James Blog #1

I am James Manning, this is my third time/year attending a SOAR program. This is my first time attending a semester at Academy, but the past two summers I attended the Academic Discovery program. My second time attending A.D. I was took part in being I.L.S. Or Intensive Leadership Seminar. This is basically SOAR,s version of a Junior Counselor or Instructor. I helped my instructors and teammates through out the semester doing anything I could to learn and improve my leadership skills. I feel personally that I am a natural leader. However I am not the best leader.

My goal this semester at Academy is/was to improve my leadership skills to help be a asset to my team. It at times is rough and very straight up stern, but I am hoping to improve my ability to communicate properly with my teammates to help better our experience. I saw my leadership ability fail over this past expedition when I had a turn as “Yoda” one of the many roles we have in our group that we trade off to make sure work and jobs are fairly distributed. Yoda's job/ role is to be the leader of the team and basically be another instructor. He/she also sets time goals and makes sure the group is doing the necessary things. I figured when I was Yoda it would be difficult to be a leader seeing as though I am the youngest of the entire group. I was not detoured by the challenge, rather I welcomed it. As my second time being Yoda, I felt I messed up and wasn’t a huge help to the team and realized I made mistakes. During my turn as Yoda and I took time to evaluate myself and decide what I needed to work on. I also took time to observe my peers and how they handled the role.

 Most everyone here is very experienced in anything we do as they have all been here for the past semester and this is my first semester. Two of my teammates I look up to and admire as a role model are Zach (Tüd, pronounced “Tod”) and Harrison. They both are incredibly hardworking and great leaders when they try their best to do what they want. Harrison may have difficulties sometime maintaining his amazing status, but I  understand we all have the times when we cant stay amazing. I still will look up to him as a great friend and help him when possible as well as learn from him about anything.

 Zach is another story, he's been going to SOAR for a couple of years and is very experienced in almost everything we do. He's a great friend and a great role model. Him and I get along very well. He can usually always maintain his composure and work towards the big goal and help his teammates get there. He's a great asset to our team and I hope I can be as good of a leader as him.

During our expedition I got to be Yoda again and we had the best day on the “ex”.It was the fastest morning. We got ready to leave;the longest and fastest distance we went It was altogether a happy day, and it was the last day so we were getting out of the Everglades! I would say even though I was Yoda, Harrison and Zach were the two biggest reasons I was able to be a good leader, as they were helping me the entire day and helping by listening and being another great example besides me. They also were great co leaders and if we weren’t all working together I don’t think that day would have went the way it did, perfectly.

This was only my personal experience of how my team is and a brief history of me. I feel this will be my best yet, even though we have our difficulties as every team does.