Blog #8

When i think of pecks theory i look no further then my lacrosse team from my senior season in high school. We went through all these stages and grew as people and players.

The first stage, pseudocommunity, is described as one where there doesn't seem to be many problems and people get along. My team was much like this because almost all of us were really good friends and we hung out outside of school all the time. Everything seemed like we would be one of the most close knit teams i would be a part of. 

The next stage comes from different individuals stating their views and that leads to chaos. My team very clearly went through this at the beginning of our season. Many people believed that our coach didn't really know what he was doing. They questioned who he played and many of our playing strategies. There started to be a schism between the guys that supported the coach and guys that didn't. 

the next stage is the realization of the barrier that is being built from the disagreement. we had a large fight breakout in our locker room and realized it was time to sit down and talk about our issues. We held a captains meeting and talked everything out and fixed all the issues so we could move on which led to the next stage. 

The final stage was the team coming together. We finally started to win games after starting the season off with a lot of losses and started playing like a team. We ended up getting everything together and went on a long playoff run that ended at the hands of a team that won four straight championships and we were the only team to lose by just 1 to them. 

I learned a lot from this experience and i believe the application of pecks theory was something that came naturally to us and if we had known about it before we could have turned things around earlier before it became a serious problem in our locker room.  

Blog #7

As an upper class white male who is straight I pretty much fit in the non target identities for nearly every single facet of life. There is obviously nothing I did to choose whether I was or wasn't born into the family that I was born into. I feel like it is important for me to realize my privilege as I am about as privileged as a person can get. But I also feel that I shouldn't feel ashamed of my background either. I was lucky enough to be born into a great situation and I didn't take it for granted so I did all the work i needed to in order to be accepted into my dream school. I realize that having all of these benefits helped me achieve that, I also know that there are people in my same class as white males from upper class families that are straight and they don't succeed because they don't give any effort. I don't personally think anything is given nobody is handed anything in this world the difference between someone with these benefits and someone without them are just obstacles. For instance it may be harder for someone from a lower class family to pay for college so that's something I don't have to worry about necessarily but that doesn't mean that I was just "handed" my acceptance letter or my degree. I still have to work to get what I want granted it is easier and I realize that but I don't think the word "handed" should be used for people from my background.

Probably the only thing working against me, and it is only in select situations, is my age. I am the youngest of three kids in my family as well as the youngest of all my cousins. My whole life whenever with my family my opinions and thoughts on most things were not taken seriously because the older people didn't really respect them as much as the older wiser peoples opinions. I like to think of this as an advantage for my growth as a human though because one of my biggest skills in life is being able to listen to people and i believe strongly that came from being the youngest and never getting a chance to speak I was able to close my mouth and open my ears and really take in all the wisdom my family members had to offer.

Post #7 LPI results

After taking the exam i came out with the results of enabling others to act and encouraging the heart as perfect scores which doesn't really surprise me because my leadership style has always been through building my teammates or followers up and helping them be as productive as possible. I scored lowest in challenging the process which also doesn't surprise me because i am the least rebellious person i know and like to just follow the rules and lead by the book so to speak. These results reflected a lot of what the strengths quest exam came out with and therefore i wasnt surprised to see the results i got. I dont think i need to work on challenging the process because i think that an average score in that is ideal because that way you dont go too far with challenging the proccess where you step into things like illegal activity but you do enough to not settle for less than efficient.

Random act of kindness

Although it seems like an all together selfless thing to be kind and help someone in need it adds a lot of joy to the person doing the acts life as well. I believe if everyone made an effort to try to do something nice for someone in their life every day the world would be a much happier place

My good friend recently had surgery on his knee and has been really struggling to get around in recent days. I really felt bad for him because he was really struggling with getting to class and doing anything that he likes to do. So I decided on friday to bring him his favorite food chipotle right when he got back from class. its so easy for me to get up and walk to chipotle and walk back and i had noting better to do at the time so i figured why not try to reach out for him. He was extremely grateful and even though i got nothing out of it, the joy i felt to see how grateful he was that i did something like that for him was enough for me.

Its important to think about how easy such a small thing can be for you to do and how much it can change somebodys mood around so quickly.

Moral Muteness

There was one time in my life that always comes to mind when i think of times i should have spoken up about something that was wrong but didn't. My best friend from home had a girlfriend of 4 years. He always talked about how much he was miserable with her but we all thought he was just saying that to sound cool and that he actually did really like her. Right when we graduated high school we went on a senior trip to the outer banks where we met up with this group of kids and we knew like two out of the 12 kids who were living in that house. He hooked up with one of the girls in that house all week and my best friends sister right before we left (which i found out later). He continued to hook up with this girl he met at the outer banks when we got back and just hid it from his girlfriend. Now being his best friend and the fact they dated for 4 years i knew his girlfriend very well and thought she was really nice. I never said anything to her and found out that last week they broke up cause their relationship had been deteriorating for the last year or so. Maybe if i had just spoken up at that time they could have avoided being together for a year where they didn't even like each other anymore. But also would have been crossing a moral line to tell when my best friend since i was 5 told me to keep it a secret. But looking back on it i believe they both would have been better off if i had told her.

IAT test results

This was a very intriguing and interesting assignment as it got me thinking about  my views on certain subjects.

I did the presidents test first which led to some interesting discoveries. Although i dont agree with the way that test works in every aspect of it i believe it somewhat works because it did get my preference right in my first test as i am slightly conservative so it guessed that through that test. I find it extremely intriguing that with just pressing two buttons it found out what my thoughts were on that.

The next test was the weight one and that also figured me out. It found out that i had a preference to skinny people which is interesting because i guess i do in a way but like it isnt a hatred for fat people which it kind of made it seem that way it is more just a im skinny so i associate with skinny people better

I did the race one cause i thought that was an interesting thing to test. I got little to no preference and wasnt surprised at all cause i grew up in a very diverse accepting area and i dont really have a preference on color of skin.

Overall this experience was very interesting because although i didnt believe that pressing a couple buttons had anything to do with my preferences i agreed with every one of my tests so i would say its a useful technology and was overall a very interesting activity but it is only a piece of the puzzle for finding your preferences it isnt a final answer type of thing.

Example of leadership model

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FKPDOpKzDo

This clip is from the movie Coach Carter. This movie is full of great examples of leadership. In this clip and throughout the movie he shows ethics in that he takes these kids future off the court as more important than on the court. He shows them that class is more important than basketball and that these kids future was more important to him than a few wins on the court. It shows inclusiveness through him trying to make sure every kid is being a better student and getting them all involved in their schoolwork. He is empowering his players to become better men and go to college and make it out of the crappy situations they are in. And it is purposeful because the leadership he showed forcing these kids to do well in school and get into college makes these kids do something purposeful with their lives and fix their situations