Rachel Ann's Top Ten & Habitude
Top Ten Things I Learned During Staff Training-Summer 2006
10. People are people and so demand our utmost respect at all times-even before our morning coffee or if they say or do things I disagree with. I spend so much time at the café touting respect for our brothers and sisters around the world, but I forget to respect the ones that God has given me to work with this summer.
9. Not one of the members of the team can be removed without ruining the entire team’s structure. Everyone is here for a purpose.
8. Food has a powerful way of bonding people together. While teambuilding activities and games strengthen our bonds, meals are where we learn to be friends and not merely co-workers.
7. I’m a big believer in judging books by their covers, but that doesn’t work with people.
6. Things change; people change. For good, for bad-it happens. We must accept that.
5. Removing oneself, even for a day, from the outside world can have a dramatic effect on views toward the world, others and oneself.
4. The best learning happens when we follow our little kid instincts and let play open our minds to new ideas.
3. Diverse backgrounds make for great friendships. My entire life I have fully lived out "birds of a feather flock together." Training, however, helped me to become unbelievably close to people with different backgrounds, upbringings, hometowns and approaches to theology.
2. Get passionate, and maybe even express some righteous anger, but keep it REAL.
1. It’s not about you, or me or any of us.
Whitewater Rafting Habitude
One of the more humorous realizations that our boat stumbled upon while whitewater rafting is that each of our team members responds to tree branches coming at our faces in different ways. By the end of out trip, I swear that our guide steered us toward trees just to see how things would play out. Our approaches fell into three basic categories: 1) the person who thought of no one; 2) the twosome that worked together; 3) and the person concerned only with himself. I was the person who thought of no one-not even really myself. When faced with the problem of tree branches I let them hit them thinking that I would be fine because I had on a thick PFD and a helmet. Never once did I consider that the branches were hitting me and then coming back at Marty’s face with great force. Because of my lack of foresight both of us were hit in the face with tree branches. Our guide was the other extreme; he thought only of himself. Steering us into branches to see what we would do is selfish AND he had a better, higher view than everyone else and dove and ducked his way through all the branches successfully. The best technique was the one employed by Zac and Sarah Beth. They would sufficiently duck so that both of them would escape the tree branches. Sarah Beth would tell Zac the particulars of the branches, if necessary, and Zac would tell Sarah Beth that they were coming up if she was distracted. Neither of them were hit with tree branches.
Summer time conflicts are much like those tree branches. We can choose to take a small loss on our part because it’s easier than thinking ahead which forces someone else to get hit much harder. That’s the trouble with apathy-it didn’t hit me too hard, but Marty now has a black eye. We can look out only for ourselves, but in the process we could cause more troubles for our teammates. Or we could commit to take care of one another, inform our teammates when branches are coming up and work through the problem together so that no one gets smacked in the face.
10. People are people and so demand our utmost respect at all times-even before our morning coffee or if they say or do things I disagree with. I spend so much time at the café touting respect for our brothers and sisters around the world, but I forget to respect the ones that God has given me to work with this summer.
9. Not one of the members of the team can be removed without ruining the entire team’s structure. Everyone is here for a purpose.
8. Food has a powerful way of bonding people together. While teambuilding activities and games strengthen our bonds, meals are where we learn to be friends and not merely co-workers.
7. I’m a big believer in judging books by their covers, but that doesn’t work with people.
6. Things change; people change. For good, for bad-it happens. We must accept that.
5. Removing oneself, even for a day, from the outside world can have a dramatic effect on views toward the world, others and oneself.
4. The best learning happens when we follow our little kid instincts and let play open our minds to new ideas.
3. Diverse backgrounds make for great friendships. My entire life I have fully lived out "birds of a feather flock together." Training, however, helped me to become unbelievably close to people with different backgrounds, upbringings, hometowns and approaches to theology.
2. Get passionate, and maybe even express some righteous anger, but keep it REAL.
1. It’s not about you, or me or any of us.
Whitewater Rafting Habitude
One of the more humorous realizations that our boat stumbled upon while whitewater rafting is that each of our team members responds to tree branches coming at our faces in different ways. By the end of out trip, I swear that our guide steered us toward trees just to see how things would play out. Our approaches fell into three basic categories: 1) the person who thought of no one; 2) the twosome that worked together; 3) and the person concerned only with himself. I was the person who thought of no one-not even really myself. When faced with the problem of tree branches I let them hit them thinking that I would be fine because I had on a thick PFD and a helmet. Never once did I consider that the branches were hitting me and then coming back at Marty’s face with great force. Because of my lack of foresight both of us were hit in the face with tree branches. Our guide was the other extreme; he thought only of himself. Steering us into branches to see what we would do is selfish AND he had a better, higher view than everyone else and dove and ducked his way through all the branches successfully. The best technique was the one employed by Zac and Sarah Beth. They would sufficiently duck so that both of them would escape the tree branches. Sarah Beth would tell Zac the particulars of the branches, if necessary, and Zac would tell Sarah Beth that they were coming up if she was distracted. Neither of them were hit with tree branches.
Summer time conflicts are much like those tree branches. We can choose to take a small loss on our part because it’s easier than thinking ahead which forces someone else to get hit much harder. That’s the trouble with apathy-it didn’t hit me too hard, but Marty now has a black eye. We can look out only for ourselves, but in the process we could cause more troubles for our teammates. Or we could commit to take care of one another, inform our teammates when branches are coming up and work through the problem together so that no one gets smacked in the face.
posted by Marty @ 5:54 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home