The week 6-13.11.2006 I spent in an AIESEC-Seminar called NALDS2006 in Harz area (4 hours with a car South-West from
Berlin). NALDS2006 states for National leadership seminar 2006 which means that it was a German national AIESEC seminar focused on leadership.
For the ones who are not in AIESEC:
In this posting I will use a lot of abbreviations used in AIESEC. Sorry for that but it’s just impossible to talk about AIESEC seminar without those:) If you want to some clarifications, please ask from me…
I start with a bit with my starting points of NALDS. First of all I have already been in some 10-15 AIESEC seminars! Yes, I was surprised also myself when I counted once. Three international seminars (EUROLDS2005, SCALDS2005, WeGrow2005), seven(!) national conferences in Finland, 4 local seminars in Tampere, 3 national ICX team meetings in Finland and now NALDS. All those in two or two and a half year:)
So why to go to NALDS? Well, I had heard from a lot of people that NALDS would be a seminar to change your life. After it you’ll either change your studies or do some other crazy things. I wanted to check out if that would true and also change my life. I had a lot of ideas of my future in my head and I wanted to have some time for myself to think about my life and my future options…
Some facts about NALDS:
- Took place in Harz area
- 100-150 delegates (I think 1/3 were internationals, furthest came all the way from Kenya and Mexico)
- Workshops in English and German
- More info from http://www.nalds.de/
In NALDS I was taking part to an English language workshop. I thought that with my German skills I would maybe learn some more German in a German workshop, but otherwise I wouldn’t get so much out of it.
In my workshop there was 12 delegates and two facilitators. We had such a cool group! I really loved our group. I learned so much from each person and also had so much fun with you guys! :)
My workshop group called "The butterflies"
From the first day :)
The flow of the seminar
The agenda of NALDS2006
Well, now I’ll tell something about the flow of NALDS. However I won’t explain the whole agenda in details. I’ll also add my personal opinions, emotions and key-learning points of the whole seminar. This posting is working at the same as my personal reflection of NALDS. You’ll get an insight of a “diary” of mine that normally doesn’t exist.…
Monday & Tuesday
The main focus of the agenda was to start with building a strong trust within each workshop group first of all by getting to know each other with some games on Monday evening and on Tuesday with some outdoor games. Some of those are familiar to people who have been in AIESEC conferences. It was a good start and I felt already then that we’ll have a good workshop group which later proofed to be true.
Wednesday
On Wednesday we had some sessions of leadership as whole. We were talking e.g. about positive and negative leadership. There was also an external session of leadership. I took part to one held by Finnish guy, Osku. Who of you actually knows Osku? Osku held a session of corporate culture as a tool for leadership. A very interesting insight how hard it is for one individual to shape the company culture and still how it’s possible. There was also some other learning points…
On Wednesday evening we also had the official dinner!
The butterflies dressed on their bests :)
Backrow from left to right: Shreya, Viola, Ely, Valentin, Fania, Iraz, Marian, Valentina, Cathleen (faci)
Frontrow from left to right: me, Borge (faci), Alex, Tomas, Jaq
Thursday
On Thursday we were talking about leadership and values. Later on we were thinking about our own values. That’s something I have been doing also before but this time there was more time for it and I think I got more out of it. I think personally that NALDS got so much better from here onwards…
So as a result my most important values are (in no special order):
Health
Close relationships
Self-respect
Personal development
Nature
After a long thinking process of those values above I thought that there are too many important values missing. Therefore I checked the process a bit again and added five more values to my list. In my “top-ten”-list of values are also:
Peace
Freedom
Equality
Happiness
Iniative
Please question my values! I think that value forming process is something quite artificial. I think it’s really hard to find out what are your MOST important values for me. That could easily be a never-ending conversation. However I think it’s really, really important process to go through. Values are something that’s inside of yourself but you might not be conscious it. And then again your behavior is based on your values so if you want to change your behavior for good, you need to go deeper than the surface… And the process should not be once-in-a-life-time-experience. Rather it should be something that you go through every now and then to see how your values have changed.
Friday
On Friday we took the next step from values to creating a vision. We started with talking about leadership and vision. So what vision actually is and how a vision can help a leader. We also were thinking about our own visions in other words, we were thinking about what we really want to do in our lives based on our values… A very interesting and productive day but unfortunately I wasn’t able to clarify my vision. But refering to my favorite video clip (“Everybody is free to wear sunscreen”):
“Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life,
the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22
what they wanted to do with their lives,
some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t.”
I personally think that is SOOOOO true. I think more important than having a very clear and shaped vision, is to just give a thought to your vision, what you really want to do. I think that you should have some of dream, and idea that is striving you further. However the dream doesn’t need to be very clear. But the dream you have, you should keep alive and feed it. On the other hand –like values- you should not take it for granted. You should think if it’s still up-to-date. So is it still REALLY something that I want to do and if it is WHY I is it? If you see this in an other way, I would love to hear some different opinions…
Now back to the agenda:) For those people who don’t know anything about AIESEC conferences there is this thing called “Global Village”. Global Village is an idea that everyone bring some information and some traditional things like dresses, dances, food and drinks from his/her own country or region. It’s really cool to experience! It like a short-lasting dream, how it would look, if all the nations of the World would be living in the same village, being able to enjoy life together. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful dream? I really love Global Villages:) On Friday evening in NALDS we had one:
Unfortunately I didn't have so many things from Finland with me as I already had been over two months in Germany
Saturday
Saturday had the title of Empowerment. I think that was maybe the best day of NALDS. There was a really great external speaker talking about empowerment. With empowerment he meant being able to empower someone to do something. Have you ever asked yourself the following questions:
Where are the limits in my life?
What am I able to do in my life and what not?
Why I’m not able to do that?
Who and how would be able to empower me to do that?
How was it said in the movie “Matrix”? :)
“I can just show you the door, but you have to walk through it yourself.”
I think there’s a bigger idea behind that phrase. Everyone empowers oneself.
Sunday
On Sunday we basically were just closing NALDS and saying good bye to all of the people… A very sad day… To describe how I felt on Sunday:
Imagine an opportunity of living one week totally forgetting your problems you have in your life. Imagine that you can dream, you can share those dreams and you are supported. Imagine that you have a lot of interesting and nice people around you with whom you like to get to know better and maybe start a long-lasting friendship with them. Imagine that you are also having a lot of fun in middle of all this. Then imagine that suddenly you are just pulled back to reality in the middle of your daily routines. That might describe a bit the feelings in the end of NALDS on Sunday:)
Life's so hard, man! However at the moment I love my life. Currently I can say that I am happy with my life:)
I still want to add some great quotes I heard and read in NALDS. If you have a favorite quote, I would love to hear it. So please tell here!!! I already has taken the following as my personal quote, my personal life philosophy: “Everybody are free to wear sunscreen”. If you don’t know what it means, check out the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2fN0bZCso
And some other quotes and learning points from NALDS:
We were talking about the war against terrorism…
“If you want to destroy a castle, you have to destroy it from inside, because from outside the walls are too strong.” – Iraz’s grandmother
What is difference between a manager and a leader? When cutting trees:
Manager: “Cut this tree and cut that one, but don’t cut that one yet”
Leader: climbs into a tree and says: “Guys, we’re in the wrong forest”.
What is a vision?
One definition: “It’s a tree, seed by a dream. It grows by the time and spreads having other dreams and other carriers.”
Some questions which we were thinking. Have you ever thought gave a thought to these?
What is the craziest idea that you ever had? How would the World look without your idea? What would you die for?
Of the difference between questions and answers:
“Answers are something that lies behind you. Never bow for answers. Questions are the key to change. They are something to bow for.”
“It’s one hand, but five different fingers.”
- Iraz
“Money doesn’t bring happiness. It just entertains it.”
- Alex
We talked about how people enjoy the nice things when they first of all haven’t had those. How people enjoy things they have to work for. Then there came the following (quite a funny) idea, which I found very interesting:
“I should suffer more.” :)
- Jaq
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
- Thomas Edison
“I’d rather try to do something great and fail than to attempt to do nothing and succeed.”
- Robert Schuller
“The older I get, the less I listen what people say and the more I look what they do.”
- Andrew Carnegie
The next one is especially to my dear butterflies (Hehe, others might be wondering now what that means:) ). Do you really know the butterfly effect? The following is an illustration of the butterfly effect:
“The idea in meteorology is that the flapping of a butterfly's wing will create a disturbance that in the chaotic motion of the atmosphere will become amplified eventually to change the large scale atmospheric motion, so that the long term behavior becomes impossible to forecast.”
In other words:
“One flap of a butterfly wings would be enough to alter the course of weather forever.”
That’s all folks this time! I guess it became the longest posting I’ve ever wrote and I’m a bit sorry for that. But on the other hand I think it gives quite a holistic picture how NALDS was and how I experienced it. I will continue soon with my vision because that's something I've been thinking lately quite a lot.
What do we want to do? To be a butterfly!!!
What do we expect? The butterfly-effect!!!
:)
4 Comments:
This was an awsome post Jouni, I really enjoyed reading it.
To ad to "the butterfly effect" Steve Jobs said the following:
Because I had dropped out(of college) and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
(Børge writing again) All the things you do have some kind of "butterfly effect", but the thing is that you don't know the effekt your choices, actions or thoughts will have on the future:) So my tip which have worked for me is to trust the voice that say you should do "something" and you will consantly live a life in positive surprieses... It is really cool;)
Take care man!
Hey Jouni,
your blog is just awesome! It gave me a shiver in every passage and also revives some of the feeling I had a NaLDS and already forgot about them.
Thank you for it. Sending you some hugs Cathleen
Moro!
So everything what was rumoured about NaLDS was true, at least in your part, and your group! Excellent.
This following quote is almost too simple for those quotes which you wrote, and especially that one which Borge showed, but it has been extremely handy especially through my AIESEC career, and also managing and and leading different projects and teams and similar things before hand. I think Jouni knows it already, and probably Borge also (during ScaLDS or IC...) and it's form Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Don't Panic!
It's almost too simple, but what ever happens around you, just think at least couple of minutes instead of panicing, because it usually doesn't lead anywhere. And also if you have worked and giving that 110% to one thing and then you don't achieve it fully or you feel something that you are not satisfied, don't panic nether, there is always something what you achieved, but you have to figure out by yourself... But never be afraid to try new things...
I have no idea was there any sense, or was it too philosophical to me, but somehow this came to my mind when I read your blog entry...
-Jani
P.S. I'm really curious to hear your future visions/plans, and how NaLDS and your exchange year has affected to those lately...
P.P.S And talking about that, have you planned yet meeting just before Christmas, and how we are going to do it?
P.P.P.S. And how about the German trip for the fellowship? I met Anssi yeaterday, and we started to wonder could it happen actually one point, when you are stille there is Germany...=)
P.P.P.P.S No more post scripts...
Really cool to get some comments from you! Thanx a lot! I appreciate it. I write this blog for two reasons: to have myself a possibility to gather my thoughts and do some self-reflecting and to tell my friends and family how I'm doing. This NALDS blog had also an extra role of clarifying my thougths about NALDS.
I agree with Borges (I have no idea how to make that line over 'o' :) ) idea. I think that everything we do might have a greater effect in the longer run. However as Borge said, I think also that quite often these effects are not possibly to see beforehand, which makes decisionmaking-process sometimes so dahmn hard.
Sometimes I really love to think about my life, how it would be if I hadn't make the decisions I have. It makes me very happy. Very happy because then I realize that I'm happy with my current life and also how my future looks like at the moment. I don't have any decisions I would regret in my life. That's really nice to realize.
I really think life that when looking our lives in longer scale, we are are all like feather in the wind: our life direction is set by innumerable amount of small and bigger decision that we take in our everyday life. The sum of those is impossible to see. One can have a vision in life to give a direction. But in long run no one there's always that certain element of uncertainty. But understanding that is the beauty of life. We should not be afraid of that uncertainty but rather we should see it as a possibility: we can set the course of our lives ourselves.
Maybe that was quite philosophical, but just telling something about my life philosophy...
Cheers friends,
Jouni
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