Team Development

I believe that a good team is created by a group of people that complement each other. Each person has a speciality and the other people feed off of it. The people on the team each have a goal and most likely the goal is universal for all of them. The team should be working towards their ultimate goal and make a couple of other goals that are to be achieved along the way. The way that a team is most successful is if they communicate with each other. Each goal needs to be well-known throughout the group and the ways that the goal is going to be achieved needs to be discussed with everyone that way there is no confusion when it comes to completing the tasks. To turn an unsuccessful team into a good one there must be an evaluation for where the problems are occurring. Sometimes, the whole aspect of the team may need to be changed, but if it is going to make the team a successful one, it will be worth it! The leaders of the team are the ones who need to make sure that this happens and they need to keep positive attitudes throughout the experience in order to keep everyone's spirits up because it is proven that it is more effective to work when you are happy than if you are in a bad mood.

Self-Discipline

The five areas in my life that I lack self-discipline in are 1) my faith 2) my schoolwork 3) exercising & eating right 4) relationships and 5) time management.

All of these areas need improvement in my life. My faith tends to be put on the back-burner when I have school and friends that keep me busy. However, I need to realize that there will always be other things, but that it is important to attend weekly mass and pray and read the Bible daily. These are things that I am going to work on improving. Also, the work that I do in my classes is never 100%. I feel as if I give 90% and just hope that the teacher may not notice that I'm not putting forth my full effort. I would really like to change this and do my best on everything that I turn in and try to be an active participant. The third area in my life that needs discipline is my exercising and eating habits. I feel as if most people say they have these problems, but I really don't like the way that I have become. I enjoy working out, my biggest problem is finding time to fit in in my busy schedule. I'm going to make a working out schedule and try and stick to it as much as my real schedule will allow me to. And as far as eating right, I just need to make a conscience decision of what is good to put into my body and what is not good and also limit my portions and work on not eating when I am not hungry. I would say that I lack self-discipline in my relationships with other people. I tend to get over-involved when it comes to relationships and try to improve others lives and take a load off of them. I know that to some this sounds like it'd be a good thing, but when it starts interfering with my own life and personal time is when I notice that I really need to cut back. I tend to want to be involved and "in-the-know" of every aspect of every person I've met's lives and I just need to learn when to stand back and let them come to me rather than jumping head first into everything. And finally, I think because of the self-discipline I lack in the other areas of my life, it has caused me to lack self-discipline when it comes to time management. There are a million other things I would rather do than write my paper for my Friday class, but I know if I would just do it and get it over with than I would be a lot less stressed so I need to work on managing my time better.

My roommate, Laura Slagle, has the most self-discipline of anyone I know. She is always on top of her school work and usually has papers and homework done days in advance. She knows what's coming up and has planned her schedule accordingly. I would like to be more like her in that aspect.

I am accountable for everything I do. Whether it be in my social life, school work, family or with God, I am accountable for my actions. I am accountable to anyone who I told they could count on me. I am accountable to God and my family first and foremost and my friends and even acquaintances and teachers. I am accountable.

My Mission

I am at my best when i feel enpowered.
I will try to prevent times when i lack self-confidence.
I will enjoy my work by finding employment where I can sort through challenging situations with a positive attitude.
I will find enjoyment in my personal life through talking to other people and helping them with their problems.
I will find opportunities to use my natural talents and gifts such as giving advice.
I can do anything I set my mind to. I will build my own company that organizes a charity that will help people in need.
My life's journey is to work for the purpose of other people and to do it because it creates a common feeling of happiness shared between both me and the people I do it for. The journey's result is the happiness and feelings that come from this.
I will be a person who lives in the moment and encourages her best friends, my brother, sister and cousins to do the same.
My most important future contribution to others will be my time.

I will stop procrastinating and start working on:

• my eating habits and my sense of self-worth

I will strive to incorporate the following attributes into my life:

• Kindness and true compassion for those around me
• Time for others even when bogged down with tons of other things
• To be determined and strive to give 100% all the time

I will constantly renew myself by focusing on the four dimensions of my life:

• Work out as often as possible
• Spend time reading the Bible and make an effort to pray and go to church.
• Attend class and study well for upcoming tests.
• Be supportive of those around me and try to see the positive light of all situations.

Who's Who

I feel like this blog is very general and kind of hard to answer because first of all we learn so much and meet so many people everyday and it's kind of hard to take a step back and examine just what we learned and who we met. However, there are a few people that stand out in my mind. I met the head of the K-9 detective agency (not sure if this is what it's called) of a city in Texas. I met a boy who my roommate has been studying with and I also met a lady who came and talked to our sorority. My friend invited me to play tennis with her and taught me how to serve along with how to hit a tennis ball with the racket from the "backhand" position. I learned how to draw a Lewis structure in chemistry lab and I learned a new note on the recorder in my Experiencing Music class. Advice that I would give to other freshman is to not be afraid to try something new and to always keep your mind open to new ideas!

Leader-in-the Field Inteview

For our Leader-in-the-Field Interview, I interviewed Dr. Victoria Christofi who is a psychologist at the University of Oklahoma's Health Science Center. I interviewed her because I am interested in becoming a psychologist of some sort and wanted to find out more about how she got to the position she was in. Dr. Christofi told me that she attended Ohio State where she received her Bachelors degree and then Rutgers University in New Jersey to obtain her Masters in counseling and apply for her Doctorates degree. I learned that when you apply for your PhD, you have to attend at least another 5 years of school and be working a job or an internship at a hospital, college, jail, etc. as a psychologist. She told me that her first job was doing college counseling for Plattsburgh State in upstate New York. Dr. Christofi told me about the details of an average day for her which consisted of seeing a few clients, supervising interns, consultations with parents or other clients and some sort of outreach to people that are not her clients, whether it be another type of counseling or teaching stress management. She told me that the way she balances her personal/professional life is by setting boundaries. She says one has to help to the degree that she is able to and then she must let go because she says "you can't be as effective if you are so involved." The biggest and scariest problems she encounters are when she is dealing with seriously depressed clients who are experiencing a crisis or are suicidal. When she is dealing with someone along those lines, she sometimes has to step over the line and violate the boundary that she has created for herself. When struggling with something work-related, Dr. Christofi says she goes to Kate Stanton for guidance. She says that Kate is always supportive and calm and helps her get thru situations. She also says she goes to other colleagues with clinically related matters because they most likely understand what she is dealing with and can help her and give their opinion. The greatest strengths, in Dr. Christofi's opinion, that are necessary to be successful in this field are empathy, good listening skills, and passion. She explained how it took a lot to get where she is and if you don't have passion behind you than you are not going to get far in this position. She said that her dissertation was one of the hardest obstacles she had to overcome, along with overcoming her own insecurities. The best advice she could give me was to be prepared and to know my own strengths and weaknesses and of course to have passion for what I'm doing. She also told me that this is the key to being a leader in anything you do, because if you don't have yourself figured out how are you supposed to help figure other people out.

Future at OU

Honestly, my future here at OU is completely undecided and unplanned. I would love to graduate in 4 years and am trying really hard to accomplish that goal with a high GPA. I have applied for different executive committees and teams of leadership and haven't gotten accepted yet, however, I know that I am still a freshman so maybe in years to come I will have the opportunity to be on a team that serves the greater community and public. The thing that interests me most is just helping and being there for others in their times of need. I don't know exactly what I am going to do with my passion yet, but I imagine something to do with service.

Attitude

Wow. First of all, I just wanted to say that today's attitude discussion really opened up my eyes and made me more aware of how I am acting at all times and how I view the problems that come at me everyday. Since I was a little girl, my mom has gotten onto me about three things: my eye rolling, my tone of voice, and my attitude. I never realized how important it was to have a good attitude until we discussed it out loud in class.

I really do believe that "our attitudes are our most important assets." With a bad attitude, everything else in your life could have a dark light to it. However, with a good attitude, you are more likely to view everything in a positive light and you are more likely to get things accomplished more quickly and stay happy! People around you respond better to someone with a good attitude. A good attitude makes others more likely to WANT to work for or with someone opposed to someone with a bad/negative attitude.

At my youth group, a lot of times people will get loud and talkative during praise & worship and this is really frustrating to those who are trying to focus on God. Sometimes I get so frustrated that I want to tell everyone to be quiet loudly or something rude because I get so angry, but my youth director, Ron Tremblay, will calmly ask us all between songs to please remember that some people are using this time to focus on God and that we are distracting them. The way he asks, so nicely and respectfully, makes everyone want to listen to him and it gets things done more quickly and efficiently.