Life Skills - March 10, 2014

Yesterday was a super long school day, as we had a double class from 2-6pm of our Jamaica Seminar before the Life Skills course for 6-9pm Ive had an ongoing issue in my Seminar Jamaica class that has had me frustrated for the last few weeks during and after class, so I find coming into Life Skills class at 6pm immediately after the seminar course, I am often discouraged and frustrated overall. I don't think there could be a better class than Life Skills to transition to while I'm feeling this way. I believe this is because the overall sense I get from this class is empathetic (since many of us are tired from the previous class) and inclusive. I've felt comfortable sharing bits of pieces of my frustration or my situation, as its applicable to the class (i.e.: check in's etc) When going over the class's goals for the day 'Identifying helpful and hindering group behaviours' I was able to name some of the behaviours I was dealing with in the previous class (anonymously) that I found hindering or not helpful. This expressing of what was frustrating me, although vaugely, helped those feelings dissipate a fair amount. Again, during Evocation we were asked how we felt when a group did not work well, and I was able to express my own feelings by submitting 'defeated' and 'detached' as my responses. I learned the theory on group task and maintenance and realized through the Skills practice that I do some of these task and maintenance functions very well. After the skills practice when we were receiving feedback, I also learnt that I am quite fixated on 'getting it done' whatever the task may be, and that I may miss other opportunities due to my focus being so fixed. What I would do differently if I were coaching the session would be to condense the handouts, or use less, as Ron gave us quite a bit, and some of them were repeats or reinterpretations of the same thing.