The second project was about creating your network. Networks are an incredibly important thing to everyone in the world. Your network is what gives you strength and help when you are creating things. And so we were pushed to find out who was our network now and how to expand it this quarter. It was an amazing and long journey. I got to talk to and meet so many amazing people in so many different ways. I love learning about their stories and connecting with them. So here it is:
Part One – Nourishing Networks Now
- Ultimate frisbee
- A large group of friends and new faces that come together each week to play Ultimate frisbee or other games
- DND
- A small select group of close friends who play Dungeons and Dragons once every other week
- International Business Club and Major
- A title for the people that I interact with through my classes and the business school, specifically in the area of international business
- Entrepreneurship and Innovation Minor/Community
- A collection of people within the school and community that I connect with to share ideas and experiences and made changes to the world
- National Residence Halls Honorary
- The group of people that I work with and manage on a weekly basis for increasing leadership skills within student leadership in the dorms
Once there was a small girl who had no friends and didn’t have the network to help make her dreams into a reality. She would go into the library at lunch and curl up in a secluded corner with her books to read the time away. After a while she got so used to the small corner that she forgot what it was like to hang out in the sun with no walls around her. This was her way of dealing with the pain that she was feeling. If she just kept hiding in the corner, the loneliness wouldn’t be able to find her. For a time that peace lasted and the girl wasn’t happy, but she wasn’t sad or hurting. But then one day her corner wasn’t able to keep her safe anymore. The loneliness and pain found her and she lost all of the support she had built in that secluded cave of a corner. The girl ended up falling into a darkness that she couldn’t climb out of on her own. But she didn’t have any friends to help her climb out either. It was so dark and cold, but the worst part was how alone she found herself. The dreams she had once held as a child always had others in the image. Without those hands reaching out to help her achieve her goals, there was nowhere to go and the future looked to bleak. As she crawled out of the corner, she realized that she needed to find what happiness meant to her. She went on a journey and talked to many different people from all walks of life to understand where they found their joy in life. But it was a conversation with her father that gave her the understanding of herself to find her sense of joy. He said that his joy came from his kids, her. It was a powerful conversation that lasts in her memory for years to come. From that moment on, she found her joy in the people that she cared about and surrounded herself with.
Moving forward through time, the girl is now surrounded by many different groups of people that want to support her. She has a few groups of close friends who support her mental health and help her keep her eyes on the joy in life. One is a large group of friends that play ultimate frisbee every week. Another is her DND group. Without their support she wouldn’t have the strength to get out of bed each day. They are her lifeforce. The ultimate group is a wide range of people that come from all walks of life to just play a fun game of ultimate frisbee without the anxiety of being good at a sport or being athletic enough to compete. While the DND group is a small group of close friends that sit at a table and talk through imaginary problems together. Both groups hold very different environments and ideals, but they both give her joy and fun. Unfortunately, life without a purpose is a bland experience. It lacks the flavor and spices that keeps her attention and ideas flowing. She finds support for her purpose (finding it and pursuing it) within a few groups she surrounds herself with. One of those groups is the international business club and major. They have the skills and tools that let her understand and reach out to the people and places that interest her. These groups connect her with the resources she needs to make money and have the base skills to jump into the modern international community and create real change. These are necessary and helpful to gain and gather, but without a goal to reach for, they become useless. And so the second group comes into play, the entrepreneurship community. Even though she is new and just beginning to create connections in the community, she already knows that they have helped her find her purpose in life. She has not only explored how her internal systems work and operate, but been able to use them in new ways that she hadn’t thought about before. These led her deeper into understanding herself and why she has the drive to do anything. As she moves forward with both these communities, she hopes to create long-lasting relationships that she can deepen and depend upon. The last group in her network is the National Residence Halls Honorary or NRHH. This group of people have helped her get a job to pay the bills along with giving her the opportunity to expand the skills of leadership that she cares about. Each week she helps lead a meeting to give advice and create change for the kids within the residence halls on campus. The people in this group are the farthest away from her in terms of close ties, but they are where she has started to reach out and develop her connections. Since she started the job with a mind focused only on the task at hand, she almost missed the chance to get to know the people she works with as friends. They are all amazing people that she had written off. Now, she is trying to meet up a few times for coffee or food outside of their meetings to understand the people behind the business.
All these groups have different purposes in the girls life. Some are there as support for health, some help with ideas and skills, while some are there for their future potential. They all have the chance and ability to develop into better relationships if she lets them. They could become closer friends or partners in future ventures. All the connections that she makes have the ability to transfer into different categories of strength and help. The biggest challenge that the girl faces is opening up to those networks and having the courage to start conversations. The beginning is the scariest part to her, and therefore she has taken a long time to reach the point that she is at with the networks that she has. But she also acknowledges how far she has come. She is starting to stand in the sun and let its warmth into the body. It radiates from inside out when you have a strong support network. She has let herself be open to people starting conversations with her and letting others pursue relationships with her instead of bracing for the pain that might come with being open.
Part Two – Take people from inside the minor a have a chat to increase your networks
Aida
I got to meet with Aida in the underground coffee house and just talk about what’s upcoming in life and what has led us to be in the positions that we are today. It was amazing to hear about where other people come from and how they came to be the people they are today. Aida has been setting up the trip to Portugal and Greece for this summer while running her own venture and completing the event planning project with all the other E3s. This is on top of her other school work. That is simply incredible. I am amazed and so thankful to have these wonderful people around me. She was one of the easiest people to actively set up a meeting with, even with the amount of things that she is juggling at a time. I learned that you need to thank and value people for the time that they grace you with no matter what, because you never know what they are balancing behind the scenes. Sitting with Aida gave me an idea of the type of leader I want to be. She was inquisitive and interested in learning about me, while she also let me ask the questions I had for her. I am so happy I did this, as now I am working alongside Aida as a student leader for the Portugal trip. This is one of the best ways I can see nourishing networks coming into play. I reached out and started a connection that has now led me into an incredible opportunity.
Zosha
I met with Zosha because she reached out to me. This was more of a happenstance meeting than any of the others that I had this quarter. I met with her in the Underground coffee house before class. This was a meeting that held a purpose to it. We had decided to look through and take the E2 exam together. We know now that was not what the instructions of the test were, but at the time it made sense for how the minor was set up. But it was a totally different experience to that of all my other meetings because we held a purpose to it. The way we talked and connected with one another was completely focused and evenly split. In the other meeting that I had set up and decided to pursue had a very different feel to them. I believe that is because we had a driving force and reason to meet that we both understood and knew we wanted to accomplish in a set amount of time, while the other meetings I set up had more of an ambiguous purpose to them and it fell mostly to me to ask the inciting questions. The way that we communicated was so different depending on who, how, and where the meeting was set up. It was an incredible thing to learn through just one abnormal meeting. I also learned a ton about Zosha herself. It was a time where we could get to the goal of the project at our own speed and sometimes go on tangents about our own lives and values. She is an incredible person who wants to go her own way, with the drive to push anyone who disagrees with her view to the side. It was awesome being able to work on this project with her as I had never spoken with her before. She struck up a conversation with me all on her own and that skill and confidence is still something that I am trying to learn in my life right now.
Olivia
Another person I tried to connect with this quarter was Olivia, unfortunately I was not able to make it to any of the meeting times we set up at the end. This was a place where I learned that not everything you do will work out the way you plan it to. Sometimes things will shift and go arie and you must go on anyways.
Part Three – Go to a networking event within the minor
I decided to go to the Facilitated Leadership course offered this quarter. I got to meet and work with a group of about ten total people from across all the different stages of the minor. We all met up for ten hours split evenly across two days. This led us to diving into extreme depths of each others strengths and communication styles while learning about topics within the realm of facilitated leadership. The class was produced in a very unique manner, as all the entrepreneurship classes are, with the instructors being very open and honest about the background creation of the class structure and topics. The second class we were all given the outline or storyboard used to produce the class because we requested it after the first day. This was an amazing turn around. In one week, we had given feedback and came back to have the class given what we asked and had the changes we asked for implemented into the second day. That was an incredible thing to experience within my community. But it wasn’t the only impressive thing about the class. The people I met and interacted with absolutely blew me away in terms of themselves. One of the people I met with was Max. Now this human is one heck of a human. He does so many things and has a layer of confidence that I am still trying to replicate. Coming into the class I did know Max and we play ultimate together, but getting to work with him in an academic setting was a different layer of him that I hadn’t seen before (as we are different E levels). It made me realize that even if you know someone from somewhere else, put them in a new setting and who knows what they will surprise you with. Another rad person I got to work with was Anna. Anna has a completely different view on the world than I do. Her perception of how words were intended and used gave me insight into how groups work together and how they can have individual goals they are working towards. I loved getting to discuss the ideas that we were interpreting in the second class. It was a door that I had never thought of opening. She also gave me the opportunity to possibly partner with her in a venture that I am trying to get up off the ground right now. Entering this class, I had no idea what to expect, but to bring all the energy I could muster for a few days of deep learning. So, I prepared by gathering myself and giving me time to process and adapt to the new styles of learning. By preemptively asking myself for grace I let myself grow faster than I had in a long time. It was a class I would want to take again to learn more from myself and the new classmates that I would have.
Part Four – Take people outside the minor out to increase your network
Anthony
I took my coworker Anthony out for coffee after a long week of classes for the both of us. He is an engineering major in his last year at Western. He is a very dedicated worker who wants nothing more than for everyone to do the best they can with what they have. First off, I learned that this was a meeting that was extremely difficult to set up. The first time we had set to get coffee, we both got the times wrong and ended up missing each other because of an issue in communication. The next time we set up to meet was at breakfast a week later, and that also fell through. Either way it felt fated not to be. But miraculously we both ended up with a break in between classes at the same time later that day. It was a great way to start by just being able to laugh over the many issues we had run into. I was extremely thankful to get to sit and talk with Anthony more in depth than we had previously been able to. He had incredible insights and grace for the people around him. We only met up for 45 minutes that day, but it was a nice peaceful break in the middle of what was a hectic day and week. Over the time we talked, I learned a lot about how Anthony perceived ideas and communication styles within our combined circles of friends and colleagues, but also about how I had been working and thinking about the job that I held. He opened my eyes to a new side of myself and the people we work with. So while we did not discuss many new topics outside of our jobs and how they interacted, we did still learn a lot about each other and how we were dealing with the stressors we were under.
Yocasta
I took a different approach to learning about Yocasta. She is my suitemate in the dorms this year. And while by living with each other we should have already known a bit about each other, I did not know her before the beginning of this quarter as neither of us spend time in the dorm. This was something that I decided I wanted to remedy. So, I spent more time in the joint room we shared by doing homework and hanging out in order to catch her for the few minutes she was coming in and out of the dorm. I started by just asking how her day was, and trying to see if there was anything in her classes that I could help her understand. She is a freshmen this year taking a lot of GURs, so I had a bit of knowledge that I could share. And so each night, I would sit in the common area and wait for her to come home, just to ask a few questions and check in on her. I wanted to connect and create a place for her to come back and feel that someone cared when she came back. It took some time, but recently she has been coming back earlier and will sit and just chat with me. We are friends now who also live together, instead of people who happen to live together. This may be an example that doesn’t quite fit the criteria of the assessment, but I felt the end goal was to expand our networks. With this goal in mind, I choose to put my energy into connecting with a girl I didn’t know, but lived with, through not coffee, but my own methods and our community space.
