Dear friends and colleagues - Leadership and Hardiness 2013 recently returned from Mt. Adams with many memorable moments and epic experiences. It was a long awaited journey with tremendous introspective work and much growth. As many of you know, we conclude this course with an experiential exercise of climbing Mt. Adams, for we firmly recognize that in order for us to learn about leadership hardiness we need to engage an Aristotelian tradition that "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them". The course integrated a blend of didactic but mostly experiential learning captured from learning about hardiness through Frankl's narrative account, film on stress/adversity, analysis of a poem, health and exercise plan, interview with Kay, a personal reflection, and an organizational case study. Kolb, who was largely influenced by Dewey, Lewin, Piaget, and others deconstructed the basis of experiential learning as involving * concrete experience, * reflective observation, * abstract conceptualization, and * active experimentation. We are interested in learning through reflection on doing given that we have been actively involved in the experience - arguably for many weeks and not just on Mt. Adams. It is following the experience on Mt. Adams and ongoing reflection that we will begin to use analytical skills to conceptualize the experience of the past 10 weeks. Finally, it is experiential learning and reflection that will contribute to developing a higher order understanding of hardiness in order to use and scaffold new ideas gained from this experience.
So once again, a reflection is strictly that - your own subjective story - a narrative on how the course content, colleagues, and experiential exercise on Mt. Adams impacted your learning, growth, search for meaning, will to meaning, '(trans)formation', leadership, strength, clarity, and future. Consider how this course and final experiential exercise that required a physical, mental and spiritual challenge provided you with a new context for leadership and/or coping with adversity. What did you learn about yourself from the context of this course? What do you plan to with content gained from this course? Consider implications of these experiences for organizations or your personal life. You have license to be creative in how you capture this reflection. These are just some simple thoughts to get you thinking about this final reflection.
Most importantly - Have FUN and ENJOY the reflection.
Please comment on this blog with your reflective posts when ready.
(click on image to enlarge)
