Rewording

PLP 8

Authenticity

Friendship

Family

Self love 

Loyalty

Freedom

Creativity

Trust

Respect

Kindness 

After striking out 5 of my 10 personal values/beliefs, I was left with respect, loyalty, self love, family, and friendship. I tend to place high value on relationships and like to ensure that I am constantly working on my interpersonal skills, as I believe that it is consistently advantageous to be able to form meaningful connections with people. I also believe that respect is high on my list due to the fact that I have always prioritized the way I treat others, as it has always reflected in how they treat me. I think its important to respect everyone you meet, even if you dont always hold the same values or opinions. This is especially important in leadership roles, as respect sets the foundation for getting tasks done and effectively collaborating with others. I also chose to keep family and friendship because I feel that foundational relationships like that greatly affect how you interact with coworkers, and within those relationships, I believe loyalty to be a crucial value that holds them together. To me, loyalty goes hand in hand with respect, and they often reflect on each in the way an individual acts. If one of my friends or a family member isnt loyal to me, it’s a direct reflection of their respect for me and how valuable our relationship is to them, so I place this high on my list of priorities in relationships. The final thing on my list, and possibly the most important, is self love and acceptance. I believe that a good leader should know who they are and be secure in themselves before leading a group of people, as insecurity and lack of self worth can cause issues to arise later down the road. I think that my values and beliefs have greatly impacted the way Ive gone about leadership in the past, and how I will go about it in the future. I will always place high value on interpersonal relationships, and within those relationships, I also place emphasis on mutual understanding and respect. This significantly impacts the way I collaborate and communicate with others and has helped me to form meaningful connections with my peers and coworkers over the years. As for improving my leadership style, I would say that Id like to develop a more authoritative persona within the groups that I work in, because I can often come off so personable that it diminishes a bit of the power I hold and makes me come off as more of a friend than a leader. To do this, I would still like to place emphasis on building good relationships, but also on establishing my position as a leader by staying focused on the tasks at hand and putting myself in more of a business-focused and professional mindset. 

PLP 9

Mission statement:

To inspire respect and empathy in myself and others through personal growth and meaningful connections. 

In my mission statement, I wanted to encapsulate not only my moral values, but also to set a standard for myself going forward. I have always placed emphasis on building strong relationships with others, but I have been failing to focus on building a relationship with myself in the past few years. Building a relationship with oneself based on trust and loyalty is something that I think everyone can benefit from, as it sets the foundation to becoming confident and independent. The more secure you are within yourself, the easier it will be to build relationships with others who share the same sense of confidence and security. I have been trying to work on this in the past few months and I plan to continue doing so for the rest of my life. I cant always rely on other people, but Ill always know that Ive got my own back. 

I also added that I would like to inspire more respect and empathy in general. I place high value on respecting everyone I meet and part of being respectful, I feel, is refraining from meeting new people or going into a new group project with an unfair prejudice for someone. I like to go into new situations with an open mind and it usually sets a good tone for the rest of the time we have to spend together. I think that this is also where empathy comes in because you never know what people are going through or if there is something that can explain a certain way theyve been behaving. This is why I try to always be patient and empathize with people in both work, and personal relationship situations. 

The last part of my mission statement places emphasis on my desire to build strong connections with others. I believe that putting in an effort to be friendly and expand your network, both for personal and professional reasons can reap you many rewards and leave you feeling more fulfilled in life. 

PLP 10

One special skill I can think of that may help me to take the lead in a future scenario is my National Lifeguarding certificate. I have worked for the city of Toronto as a lifeguard for the past three summers now and any time I go to work, I might have to lead in a life threatening emergency procedure. Throughout my training for this certificate, we completed many physical and situational assessments that tested our lifesaving knowledge and prepared us for our work as first responders. In any situation at work, I have multiple other lifeguards helping me if anything happens and we all have a role to play. Depending on the emergency, we will have guard one, guard two, and so on who respond to the situation, making guard one the person who takes the lead and tells all the other lifeguards what they need to be doing. 

I was also required to complete my standard first aid and CPR-C certificate to become a lifeguard. This course focused on basic first aid procedures and prepared us for situations when we find ourselves in the vicinity of someone having an emergency. This could be a friend, a family member, or a random person on the street, and with my certificate, I would be able to take a leadership role if I ever find myself in a scenario where I could put it to good use. 

I can also speak fluent French, as I was in French Immersion in middle school and then took it in all four years of highschool. Being bilingual has not only helped me a lot to communicate with people when I travel, but also to get out of sticky situations in foreign countries. I was traveling with my friends in the south of France when we got lost and had to interpret a map and bus schedule in French with nobody around who we could ask for help. I feel that it may also help me in future scenarios when someone needs help translating something to someone else and I could step up and use my skills to help other people. 

Though I feel that I could definitely respond to an emergency situation at work, I often doubt my abilities to stay calm and collected in the moment if something traumatic were to happen at the pool. Its one thing to practice and receive training for something like that but its another thing to actually experience it first hand. All I can really do is go over emergency procedures in my head and work to prevent major incidents from happening to the best of my abilities.