Hello there, welcome to my blog post! In this post, I will be talking about 3 nuggets I got from the book Developing the Leaders Around You by John C. Maxwell. A quick summary, this book talks about how you can be a full potential leader with skills and techniques that can help along the way.
For my first nugget, an inspirational quote I found from the book is “I want to make a difference with people who wants to make a difference and who can make a difference during something that makes a difference”, (Pg. 3. Maxwell, J. C. (2014). Developing the Leaders Around You. The John Maxwell. This sentence describes why I want to work with other people, painting a picture about characteristics about leaders and the who, what, when, where why I want to work with other leaders. All in all, it explains my motivation in easier words. This quote is important to me because as a leader I am not always motivated to step up and work with other people. It is hard and exhausting to take responsibility when I had a bad day or if I’m just feeling tired. However, if there are people around me that want to make a difference with me (other TALONS 10’s), I am motivated to make a difference as a team. Having a team that has the same goal is useful especially when we are planning trips or activities. Staying until Y block everyday planning for future trips and activities is exciting but after a while, it gets exhausting and drains everyone’s mentality. Although being tired at the end of the day, having encouragement will get me and everyone else get through the tough thinking and precise planning. Also having more people that I can work with will make the planning go faster and more amusing.
Moving on to my second nugget, a topic I choose is about shared thinkers. If a bunch of leaders comes together, they can create bigger things, while if a leader works independently, they are limited by their own minds. This idea can mean many different things, but I believe for me it mainly focuses on collaboration and communication. If I’m working in a group with other grades 10’s I need to communicate with them to share my ideas. Furthermore, if I want to share my ideas with the new grade nine’s, I need to have my communication skill to work with them well. If I have poor communication skills, sharing minds and ideas wouldn’t happen. Having many people in a group will create amazing ideas but being a gifted learner and thinker, I think it could be possible I can think of the same things they are thinking of. However, having a bunch of gifted thinkers in a group, I am sure they will create and collaborate wonderful ideas. This creates a big impact on the planning and projects because it is difficult and confusing to plan. For example, last year I was planning the shoreline clean-up project. My team had a difficult barrier to overcome because of many factors such as COVID and parent volunteers. Although at that time it felt almost impossible to put everyone in their groups but having people drop in ideas there and then, we created a simple plan to put everyone in a group.
Finally, for my last nugget, I picked something that will stay with every TALONS student. The statement is we multiply. Multiplying basically explains itself, it exponentially grows. What Maxwell means by we in we multiply is that they are leaders. This is critically important in the classroom environment and the outside world as well. Most people in their high school years wouldn’t take leadership as their extra-course. However, the TALONS program focuses on leadership, and every year we have a new class coming in; every year all the alumni are scattered out. These alumni will possibly share and use their leadership skills in the normal high school courses. Hopefully, the people who are impacted by their leadership would be inspired and grow their skills in leadership as well. Furthermore, a bigger majority of graduates will share their leadership in the real world and become inspirational. Anyways, the idea of multiplying is critical to my leadership planning and mentoring because I believe that all the TALONS 10’s that are teaching the nines have a great responsibility to teach the newcomers. Helping the nines to develop and grow their skills in leadership and responsibility will get them ready to be the 10’s later teaching the future nines. Building a strong foundation is critical and having experience is important as well. I think the last few planning and trips were really a time of introducing and getting to know one another. Now, I think everyone is more familiar with everyone else, so I think the leadership projects will be a wonderful time to build each other’s leadership skills, so they multiply well.
During the Y blocks listening to John C. Maxwell had me learning lots of new things I never knew about leadership. He gave me more inspiration to be a more inspiring leadership and to strive for the next step and place. Thank you to everyone who stopped by to read my blog post today but for now, have a great rest of your day:)
Citations:
First Picture: https://blog.12min.com/john-maxwell-biography/
Second Picture: https://www.goalcast.com/john-c-maxwell-quotes/