Final Day

I can’t believe it’s already the last night of NGLA. I feel like I just got here, but in that short time I have learned so much about leadership in Greek life. This morning’s presentation was Phired Up, which I’m sure many of you Greeks at home remember from a few years ago when they came to BSU for a full day workshop. Although this presentation only lasted an hour, it was a nice refresher course for me on Social Excellence and I had a pretty great conversation with a brother of Alpha Sigma Phi from New Jersey. I hope everyone else from BSU had some quality conversations this morning too.

There have been a lot of new ideas flying around here at NGLA, but it can be difficult to implement those ideas after returning to campus. At my first session of the day, “Making Change Happen: Understanding How to Implement your Action Plan”, I got some great strategies for bringing new ideas to life. Something really shocking that I learned at this session was that, apparently I’m only going to remember 20% of what I learned this weekend (it’s okay though, my notebook agreed to handle the rest) and all of you at home will only remember 20% of what I bring back! (that’s 4%, I had to use a calculator too, don’t worry). Good news though, the presentation included strategies to increase and maximize that percentage, and I guarantee that I will be bringing back much more than 4% of what I learned.

I was lucky enough to get one of the last chairs in Antonio Neves’s session “How to Create Your Own Luck” (or maybe I created my own luck to get that chair? Not going to lie, I power-walked over when someone said there was an empty seat). He gave some really great advice which I plan to apply to both my fraternity and my personal life. There was far too much information in that session for me to type out in a blog (we’ll be here forever), and I’m still working on fully processing the ideas, but it never occurred to me until today that luck doesn’t just happen by chance. As Antonio Neves put it, Luck = opportunity + preparation, and looking back on times that I’ve had “good luck” that’s basically been the formula.

This afternoon, I finally got to meet some of my fellow local organizations at the Affiliation Luncheon and the final education session “Where’s the Local?” led by Chris Centi. I was surprised to find that there were more local representatives than the ones I had met at the luncheon, and that we all share a lot of the same struggles. But while we had to focus on some of the more difficult parts of being a local organization, it also reminded me why I’m proud to be local. While I love Greek Life as a whole, there was definitely a different culture in that room which made me feel at home.

For now though, I am exhausted after an exciting weekend and I’m ready to head back to BSU. I can’t wait to see everyone in Phi Pi Delta and share my experience!

Goodnight Bears, it’s been awesome.