Learning to live... with you.

We've had about one full week here in the Shenandoah Valley. The snow has kept us home today, but we're still working on AmeriCorps requirements and reviewing our training notes from the office. And blogging, because why not? 

Just for fun: we live with 9 people in 1 house. Here's our "pantry" that lasts us for one week. It doesn't last longer than that!

The past week has been a whole new world. Denver was populated, we were separated from each other, we were mixed with other teams. We didn't hang out in the same room every night and we weren't together ALL. THE. TIME. The worst part? We didn't get to know each other. 

At the beginning, we did light team bonding activities that didn't go over well and received low responses. We had team meetings to review updates and information, and then we were on our way. We got to Denver, and everyone worked in different areas. We only ate together 3 times each week, and our Team PT usually involved other teams so we could have bigger games. Having other teams to be around in Denver was great for our social lives, but it was highly toxic to my team's morale. Did I love it? Absolutely. Is that a bad thing? Probably. 

I'm not usually the first to admit my faults, but I know I could have done more to bring my team together. However, it would have felt forced and unnatural and I hate to be "that guy" who is always forcing people into activities that they hate. I don't really like to be the asshole, although as a Team Leader it kind of happens a lot.

Being here in the Shenandoah Valley is a different experience for us. We all live in one building, TOGETHER! We cook TOGETHER and eat TOGETHER and work out TOGETHER. The girls share a room, the guys share a room, and I have my own room (one of the TL perks. It usually doesn't happen so I'm enjoying it while it lasts). We have space for meetings and games. We have a game table! It's full of things for us to do together. It's pretty awesome, all of this "togetherness."

I should probably get to the point of this post. The togetherness is killing us. We're just not very good at it. I'm not good at it - I'm an introvert. I'm trying and pushing myself (quite far) to develop my extraverted side. But there are 8 other people who function quite differently than I do, and differently from each other (only two people are the same on their Myers-Briggs test, the rest of us are different!). So I am running a series of Team Workshops to help us learn how we all function. Our first one was Myers-Briggs. While it may not be 100% accurate, it helps us get the general idea that people function differently and have different social needs. If we remember that other people are introverted or extraverted, or that people have stronger feelings or need step-by-step directions or a fully planned out daily schedule, we open ourselves to be accepting of other styles and remember that we each might need to stretch to find a middle ground. For this workshop, we went through each trait and split into groups, and wrote a list of 5 things that will help the opposite work with us, what we need from them, and what about us that we want them to understand. The feedback from the team was really positive, and I hope that we'll continue on a positive path.

A common subject brought up by all members is positivity. They want each other to be more positive, but there are still a lot of bad attitudes floating around, and we are all guilty. Negativity is contagious and misery loves company, but positivity is contagious too. This week we are going to move in to attitudes and moods, and hopefully it generates constructive discussion. I've talked to a few team members about this already, and I'm still receiving input, but so far we've decided that we are going to approach topics from "Can I talk to you before you have your coffee?" to "When you're down, what can I do to lift you back up?" If you had asked me about these conversations before joining AmeriCorps, I would have told you that conversations like this are "bullsh*t" and "unimportant" and that "they don't matter" but honestly, it helps people live in a team environment together. When I think of living with people, I think of family. I've always struggled with roommates, and I lived by myself for my last year of college. Other than that, it's been immediate family. My parents have known me for my entire life. They don't need to ask me what they can do for me if I'm down, they already know. My sisters know when I'm grumpy before I do. The only other person I would picture living with would be a spouse, and not that I have any experience, but I would imagine that those are the kind of relationships where you already know a lot about that person and are willing to compromise. The people you've lived with for your whole life are those who you have been able to mold from, and you have molded them in ways too.  Its is a very different feeling from being thrown into a house with 9 very different people from very different places. You have to learn new things and ways of interacting, and learn how to live with them, because this isn't your childhood home anymore. The little things are usually the things that matter the most, because of perception. Everyone perceives differently, and an issue that seems minuscule to one person is likely a grenade to someone else.

My biggest hope for this round is that we all learn to live together, have fun together, and be open with each other. I feel terrifyingly like my parents when I say this, but the biggest Team Goal I have for Round 2 is one day, just ONE DAY out of our two and a half months, that everyone is pleasant, no one fights, and we all just get along.

I can hear my dad right now in my head, "Good luck, Kid."

Long overdue... and a piece on diversity.

I keep telling myself that I need to update this blog, but then I tell myself that it can wait, and other things need to get done first. 

Today, nothing needs to get done first. I am in a beautiful little coffee shop in an old part of some town in Virginia (That's probably the most I can tell you). It is the exact same shape and size as a perfect little wine bar that a few Team Leaders and I discovered during our last weekend in Denver, and is just as cozy. I think I'm gonna like it here.

After departing Denver on December 17, we went back to campus in Vicksburg for a couple days, cleaning up and helping in the supply room and unpacking and repacking our belongings for our trips home for Winter Break. I was too far past exhausted and a million kinds of overwhelmed to even consider opening up my laptop, let along writing an entire blog post to summarize Round 1. Over Winter Break, I was much happier sitting with my family and cooking real food and playing with my nephews to want to be on my computer much at all. The time I spent with my family over break was what recharged me and what helped me regain enough strength to return. The thought of not returning didn't cross my mind, but I definitely needed that two-week recovery period before returning to the program.

Round 1 sucked the life out of me. I loved it, because between through every trial and all of the tears, lessons, and difficult days there were the amazing days and the fun times, a thousand laughs, and a recurring sense of accomplishment. Ups and downs are exhausting. It's like running up and down hills for 2 and a half months. No matter how happy it makes you, and how well you do, how many breaks you take, you're going to feel tired at the end of it. I am endlessly grateful for the opportunities I've had, the people I've met, and the team that I have. I've learned so much about myself and other people, and I am currently learning how to better myself and bring the best out in me so that in Round 2, I can bring out the best in others. It's not easy, but I can do this. I am practicing how I can work with each individual on my team and highlight their best qualities and find their best moods, so everyone can benefit. I don't know if I'll accomplish this, but I am hoping that just giving extra effort and trying really hard will have some sort of benefit. I guess I'll find out.

I have never been so confident in my leadership skills while being terrified and fearing that they don't exist at the same time. I know they're there. Or is it "here?" I wouldn't be here if I didn't have them, but every day I question myself. I still panic that I can't do this, but somehow I wake up the next day and here I am, and suddenly we're all going out the door and off to another day of work. 

That brings me to my next point. Work. We're in Northern Virginia, at a FEMA facility. It's a million kinds of awesome. We're working with the deployment branch, and the Automated Deployment Database (ADD). We will be calling reservists to deploy them, and updating employee information in the system. We are all working on the same task, together. I'm really excited about this, because as a team we will be experiencing the same thing. We also live together in a lodge at a summer camp. It's pretty cool, it even came with two pet birds, at least one pet mouse, and a family of stinkbugs. Our outdoor pets include a few dozen deer and at least one skunk. It did NOT come with cell phone service or WiFi. So we're pretty isolated with our wildlife pets, and there's a trail behind the lodge that leads to the Appalachian Trail. It's comparable to a black hole as far as technology goes, but we are really close to nature (immersed in it, really) and it's great to all live together in a sort of house that we have all to ourselves. We have space for indoor and outdoor PT and to have team meetings after work and be able to hang out together. We've hit the AmeriCorps jackpot as far as living goes. Most people think it sounds terrible, but I would take a two hundred nights in this lodge with my team over two months in an Extended Stay Motel. We also have an awesome job, and a really awesome office team that we'll be working with. Our POCs are incredible and we're in the best location. We're in for a really awesome Round 2, and my energy is so much higher than it was in Round 1. I'm a different kind of motivated, and I honestly feel like I wake up every day with a purpose, and I know I'll be going to bed feeling much more accomplished every night. 

Oh, and just to add - The Appalachian Mountains and The Rocky Mountains are both a million kinds of beautiful, but are completely incomparable. I love this area and I find it breathtakingly beautiful, but I felt that way about Denver, too. It's just a different kind of beautiful. 

Which also reminds me, I'd like to leave you with two quotes today. One is what got me through this week. I have NO IDEA who said it, but I've said it to myself at least a dozen times this week. I've really had to check my own attitude a couple of times. "You can't live a positive life with a negative mind." It starts with yourself. Take some initiative and hold yourself accountable. Don't make someone else try to change your attitude, it's impossible and it's exhausting for them. Trust me, I definitely have experience in that.

The second one was an effort to explain diversity to someone who said that diversity isn't a "thing" and we need to all be equal and a bunch of negative things that I don't want to repeat or discuss on here. When my efforts to explain that diversity isn't just skin color, but is made up of so much more and why we should celebrate diversity were failing, a team member looked up and gave a perfect metaphor. It was almost too good to be true, so I asked where he heard it. He said "well, I wrote a paper on these two artists, and I was taught that if you can't explain something with words, you should try art." Which I thought was just as wonderful as the actual explanation he gave. It went like this: "Take a Turner and a Monet, they're both beautiful paintings but the methods to create them were completely different. We are all equally beautiful people, but we were created differently, and that is diversity." I don't think it needs more of an explanation. Sometimes you just need to close your eyes, but keep your mind wide open.