Investing in Yourself with PTK

By Mary Naughton

At Phi Theta Kappa one very valuable program I would encourage everyone to participate in is the Leadership Program. As one of the former facilitators for the leadership program I am able to speak to the mission behind it. The mission is connecting with students to help them unlock their hidden potential. Many students don’t realize being a leader doesn’t mean you are automatically someone in a high paying career with a fancy job title. Many people are already leaders in their family such as the single mom who teaches her kids the importance of hard work. Another student may be a leader in their community by speaking out against injustices they witness happening to others. In any case, we became increasingly aware that students often need to reassess their vision for leadership and put themselves into the picture, we worked on helping them do just that.

Six students, including myself connected with our campus leadership specialist to create a series of workshops we encouraged students to participate in. Each week the focus shifted slightly to encompass a different aspect of leadership. During one of our workshops, “Roadmap to Success”, students were presented with a paper road map. They were asked to think of what success looked like to them, whether in the form of attaining their master’s degree, a top ranking position in their dream field, raising a family, or any number of possibilities specific to them. Next, they would write where they were currently, and the idea is to write out what steps you would take to get yourself to what you defined as your success. The act of physically writing something down and building the connections in your mind with what steps you will take to get where you want to go acts as a reinforcement. It allows you to see the process and plan your way to your goal. It sounds simple enough but it of brings it into focus in your mind and that is what helps it resonate.

One of our student participants who attended every session and actively participated has now expressed interest in facilitating our workshop series in the spring. She was someone who had been shy in the past but after attending the workshop and meeting everyone she felt more comfortable expressing herself and asking questions. It’s workshops and events like these which bring students together in a relaxed setting to work together and achieve things, like public speaking for instance, that they never would have done otherwise. This spring, a new series of leadership workshops will take place focusing on an entirely different, though very important part of leadership which is emotional intelligence or (EQ). This series will allow people to understand more about themselves and others in ways they have never thought possible, many of our everyday interactions require emotional intelligence and it isn’t just the way we perceive others but it’s also about the way we are perceived.