Leadership retreat

As a second year intern I have not only the responsibility but the opportunity to help lead weekend leadership retreats for our high school aged street leaders. 

This weekend was went up to the great white north also known as Muskoka and had an awesome opportunities to continue building relationships, encourage them spiritually but also to experience with them a weekend of leadership training provided by Muskoka Woods.  

Their beautiful leadership studio has a motto of "A leader is some one who looks at their world and say it doesn't have to be this way and does something about it".

This weekend we experienced a jam backed schedule Friday night till Sunday afternoon of studying Shackleton an explorer in 1922 who lead an 28 men through an incredible, inspiring journey to the south pole. Even though Shackleton never completed the purpose and goal of his journey to the south pole he did complete his own personal goal of bring back every single one of the 28 men alive which is something that rarely happened on these excursions in that time. We learned how to chart a course using only a map and ruler, experienced the personal roles of the 28 men and talked through the many challenges and unique way Shackleton had of leading.  We also talked about self leading, personality types using the DISC test and spend an afternoon building a very challenging bridge representing the fact that as a leader you also need to be a bridge builder for your team.  

Beyond all of this my favorite part of the weekend was during of debreifs a time when we sat down and reflected on what we learned and shared. As normal people tend to be afraid to speak up and share their thoughts and ideas but our trainer had an extraordinary gift of calling people out and asking the right questions to help them working through the things they were learning as well as challenging them to not stop there. One young lady who was only 14 was very hesitant and also said statements like "I don't have a dream", "I don''t know", "There is nothing I want to do".  As she kept prodding it was discovered that she did have a dream, in fact a very big, very specific already thought out plan. She wants to go to Korea and teach English in grade two and has already started learning some Korean.  The debreif times are designed not only to help discuss the things we learned but to ignite passion, to give room to voice dreams, step out of boxes and to be stretched to confidence. 

As we finished this weekend before we walked over the suspended bridge to represent us as bridge building leaders as re entering the world that we came from we each had to stay one thing we would as a leader say doesn't have to be this way because we are going to do something about it. These young leaders also have coaches who will be checking in with them and helping them to be moving forward in their communities to be involved in a leadership role of some kind and to start chasing their dreams.