"The City of Brotherly Love"

What kind of influence will this trip have on you as a leader?

Learning to live/be around others for lengthy extended amount of time can be unsettling and sometimes very difficult. However, from this trip in the development of my leadership skills, I have taken away that it does not matter who you are with, what has taken place, or how relationships interact. It matters how an individual can reflect and think through how to positively link all three of these aspects to lead to great actions of leadership! As I have mentioned in a previous blog post, I have been on several other long-distance trips, and whether it was through high school groups, KNEA national conferences, or church mission trips, all required the interaction with the same group of individuals for well over a week. While these all were a very long time to be with others outside of your normal daily lives, they differed in that none of the others besides our trip to Philadelphia consisted of reflection of the leadership seen throughout the trip. This has truly been the biggest gain from my experience. Instead of falling victim to the exhaustion, annoyances, and frustrations, leaders can push that all aside and focus on how to choose that positive direction to take. This was my own personal goal for the trip because being new to the team this year, I was uneasy who I would get along with or how my leadership character would intermix with others’. Philadelphia has taught me that the individuality and differences among groups are very beneficial. We should embrace these and learn to be flexible in our own style to uphold the overall mission – and I believe that for our SC Leadership Trip to Philly, it was to better EVERYONE’S leadership skills! For future trips I am going to practice this reflection and purposeful intention of aiming to reach the trip mission through experiences of "Brotherly Love."Read more