NGLA and Lots of Workshops!

Today was the first day of NGLA and we got to do a ton of fun workshops to gain information to take back to our chapter!

We started the day with a keynote speaker, Corey Ciochetti who talked about ethics, values and integrity in the greek life setting. I really loved this keynote. I feel like Corey really related what he was saying to himself. He wasn't just telling us tips or plans, he gave us actual stories and ways he has made mistakes. It made the presentation funny along with being informative. What hit me the most was definitely the end though when he asked the audience to live by the values we took an oath to uphold. He asked us if not for us, then for his child, who will be living in a world we are leaving, and then our children after that. The way it was presented was very profound. He didn't tell us to change to make ourselves better because we should, he asked us to change and be upstanding people for his daughter and our kids. 

After the keynote there were three information sessions. The first one I went to was called "Are You My Mentor" presented by Tim Mousseau of Campus Speak. I wasn't sure what to expect going into this workshop and was pleasantly surprised. I really liked how the mentor-mentee role was worked into greek life.I was challenged to think of what being a mentor actually means and we discussed the foundation of a formal mentorship; consistency, goals and expectations, ground rules and accountability. This is individual mentoring and once this is accomplished, we can move onto community mentoring. Every member in the chapter should be on an equal playing field to have a great mentor relationship. This process of mentoring is renewable, once this culture of mentoring is obtained it can be continued and become a healthy habitat to improve a chapter. The last process is community mentoring. community mentoring can't be obtained without the other two type of mentoring known and in place. Community mentoring is about helping those chapters in your greek life that could use the extra push. The tasks to accomplish this include strong, powerful conversations; building relationships with people you normal wouldn't go to; setting your expectations across the board and holding chapters accountable for your expectations of them so they can improve.

The second workshop was called (Deliberate) Practice Makes Perfect presented by Dr. Joel Nunez. This was a great workshop about confidence and believing you can do what you put your mind to if you put the intense effort in. There were three steps to doing this; dymythify, deconstruct and develop. Everyone wants the good time but doesn't want to put in the work for it. In order to accomplish mastery and eventually fluency you need intense and deliberate sustained effort and passion.

My last workshop was about Naysayers in the chapter and greek community. It was a very interactive session where we discussed the archetypes that can bring down a chapter, as well as negative comments and discussions and how to combat them. A great thing I learned was that usually the complaints you get are something deeper than what they are discussing. This requires work to figure out the problem and to solve it. Some responses we discussed range from comments like "that's dumb" to "I don't understand" to "that sounds like a lot of work". As a group we talked about constructive responses and how to solve these questions and comments that are asked or made all too often.

Overall I learned a lot today and I can't wait until tomorrow!