Magnify conference time! We were in a full immersion with ourselves during the first week of personal development course, then we dove into the New Orleans world of non-profit and youth leadership. Creative juices flowing: ideas laughters, words, online tools, to dos left and right… It easy to get swallowed in the complexity of managing our work.
Today we had a session on time management. We all took the time to reflect about how we organize our work. What prevents us from doing what we want to do, when we want to do it? How do we communicate? How do we keep track of our good ideas? How do we set deadline, organize our to dos? How do we maintain a positive work/life balance? In our session we were reminded that ‘life happens’ and we need to have tools to account for this. He suggests a weekly ‘meeting with ourselves’ to think through what has happened (and what has not!), plan for the following week, and process some of our lessons learned.
I tuck away from the group for a very official ‘meeting with myself’. I told myself I would write a blog last week (obviously need to work on my time management!). Here are my notes:
– We can to have a bigger voice!
– I want to keep learning, and have a platform to share our lessons!
In the last three years, I have done a ton of my personal and professional learning through Recrear. The ideas that emerged working together in intercultural spaces, and working in different parts of the world pop up in my brain at unexpected times of the day. They are lost in unrecorded conversations, or filed away in the abyss of google drive. Some of what we have learned as an organization gets assimilated in new best practices, and not understood anymore as a ‘lesson learned’.
This year, I want to make a commitment to brushing the dust off these lessons and to putting them in perspective. In 2013/14, I will be extracting some meaningful anecdotes in a monthly ‘what we have learned’ series. This process will be a way for us to tell the story of our trial and errors, of some of the things we have learned working with different organization and talking to all the young people we have met so far. I want to take the time to connect some dots because we need to be aware of what we have learned so far to make sure not to repeat the same mistakes. Personally, I am seeing this series as an opportunity to set up a monthly ‘meeting with myself’ and re-travel some of my Recrear adventures.
– Gioel G.
