Leadership training

Today I had to do an all-day leadership workshop. I wasn't looking forward to it. It seemed kind of ... long. We had to do two weeks worth of RA training so I was pretty much thinking that there was nothing more I could possibly learn and that there's nothing at that workshop I haven't heard already.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

The keynote speaker was Paul Wesslemann and he's a motivational speaker type of guy. I've heard motivational speakers before. There was this one guy who was a quadriplegic, another guy who was addicted to drugs but overcame it, and a girl who used to have an eating disorder.

This guy was different because he didn't focus on his heart-wrenching past and how he somehow mustered the strength to overcome his life obstacles. Instead, he talked about all sorts of qualities we have as leaders and what we can do for ourselves that will ultimately make us better leaders, and postively affect those around us.

He said some really cool things.

First, he told us to dream big because we can have ANYTHING we want but not EVERYTHING. I'd never heard it put like that before, and it made a lot of sense.

Then he was talking about how we never have enough time for ourselves. We work so hard for school and for other people and it's usually our bodies that pay the price. We get sick and exhausted, but we don't slow down even then, we keep pushing through our sickness eventhough our bodies are telling us to stop.

He also talked about motiviation. He asked all of us to raise our hands if we considered ourselves a procrastinator. At least 90 percent of us admitted it. He told us that it's only human because we just don't like doing hard things or big projects which is usually when procrastination comes into play. So he told us not to think of it as trying to get something really hard DONE, we should just try to get it STARTED. He said that the rules of physics states that an object at rest will stay at rest and an object in motion will stay in motion. He must be good if he could get through to a journalism major with physics concepts.

But the thing that stuck with me the most is the part where he was talking about asking for help. He said that most of us would bend over backwards to help someone out. Then he asked us if we felt good after helping. Of couse we all said that we did. But then he asked us how many of us ask for help and very few of us said that we did. Then he became very serious and said "How dare you! How dare you deprive someone else of that feeling you get when you help someone." And I just sat there in shock. I had never thought about it like that before. It really gave me something to think about.

The rest of the conference was alright, but he was definitely the best part. You should check out his website. He's amazing. www.paulwesslemann.com