Professional Documents
Culture Documents
LEARNING CONTRACT
Goal: To identify and utilize my top VIA Strengths Honesty, Kindness, Social
Intelligence, Humor and Perspective in an organizational/interpersonal setting that aligns
with the mission, vision, values and sponsored programs and activities of URIs Center
for Student Leadership Development. To reach this goal, I decided to become a member
of URIs Student Organization Leadership Consultants (SOLC) to shadow and facilitate a
retreat.
I started by attending the meetings on Mondays at 3 pm. After attending a few meetings
and getting the feel for the group, I signed up to shadow a one hour retreat. I signed up on
the later side, so I had missed all the planning and important details, so I just observed
how the facilitators ran a retreat and how they were able to roll with whatever was thrown
at them. The group that I was observing had had only one meeting this semester, so we
did a lot of name games. And when it came to the main portion of the activity, we played
mind-field the groups were getting it so fast. I observed a facilitator completely change
the path that they had to travel and didnt write the path down but rather memorized it. I
realized that you dont have to always have a plan, and if you change something, the
participants are not going to know because they dont know what the plan even is.
After shadowing, I signed up to facilitate a four-hour retreat. I was very nervous going
into this because this was significantly longer that the retreat that I shadowed, and I didnt
know everyone that I was going to be facilitating with. It also turned out that I had a first-
time lead, so I really didnt know what to expect. However, the lead organized it so well
that we had no issues planning. I hope that every retreat planning goes as smoothly as my
first did, but the feedback that I heard from other facilitators in my group that have been a
part of SOLC for a long time that this was the smoothest and most organized retreat they
have done. I facilitated two activities, the first was with a co-facilitator and is called focus
ring. This is when a smaller group has to move a ping pong ball from the top of one cone
to the top of another cone while holding the ball on top of a ring which is attached to
multiple strings. The group can only use to strings to move the ball, and during this
specific retreat, we set up multiple challenging obstacles, muted and blindfolded certain
people, and even made them go from Atrium 1 in the Union all the way down to the
bookstore. The other activity I facilitated was the spider web, which is where a ball of
yarn gets tossed around the circle and each person gives and receives a compliment or
some form of positive affirmation, as well as holding onto a piece of the yarn. The yarn
ball gets tossed around the circle until the last person has it, and it turns out looking like a
spider web. I then had different groups of people drop the section of yarn they were
holding to show that everyone has an impact on the group and even if one person drops it,
the web is no longer the same.
My top five values are Honesty, Kindness, Social Intelligence, Humor, and Perspective.
As a facilitator, I had to know that the best way to help this group was through using my
values. I went into it being honest with myself and with the organization members,
because their main goals were to become more like a family and work better as a team.
Therefore, I couldnt ignore that there were problems and when I saw something that was
prohibiting them from growing; I had to utilize my strength Honesty to be comfortable
calling the individual out. Going off of that, my second value is Kindness and I had to
also use this when I was trying to help the group grow. Although I did call people out, I
tried to do it nicely because being called out is never fun. Using my value of Social
Intelligence, I was able to be friendly to the organization members, but I was also able to
notice when people were getting frustrated or overwhelmed with the activities and I was
able to also incorporate my value Humor into this because I would try to lighten the
mood by making people laugh or at least smile. Finally, I saw myself utilize my value
Perspective because I have been in groups or organizations who didnt get along, so
during planning I wanted to do activities such as the spider web because then everyone
leaves the event with a positive affirmation.
Overall, I learned a lot on how to facilitate a group of college students, and I also saw
myself actually use all of my top values. It is important to know that I have these values
for a reason and that I am using them through organizations that I am joining, and that the
people I am meeting and working with are pushing me towards making me the best
possible human that I can be. I am expecting to make mistakes over my time here at URI,
but I know that I will grow from making those mistakes and from being willing to try
something new.