Well, what a brilliant week that was! One of the best weeks I have had in ages.
OK, I better get the deep part out of the way! I say deep, I am probs going to dive no further than the depths of a puddle after a light april shower! But hey ho, here it goes... From an individual point of view, It has been a about a 7.5/10 on the personal development scale. Before this week, I think I would have struggled to describe what kind of person I am and what my strengths and weaknesses are. I have learnt so much about myself through all the tasks and have a much clearer idea of what strong qualities I can exploit (maybe not the right word) and what I definitely need to work on. It has been a pretty up and down week in terms of energy and confidence levels but overall both have been boosted massively. I guess I have you all to thank for that. You have all been ridic-u-larsley kind and informative with your feedback. What I found really coolio was that I never heard the same piece of feedback twice. Some of the comments were pleasantly surprising eg. somebody (sorry I can't remember who it was) on the first time of meeting them said that I portray confidence and that I am very relaxed. Anybody that knows me better can testify that I generally have the relaxation and composure of a guinea pig being stroked by an over eager child in most situations so it was great to hear that I can hide that when needed. This was massive news to me. I just assumed that everyone thought that I would have a nervous breakdown at 'hello'.
It would be great if I could ACTUALLY become more composed though. There were times during group tasks when instead of being able to think about the task in a rational way and make a valid contribution, I would get annoyed that nothing would come to me straight away when it seemed to for other people, then get intimidated by how intelligent everyone elses responses were, then get increasingly frustrated that they thought of that and I didn't, then start to put more and more pressure on myself to add something that I wasn't adding anything to the team, and then from then on I could only think about the fact that I really need to come up with something rather than focusing on actually doing it! At that point I was completely lost and the tasks had passed me by. This is one of my biggest frustrations about myself. I can just never focus all my energy on a group task because about 75% of my energy goes into purely the will to succeed without being able to focus on how I am actually going to manage that. If it is an individual task, I never have this problem and have amazing clarity of mind because I know that I am only letting myself down if I fail. But when there is the prospect of letting others down, I want to do so well for the team that It is all I can think about. If anyone has any advice about this, pleeeease give me a shout. I hope that makes a little bit of sense to someone because I am not sure it does to me! I just hope that nobody thought that I wasn't bothered about getting involved a lot of the time, if anything I cared about it too much!
Anyway, enough self reflection for one day! I just want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who took part in this week. Each and every one of you brought something different but equally amazing and I just think you are all super-awesome-totally-rad-cool-dudes (real word) :-)
Onto Karaoke!!... What a night! Suffered a bit the next day (and injuring my ankle on the park behind mine and Daisy's house after wasn't part of the plan) but it was totally worth it. What amazed me the most was that every time I turned round to see who was singing, it was the person that I least expected! I guess you should never under estimate people's capacity to surprise. It was so cool how up for it everybody was. I mean everybody already had an idea of what they would sing by Wednesday morning (and had probably had 2 or 3 rehearsals in the mirror with the hair brush)! I think by the end of the night there was only 1 or 2 people that hadn't sang. My mind was a tad blown by that!
Anywhoooo, this is already about 5 times the length that I intended and about 20 times the nonsensical waffle... so I will just call it a day. But I just want you all to know that I have really appreciated getting to know you a bit over the last week :-)
I hope I repaid you sufficiently with a little slice of my dancing repertoire. You will be seeing a lot more of what I have in my locker no doubt! I am available for for weddings and bar mitzvahs so tell your friends... they can find me by googling 'Scotty Snake Hips' ;-)
