Karaoke Should Definitely Be A Weekly Event.

 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' ;-)

First Day of Smurfhood!

After the 3rd time in 30 minutes that my snooze alarm had rudely interrupted an amazing dream, I decided it was probably a good time to roll out of bed and prepare for the day ahead. An out of control sleeping pattern meant that this was the first time I had seen 8am in weeks! First achievement of the day...get in!! As I washed away my bleary eyes all of the emotions from the last week or so came flooding back ten fold. The apprehension, anxiety, excitement and fear of letting myself (and Kerry & Sarah who had put their faith in me) down.

I suffer from social anxiety disorder and so the thought of walking into a room full of strangers always fills me with irrational dread for weeks before it even takes place. What if nobody likes me? What if I can't be myself? Is my opinion valid? What if I signal my arrival by slipping over going through the door and flying head first into a table full of new mentors?! These are just a few of the questions going through my head as I make the 10 minute walk to campus. But at the same time, I love people and was sick of holding myself back from being able to make meaningful connections more often. Over the last month or so I had developed a new sense of determination not to let my issues stop me from achieving what I want to achieve and being who I want to be. Afterall, the need to push myself past this problem was one of the reasons that I applied in the first place. With this in mind, a bit of dread had to be expected and even welcomed.

As I entered the room, I immediately understood how irrational some of my anxiety was and that we were all largely in the same boat. I was greeted by a room full of friendly but nervous faces and it was amazing how calm I suddenly felt (in comparison with the usual uncontrollable sweat and being on edge). I should probably point out at this stage that although I claimed to be a 'Mother Bear' when asked at the interview what animal I would be (now is not the time to explain reasons!), I am most definitely more like a nervous Guinea Pig!

This calmness continued all day to some degree. There is still a looooong way to go but I was able to be more myself than I had been in any group for a long time, let alone one that consisted purely of strangers... or new friends as I will now call them! I think that comes down to the way that the whole day was set up. Everything revolved around either sharing something with the group as a whole or working something out as part of a small group before sharing with everyone. The small groups were changed every time so by the end of the day it felt like we had played musical chairs and had met everybody properly. We started off by catching a ball and introducing ourselves and sharing something 'exciting' about yourself. I got the ball rolling with 'Hi, my name is Scott, I am a Documentary Photography student. Errrrm...one exciting thing... erm... I have ran a marathon?!' Had a mini choke struggling to think of anything but the group seemed to accept it as exciting... either that or they were being polite. Im gonna go with the latter! Still, could have been worse and I felt a little bit of a boost already. Listening to everybody else, there was such a variety of different people from all different courses and all different backgrounds, which I thought was great.

For the rest of the morning, we discussed what questions we wanted answered, why we applied, what we think the role of a mentor is, what a mentor should and shouldn't do, and gave definitions to key 'mentory' words such as 'open minded'. Increasingly, I felt more and more happy and excited about the coming year. This was such a fantastic and diverse group of people. It quickly became clear that everyone was here for very similar reasons; to help fellow students whilst also developing themselves. I could tell that there wasn't a single person there that wouldn't make a good mentor. I would never have thought it at 8.30am but I felt that my new colleagues thought the same of me and I felt completely honoured and humbled. I understood the responsibility that I had been entrusted with as part of this team and I felt determined to live up to that trust.

Over lunch, the whole group sat together and chatted about anything and everything. All of the nervousness in the group at the start of the morning and gone and there was an incredibly positive vibe.

After getting our fill of coffee and conversation, we headed off together to a computer suite where we learnt how to avoid being a berk on facebook - a work in progress for me! We also learnt that we were to do this reflective blog. And so here I am, uh, reflecting. All in all a day that completely blew away even my most optimistic expectations. I met some lovely, caring and somewhat loopy people, completely built up my excitement about being a mentor and made a big step in overcoming my anxiety issues. A day that went from almost unbearable anxiety to almost overwhelming contentedness (thats a word, right?).

Cannot wait to don the infamous blue hoody and throw myself into 'Smurfhood'!

(P.S apologies for the length. Actually had to reign myself in a little. Could have written a short novel!)