For this extension project, I chose to respond to a friends prompt she received for her leadership class. I found this to be a unique prompt, and I thought it would be fun to respond to.

Prompt: Describe experiences in terms of lessons learned.

Reflect on learning (success and mistakes) and behavior of others. Make connections between studies and your experiences. Make creative connections with deep interpretations.

Experiences, to me, are what someone takes away from a given event. An experience can be created in a variety of ways. Often times experiences are full of lessons learned, whether they be good, or bad. Everybody has been through their own experiences, and everybody has been taught their own lessons. Learning from one’s personal experience is a valuable tool in today’s society. The fact that each person has gone down their own path and learned things in their own way is what makes all of us our own individual person. I find this fascinating because this is how we can begin to gain an understanding of the learning and behavior of others. Each person interprets an experience differently and learns different lessons through these experiences. What we learn from these experiences plays a role in one’s behavior and how they act. What we learn from a young age, from our superiors, or personal interactions with the world, help us to discover who we are.

So understanding that each one of us has been down our own paths and gone through our own experiences, it is easy to see the effects of this in my own life. One example that I experience everyday is going to class and listening to people answer the same question, but in different ways, and with different interpretations. This proves to me that, because we have all been through our own experiences, we have all developed our own way of taking information and responding to material. For me, the way I study and go through school now, results from what I have discovered, through personal experience, of what works and what doesn’t. Discovering what works for me throughout my years in school has been a lesson I have learned through my experience.

Overall experiences are full of lessons learned. The lessons we take away from these experiences are what help shape us into who we are today.  We have gone through many experiences and will continue to go through many more as long as we live. It is important to know that every experience that is experienced, and every lesson that is learned, is meant to help shape us into who we are.

Reflection: This prompt was much more difficult to answer than I initially thought it would be. It really required me to think about what an experience was to me and how my experiences impacted my life. When I first read the prompt, I thought it would be a more straightforward answer but then when i started writing about what an experience was, i found myself sorta stumped. Having to break down a prompt piece by piece like that wasn’t something I have really had to do before, and it was definitely fun to try something new. It was also interesting going into this writing piece with know knowledge of the context of the prompt given the fact that I have never taken a leadership class. Overall i’m glad I challenged myself with this writing piece.