate and teammate. Friends are the monuments of time and trust.
4. Respect for others: How you treat others is very important. We all want to be treated a certain way. The way you address someone, your tone and delivery. I had to be mindful of how I interacted with others.
5. Change: Change is all around us. How you incorporate change in your daily life says a lot about you. What’s good today, may not be relevant tomorrow. I had to learn to adapt to the conditions of the time.
1. Resourcefulness: I championed myself with ability to find and use whatever was available. Others would give out too soon. Or, complain of difficulty of the mission. How important is this to you. What is it (we) wanted to accomplish? Lack of funds, or materials, short on time. I was always thinking of how can we, instead of how hard it looked.
2. Teamwork: I never liked working alone, the more hands on the job I felt would benefit our project. Most of us, do not like being left out. If we see our friends involved, we wanted to be involved. Especially if the task looked like fun. Encouraging others to take part was an asset of mine.
3. Positive attitude: Having a strong dislike of negative people. The ones who always complain of failure. Or, something is too hard. I usually distanced myself from those individuals. Over time, you began to know who were up for challenges, and would at least give it a try. My strength was I always looked at everything was possible. If we couldn’t do it, it wasn’t from a lack of trying. “We can do it!”, was my famous battle cry.
4. Creativity: Thinking of ways to do anything. I feel my friends and I were, “thinking outside the box” before the phase became popular. We would be sitting around at the playground, thinking of stuff (as we called it) wondering what if? Just using our thoughts and imagination, we would come up with some far-fetched ideas.