Full Day of Workshops Woo!

Today was our first full day (from morning until around 8 or 9pm) of workshops all day!!! Learning about Greek Life is so great because there are always ways to make our chapters better and ourselves better leaders as well. The first session I went to today was about having "Crucial Conversations." These conversations are often those that make us anxious or that we try to avoid. As a person, I am very non-confrontational. My leadership strengths focus more on harmony and development of members. However, this workshop helped me a lot to learn how to make those scary conversations a little less scary. There was a seven step module given to all of us for ways to tackle situations head on instead of running away from them. The most important thing that I will take away from this session is this idea of having  a shared outcome. When entering conversations that are difficult to talk about, if the person in either party doesn't necessarily know what the desired outcome is, it just creates people running in circles. Having this idea of a shared outcome also gives people more of an understanding as to why they may be at this meeting so they become less defensive and more gets accomplished.
One of the other sessions that I attended was about retaining our members. Recruitment is often times emphasized in Greek life but after people become new members, retaining those members often falls to the wayside. Over 110,000 members disaffiliate from Greek organizations every year by choice. This number is much too high for the standards that we have as a Greek community to making our members feel important. Something that was talked about during this sessions that I really took away was making all members feel like they matter. Greek organizations (especially sororities) can often become cliquey where members don't include other members or just stick within their group. This isn't so much bullying as it is not making members in our chapters feel like they matter. In everything we do, members play a large part. Whether a person is a general member, director, on E-board, etc. they truly do matter to the organization. For my organization, I hope to begin to do things to make more members feel like they matter. My goal for this semester, for myself, is to start to pay more compliments and respect where due and show more members how much they do matter to the chapter.