Month: April 2020

Week III

nendele on

Man this week has been crazy. I have no idea where all the time has gone, but it also felt like this week was a thousand years long. This week we learned so much. During class on Wednesday, we learned about online marketing with Sarafima and wow that was incredibly helpful. The marketing and outreach team met up with her and found more tips and tricks to implement as we quickly start down our path for VP2. I loved seeing all the engagement from my teammates this week, along with diving into my own pieces of the pie. My goal after meeting with Sarafima was to create a landing page for the project, and I am so pleased to say that it is almost done after hours of work. But I absolutely adored learning how to use WordPress even more. It has been a huge challenge that I have learned so much from, all the website building I’m doing this quarter makes me feel accomplished and as if I have finally started the quarter. I’m so close to finishing this website page though. I wish I had managed to get it all done this week as we’re heading into another hectic week, but I will keep chugging along. Here’s a link to the page.

It’s been a journey y’all. (Also if you’re just reading this to comment, feel free to stop here. I’m going to talk about something that’s been on my mind this week and doesn’t necessarily relate to class. It also contains some triggering ideas to people.)

So, this week was a lot harder than most weeks. This week carries a lot of different emotions and memories with it. This week holds my mother’s birthday, one of my best friend’s birthdays, and one day that is both my sister’s birthday and the day a very close friend committed suicide. I can’t lie and say “I wasn’t affected,” I was. This week hurts. I managed to push through and give life my all, I even managed to push my pain away until the weekend. But it was hard, it was difficult. Normally, it’s a day that I grab some friends and go spend quality time outside with them. But this year, I was all alone. I’m not living with anyone at the moment and so I was left inside my head. This week takes a lot out of me. But it takes more in the weeks after it, when I’m tailed by ideas of failure and losing people I care about. I have a job to do in the coming weeks, but I’m not always sure how to explain and ask for grace during this time. So, instead, I’ll just push through and continue doing the work that is needed of me.

Week II

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Another week completed. I feel as if the days go by as if a slug is the one controlling time, but the end of the week and deadlines still manage to sneak up on me. This week was especially difficult though, I found myself wondering if I had the drive and the skills that I see in all my classmates. This quarter I am a part of a group putting on an event. And since the class is online, we must put on a virtual event. That has been a huge nerve-raking fear and source of anxiety for me.

But I found a part of myself one night this week when I was playing a Jack box game with my friends. It was a silly prompt, like they all are, to create a solution to a problem, make a title and tagline, and then present it. Now, I am not the best at coming up with solutions to WICKED problems, and I also haven’t been able to think outside the box that the quarantine has put us in. But by the end of the game, I was laughing my butt off with everyone else. It was amazing to see the ideas that we came up with and had to pitch all within ten minutes. That night I was pushed in a new way to remember all the small skills that we had learned over the past quarters, and I was shown how to laugh and smile again, even when physically separated from my friends.

So, what did I love? I loved connecting with my friends and being reminded of how cool they all are. But more importantly, I connected with all my fellow E3s after that, and we created a solid plan for our event. I am now feeling so much more confident and positive. I know we can pull off something amazing! I think moving forward though, I am going to need to watch myself and trust the others on my team. They are an awesome group of people who can do amazing things, WITHOUT me watching over their shoulders. In the one meeting that we’ve had we have accomplished so much, and I am beyond words to say how grateful I am to be working with all of them.

As we continue through the quarter, I am looking ahead to see where our team with possibly hit speed bumps and the storming areas. I want to address some of those issues before they become issues. With a group this large, I hoping we can keep it smooth sailing and preform like no group has before. I also have loved where we grabbed ideas and content creation from everyone and everywhere. It has been really interesting putting everyone’s ideas together. (Even when we didn’t believer that we were creative before!)

Going forward, our group has created a google survey for our pre-prototype and would LOVE everyone’e feedback! Here’s the link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfuSI0Xy22v43zkg1C3hlGlX-KeXI-vmSkcqSeykSCvFq1A4g/viewform?usp=sf_link

See ya on the flip side,

Healani 😉

Change Leadership

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Change Leadership is a project that we do each quarter to learn more about ourselves and what we might do with our lives. We have challenges that we need to meet that stretch us in new ways to dig deeper into who we want to be. I love these projects and have so far enjoyed learning about myself each quarter. Can’t wait to keep y’all updated on what’s going on!

Week I

nendele on

Here’s a poem that  has given me a lot of Hope recently:

One of my biggest challenges coming up this quarter is I am not your typical writer. My thoughts are not linear or even set a direct path. That comes out in my writing more than anywhere else, because of the speed that it takes to get my thoughts out. I want to convey and help you to understand where I am coming from. So, ask questions, get curious! I love interacting with people and chasing after the answers. (All I ask is that we keep this productive and positive, as online it can be easier to feel that we can say things with a mean tone without meaning to. And I am just as much to blame as anyone else is.) I hope that all of you out there will be able to help me grow in this new version of Connection.

This week seems to have circled around scheduling and time management. I am pushing myself harder than ever to keep on task and within the given timelines, even when there are no assignments due. But for Entrepreneurship (ENTR), I have been using and testing out some of my web building skills. I have created several websites before, but all of those were more creative and personal than what we have to accomplish now. This blog itself was a long endeavor to get online and posted. The amount of writing for the rest of the website was also a long series of tasks to accomplish. But, I am over the moon with the new way of connection and creativity this will give me in the long run. I believe that this skill and quarter will push me to gather and develop new skills rapidly, as every quarter has. Therefore, I am glad to start this quarter off with a jump into the deep end of a challenge. It feels amazing to have something to push towards and work on after the anxious mess of a break I had.

I am also looking forward to seeing how this class pushes our networks to nourish and grow. In my life I have found that in times of uncertainty and fear, people tend to grow closer together, metaphorically speaking. The students and community that comes out of this time will be stronger and reach farther for their goals than who they were before this pandemic. Which means, I have loved the team meetings that I have been a part of, but would have loved to reach out more to the E1s. Coming into this community online is just one more piece to add to their anxiety, and I wish I could have found more ways to connect and treasure those looking to develop their skills.

Finally, I feel I have learned more about how to coach and mentor others. During the meetings, I wanted more than anything to chime in and become a member, but taking a step back and letting them hash it out themselves gave them a better answer. I want to learn more about listening, I want them to come to me, I wish to give them the confidence that they have accomplished their goals with their own strengths. It was amazing and powerful to be the person they looked to when they needed help, but it was even better when they found the answers themselves and grew as a team. I want to learn and grow as a coach in this new setting.

The Orange