Philly

On the plane heading home, I had a lot of time to reflect on my trip experience. I had a lot of fun and was very lucky to experience such historical and beautiful places and sights. I grew as a leader and a follower, I strengthened friendships, and created new ones. Leadership is a truly irreplaceable ad special program and I'm very lucky to be a part of it.

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

This trip has had a lot of influence on me as a leader. It helped me sharpen my leadership skills while being provided the opportunity to experience new context. Broadening my context has allowed me to meet new people and experience new and different need in the world. Seeing and immersing myself in a place so different than Winfield has allowed me to grow as a leader and widen my perspective. On this trip, I learned that sometimes, having some purely transactional interactions doesn’t make you a “bad” leader. Sometimes you need those transactional type moments to keep things going and functioning properly. This trip also reinforced my belief that relationships matter. Forming new relationships and strengthening them is important, and I think it is relationships that keep people inspired and passionate about hard work. Finding motivation for grueling and gritty work is no small challenge, keeping people feeling positive and encouraged is a difficult task in itself. But it’s possible and necessary. I found myself realizing that part of keeping others motivated is keeping yourself involved as well. I suppose it might be obvious to others, but I had sort of an epiphany. In order to inspire a shared vision, you must first be inspired and have inspiration to share. It’s awful hard to motivate others if you, yourself, aren’t very into what you are doing in the first place. I learned that thinking positively and thinking of every hard task as an adventure can help you go farther and do more than you originally thought you could.Read more