Falling Up

Well, the last week or so has been very eventful!  To start with, I had a very productive meeting with my advisor, who gave some great advice on how to continue with my project.  We also talked at length about me developing my Philosophy of Practice for these workshops, which I think will help me immensely in terms of the issues I was having about designing content for people I don’t know.  Thanks for your help, Dr. C!

I also ran 2 more workshops, with interesting results.  The first was for a daylong workshop for Administrative staff:  office managers, admin assistants and folks in similar positions.  The day was designed to offer workshops that are relevant to those types of positions.  My topic was Office Conflict.  It went… interestingly.  So far with these workshops, I feel like I’ve done really well at the beginning, great at the end, and the middle is sort of….flat.  Not bad, just not as dynamic as the beginning and end tend to be.  Unfortunately, the middle is usually where the most content is being revealed, so this is a bad place to fall flat.  I have noticed that if the audience is a quieter group, the problem is more noticeable.  With my more active audiences, the middle flows just fine.  But I’m still working on making sure my plan keeps folks engaged throughout the entire length of time.

Also, I had a situation that I am positive I practiced for in Consulting Skills (and in a counseling class as well!)— the participant who WOULDN’T STOP TALKING!!!  When I realized that she was going to go on forever, I almost chuckled as I remembered what we covered in class about cutting people off politly.  However, my efforts were in vain!  My boss even tried to cut her off, but to no avail.  This is a large reason that the middle segment of this workshop seemed dull- it was all about her.  I began to realize that she expected me to resolve her conflict during my 1 hour workshop, which clearly I could not do.  She definitely monopolized that part of the session, and it brought down the whole workshop.  My evaluations even reflect this; several participants noted that I should’ve cut her off sooner and kept everyone involved.  So, my failure to effectively make her stop her ranting steer the conversation back to a central point really had a profound effect.  I was a bit disappointed in that one, but next time I will be VERY blunt (and polite and kind, of course…)

After that, I led 4 sessions with high school seniors at a local all-girls high school.  These 4 sessions were interesting… again I noted that the workshops definitely varied in mood depending on the blah-ness (that is a technical term, right??) of the girls.  I tailored the topic to what I thought would be useful for graduating seniors:  communication skills that can help prevent conflicts in college.  We talked about working on group projects in schools and the idea of creating team charters (I channeled the Stone Monkeys, of course- gotta give a shout out to the greatest school project group EVER!), and issues that could arise between roommates.  Overall, it went well.  After the first session, I realized that my 2nd and 3rd activities did not flow very well.  I figured out that they weren’t really meshing well with each other, and my use of the 4 I’s (J. Vella) wasn’t quite right.  I adjusted for the next group, and found that it flowed much better.  Essentially, I had tried to introduce some “technical” information, then asked them to consider some scenarios, but those 2 activities had very little in common and the segue was poor.  I changed the first activity to draw in some of their own experiences, and after that, the scenarios went much better.  Slowly, I am getting better at this!

This Saturday, I am observing a workshop for youth that the Richmond Peace Education Center is hostng.  Next week, I have another workshop for staff at a local retirement/senior living facility.  It will be my last one before my project is due, although I have another on May 6th.  I still have a lot of writing to do, but am feeling confident about the end result.  As an added bonus, my internship boss told me today that he will consider me his ‘official’ conflict resolution consultant from now on, meaning that post-graduation, I will still get to run workshops!  That’s great news and very flattering.  I will give my boss credit (albeit anonymously) for being very supportive of me during this learning process.

Lastly, I want to say (in case any of you read this) that I got to stop by the Change Strategies class last week, and it was SO nice to see my old classmates!  I miss you guys!  If I can make a pitch, I have to say that the Adult Learning program at VCU is one of the most nurturing and supportive environments I have ever been a part of.  I was glad to have a few minutes to chat with everyone.

Stay tuned as I finish up this project and try not to have a mental breakdown doing it…. 8 days till it’s due…!!!

It’s 1:30 am…or 2:30 am, depending on which time zone you’re in, and I’ve just settled into my hotel room in Austin, TX, where I’ll be for the next couple days.  I’m here attending the national conference on Conflict Resolution.   I have been waiting for this conference for months, which sounds pretty dorky, but I’ve got high hopes!  I need a job, a thesis idea, and, I love the BookPeople (local bookstore) and Austin in general!  So, I’m looking forward to the next few days.  I just finished browsing the workshops being offered, and they all sound spectacular.  There are workshops on cross-cultural issues in mediation, forgiveness, the war in Iraq, doing conflict resolution with kids, gosh, millions more and I am going to have SUCH a hard time picking just a few to attend.  I really love a good speaker and I have a great feeling that this conference will really help me focus in on how to finish up my last semester of school and make plans for a career.

Of course, being here means I will be missing class tomorrow, so I wanted to jot some thoughts on the flute article…Yanow and Cook.  I read that article and felt kind of sheepish.  As I read it, Cook and Yanow write it sounding a bit exasperated with the standard school of thought, which is, naturally, what I had subscribed to until I finished reading the article on the plane.  I majored in Anthropology in undergrad, and I feel like I should’ve “known” that culture was going to tie in somewhere.  Of course, I am just learning all of this, so I don’t feel too bad.  But I loved their premise, and it does make much more sense than the other two theories on org learning. 

It’s funny, their argument that org learning is a group’s ability to ‘learn how to do what it does’, which builds an organizational culture over time, sort of addresses some of my gripes in previous posts about how hard it is to get people and orgs to change.  I was looking at it from the individualist view, and was stressed out just thinking about trying to get ALllllll of those people to change.  But looking through a cultural lens makes more sense to me, and also explains why it is in fact so hard to change sometimes- it is never as simple as getting a few people to change their minds or their ways.  Darn.

Old School mediation:

I better stop here…those great workshops won’t be too great if I’m falling asleep through them.  But, I will try to blog more throughout the weekend.  Last, thanks to my mirrors and others who left such nice thoughts for me about my confidence woes last week.  What a lift!