Post #9

Team and Organizational Leadership class has made me come to like self-reflecting quizzes. When I first took the strengths quest quiz my freshman year I did not really think much of it. Honestly thought most of these answer it was giving me were wrong or just skimmed the surface of who I am. This class has changed that perspective for me. After diving deeper into my strengths quest quiz and taking more quizzes I realized that the answers began to not only come up similar but also really reflect who I am as a person. These answers all of a sudden became tools that I could use to further understand my communication skills, my relationship skills and my leadership skills.  One of the standout moments in the class was the love language quiz. I find it so interesting how communication evolves and how it affects people. Taking the quiz I found that I am the kind of person that feels love through quality time with others. Funny, how that hit it nail on the head. Moving from this class and recognizing that is how I feel appreciated I am going to look for opportunities to spend time with the people I care about and recognize when people make time for me. While I received quality time there were other options of love languages and by recognizing that not everyone fits into one category is a huge skill. Making someone feel appreciated in general is a piece of relationships that can go by the wayside. This quiz uncovers why appreciation is not communicated effectively. Understanding how someone feels appreciated gives you a better look into who they are and allows your relationship with that person to grow. This is one of the biggest take aways to me because networking is a huge part of who I am and who I want to be. In the career path I want to be in networking is key. It is all about whom you know and those relationships you build. One of those building blocks of a relationship is appreciation for the other person.  Building upon relationships another point that I took from this class is the importance of an authentic community. Team and Organizational Leadership class took the term for community and put depth to it. A community is created in four stages and those four stages can take time. Realizing how important each step to creating a community has made me realize how grateful I am that I am apart of a few authentic communities. I want to pursue more authentic communities and keep the ones I am currently apart of intact. In these communities I feel comfortable enough to share my ideas but I also have to remember to participate in active listening, two things that leadership skills play into. As a leader I have learned that it is important to actually effectively lead followers and communicate ideas. On the other side of things though being a listener is harder and may be more important. Without listening to others a leader is not as genuine as they can be. Another lesson I want to practice in my life as I grow throughout my life. Overall, I have really enjoyed my time in the Team and Organizational Leadership class. 

Post #8

My high school experience was dictated by the fact that I played soccer. Our girls' soccer program had been state champions in previous years and had produced all-americans. I remember my first soccer camp as a fifth grader and looking up to the girls of the varsity team admiring how close they all were and I remember saying that is a team. When it was my freshman year in high school the amount of new faces was overwhelming I of course fell back to my safety spot on the soccer team. When we first began the adventure of varsity soccer my freshman year I believe a pseudo community was formed. The seniors that lead the team that year had good intentions but I don't even think they knew the names of the freshman girls. It felt a bit fake as older girls bonded and the freshman girls sat their thinking what were doing here? We thought because of our age that this was ok. But as Peck states it was a very underdeveloped community.
As we continued through our high school careers gaining more and more responsibility on the team obviously more people were added and there seemed to be a conflict of ideas. Chaos was created. Some girls weren't as focused as others and it showed on the field. Ages once again became a deciding factor in who you got really close with on the team and within those ages cliques of different girls formed. This was a recipe for disaster if you are trying to bring back a state championship. We had the mold but weren't sticking together. What I think is really interesting about Peck's theory for the path out of chaos is that I believe this community went through both organization and emptiness. The team went through organization my junior year as our coach handed down strict rules and the seniors leading the team matched that. I remember specific instances in practice that year thinking wow our these girls serious? While this seemed to be a dictatorship all of a sudden it did break down a lot of the cliques and establishing a structure allowed our performance on the field to become routine. Something was beginning to blossom but it was not quite there yet.
It was finally my class's senior year and day one we had a meeting with our head coach and decided that this year was going to be different. This class of seniors was going to set a different mood. We took on the idea of emptiness and acknowledge the fact that we were not going to anywhere individually but that everyone on that team that year played a critical role in what we wanted to accomplish. With the seniors taking that mentality it filtered out throughout the team. The different ages never formed cliques and there was a sense of structure but no where near to what it was like the prior year. That was when we as New Trier Girls Soccer became an authentic community. While we accomplished many things that year, including bringing home a state title, breaking Illinois soccer records, donating thousands of dollars to community programs, but the best legacy as seniors we left was that sense of community. I recognize that this is an authentic community because even though girls have now come and gone we can always go back and our welcomed with open arms. I am two years out now and I still get giddy when I see our field and our girls playing on it. The biggest sentiment to the NTGS community is that everyone who graduates no matter how long ago still feels that they are apart of that community.

Blog #7

The discussion about target and non-target identities, including the amazing presentation by Nihal, has been one of my favorite classes thus far. The fact that these identities and non-identities are incredibly sensitive is what I think makes them most important to discuss. Our culture today is so stubborn with the treatment of people based on these identifiers and there lack of them that to not shed light on the subject would be unjust. I believe our culture today has to work on its skill of listening to other's stories rather then making a preemptive judgment based on identifiers.

For me personally one of the few targeted identities in my life is where I am from. I am from a smaller town north of Chicago on what is called The North Shore. I went to New Trier High school where many incredible people have built their lives on. While all that is great the stigma about The North Shore is that stuck-up snotty CEO's that have old family money and attended New Trier High school previously as well, now send their kids and grandkids to New Trier to continue the cycle. The North Shore is littered with people exactly like that but my experience is very very different. While yes my family held on to stay in this area for the nationally known school systems, my parents worked for themselves and had my brother and I working as soon as we could. My childhood and schooling experience was incredibly impactful as I made some life long friends, received an amazing education from nationally ranked schools and lived in a comfortable home. This environment does not make me who I am though, I believe it is how we react in such environments that prove more who you are as a person. I could recognize the over the top ridiculous of some of the people around me and to put it simply just realize that that wasn't real life. I knew that as soon as I could I would give my thanks to the North Shore and be on my way to experience life instead of just coast through it.

A non-target identity that I fit with is a white female, specifically focusing on the race. I have never had to experience racism in the ways we have seen it in our world. The amount of grief people our caused for their authentic skin color is never something I have had to deal with and I cannot imagine the oddness and pain people must feel for just being themselves. This is something that needs to change. The fact that remarks and judgements are made solely on an identifier such as race is wrong. There is so much hate when race is covered and the reasoning for it has never and will never be valid. People are people.