The Muggle World of Emma Watson

Emma Watson is seen as a beautiful and graceful actress who starred in one of the best film series of all time.  However, she is one of my biggest role models for many more reasons than that.  Here are a few:

1. She pours her life into her passions.                                                                               Emma took the opportunity after finishing Harry Potter to go to college to get an Education because it was something she was passionate about.  She started a campaign about feminism because it is something she was passionate about.  She devotes her life to charities because it is something she is passionate about.  Emma Watson lives her life through what she feels is important to her in the world.
2. She stands up for what she believes in.                                                                                         Emma Watson saw a change she wanted to make, so she launched a campaign to raise awareness for women’s rights around the world.  At such a young age she has made a large impact by making her voice heard and helping others all over the world.  She also has worked with the United Nations to help make her voice heard.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
3. She inspires others.                                                                                                              
   Through her He for She campaign she has   inspired others to learn and educate themselves about the inequalities around the world today.  Through her speaking her mind and standing up for what she believes in, she has inspired (such as me) to do the same.  She inspires by proving that standing up for what you believe in and being passionate is something we should all strive to do.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
4. She preaches and practices self-love.  Emma Watson prides herself on being her own person an loving that is different.  In fact, she wants everyone else to love themselves too.  She focuses her opinion on herself based solely on her own view of herself and not on what others may think.  She lives by the motto that she isn’t giving others or society the control to determine what she thinks of herself. This is a goal that I want to one day achieve and I think it is one of the most admirable traits of Emma Watson.

So, how does this make her an exemplary leader?  Well if it doesn’t go without saying,  Emma Watson has had a positive impact on tons of people, and continues to everyday.  Through her action she is creating more leaders to help make their own voices heard. Since she is an advocate for individuality she is inspiring others who do not necessarily have the same views as her, but is still wanting everyone to let their voice be heard.

How does she impact my life?  One day I hope to have inspired someone as much as Emma Watson as inspired me.  One of her passions, feminism, is something that I feel very passionate about as well, and through her actions and words I have learned a lot about what feminism is and how it can be interpreted to others.  She is a refreshing in terms of feminist role models in the country who are not necessarily political leaders.  The United States has many political leaders who are feminists, and lots of celebrities who claim to be.  However, Emma Watson is celebrity feminist who is practicing what she preaches and making a difference.  She isn’t saying she is a feminist for fame, she is doing it because she is passionate.

Another passion of Emma Watson’s is self-love.  This is something I have become extremely passionate about within the past year and moving to CMU.  I think a large part of being happy, having a healthy lifestyle, and helping others is having a healthy relationship with yourself.  Emma Watson gives great inspiration to others to allow them to love themselves.

I hope to continue my life and develop the leadership qualities that Emma Watson has.  She is a great role model for men, women, and young children.  I hope one day I can become a great role model too.  I can do this by improving on the qualities listed above.

Just because Emma Watson is amazing, here are some more of my fav quotes by her:

“It’s a No from me”

I was asked “does leadership come from a yes or a no?”

Not gonna lie, at first I wanted to pick no because I wanted to stand out because I feel like a majority would answer yes. However, this goes along with exactly why I say leadership comes from a no.

A large part of being a leader is being a role model.  This includes being able to stand up for what you believe is right.  You should want to be different from the crowd and have your own voice be heard.  This comes from saying “No.”  No should not be seen as something negative, because a large part of having a positive life and impact is getting rid of the negatives in your life.  So, in order to have a positive impact on those around you, you need to be able to say no to the negatives.  For example: Say no to conformity, say no to your fears, say no to the bad influences in your life, say no the negativity.

You can never truly have a “yes” if you don’t at first, have a no.  You can’t say yes to the positives in life if you are stuck focusing on the negatives.

Living the lifestyle of positivity will give you the opportunity to set yourself up to be a better leader than before.  You will be able to have a positive influence on the people around you and spread smiles.

This is a mentality I hope to embrace.  I want to complain less and say no to the things that are not necessarily the best influences on me.  Saying no may be hard sometimes but I think in the end it will be worth it because the reward will be me becoming a better person and having a better influence on the world and people around me.

 

Get Connected, FOR FREE

As a part of LAS we got the opportunity to go to the Connections Conference at Great Wolf Lodge in Traverse City, MI.  Though LAS goes to the conference, it is open to anyone on Central’s campus that would like to go.  When we got there the first night, we were introduced to the groups we would be working with over the course of the next two days and then were given free time to go to the waterpark!  The next day, we woke up early and got right to business on learning new information about leadership.  We were allowed to pick four different speakers we wanted to go to throughout Saturday.  I chose “Branching Out: Netflix and No Chill”, “Leadership Through the Eyes of Disney”, “Growing your roots”, and “Friendship in Leadership.”

“Branching Out: Netflix and No Chill” was one of my favorites out of the sessions.  It focused on disconnecting from social media and our technology in order to connect with others.  We ended by doing an activity where we colored leaves based on  how much we time we think we spend doing a certain activity.  There were six different branches and the leaves pertained to whatever theme branch they were on.  The six different branches were physical, spiritual, psychological, emotional, intellectual, and social.  I loved this activity because it help me realize that sometimes I need to focus on my own health both mentally and physically a little more.  This session focused a lot on not only connecting with others but connecting with yourself as well in order to keep yourself healthy.

“Leadership Through the Eyes of Disney” was really fun because I am a big Disney fan.  We first began with naming our five favorite Disney characters and then choosing which one we thought we identified with the most.  I chose Anna from Frozen because she is goofy and has a very optimistic look on the world.  I feel like her personality matches mine pretty well.  After that we picked our top 10 values that were eventually narrowed down to our number 1 value.  Mine was Family because I am extremely close with my family, and I believe that the value of family includes friendship, love, and trust.  After picking our value they had us think of the values of Disney character and see if the Disney character we chose would have the same value.  I was so shocked that I had never made the connection before that the thing me and Anna have most in common would be our most important value.  I liked the session a lot because something I hold very important in my life is my values, so I love whenever I get the opportunity to talk or think about them and what they mean to me.

“Growing your roots” is a session that dealt a lot with what you look for in a mentor, and what you need to be a successful mentor yourself.  I chose this one because I know in a year I will be a mentor to my LAS mentee, and I want to be able to be the best mentor I can be for them!  We spent a lot of time discussing who our role models are. I have a lot of very prevalent mentors in my life, so we discussed why they are our role models and what traits and things they do that help us in order for us to be able to understand what may work when we are mentors to others.

“Friendship in Leadership” was my other favorite out of the sessions.  The session used Harry Potter to help teach us about healthy relationships and leadership.  I love Harry Potter, so I knew I would enjoy this session when I picked it.  We learned what is known as “Comfort in, Dump Out”.  This basically shows us how to deal with tough situations and how they may be affecting us and others around us who are also dealing with the same situation.  The picture below shows how you should deal with the situations.  You should spend time comforting the people who are more inward on the circle, but you should only vent or explain your feelings of being hurt to people who are more outward of you on the circle.  We then did role playing with the Harry Potter characters where we were each assigned a character from the Goblet of Fire and were told to interact with each right after *SPOILER ALERT* Cedric is killed by Lord Voldemort! I was Cho Chang, so I could vent about how upset I was to everyone except for Amos(Cedric’s dad) and Harry.  However, the only two people who could vent to me were Amos and Harry.  This is more difficult in real life because it is harder to identify who is truly closer to a situation.  The “Comfort in, Dump out” ideology is a very useful method with having healthy relationships and learning how to be a source of comfort for others.

I learned a lot about not only how to connect better with my cohort, but also to be able to connect to other organizations on campus.  The things that I learned are things I can use in everyday life, especially the “comfort in, dump out” theory.  I feel as if I am more able to be conscious of others feelings in a situation with that theory in mind.  Overall, the Connections Conference was a blast, and I hope next year I can go back as a facilitator to help others enjoy the experience and learn as much as I did.

Choosing Civility

In our leadership class for LAS, our cohort was split into 6 groups that all read a different book and then presented how their book applied to leadership to the class.  My group was assigned the book Choosing Civility.  This book focused on the 25 rules of how to be civil.  The three rules that I had the responsibility of presenting about were “Refrain from Idle Complaining”, “Accept and Give Constructive Criticism”, and “Don’t Shift Responsibility and Blame.”

The first rule, “Refrain from Idle Complaining”, is the rule that I decided was the one that I needed to improve on the most in my life.  As leaders, we have a large influence on the people’s lives around us.  Everyone’s attitudes are contagious, so why not do our best to make everyone around us happier?  The main point of this is that we spend so much of our daily lives focusing on the little things go wrong…”the line was so long today at the store”,”ugh I don’t want to go to class”, “It is so cold outside today.”  These little negative things may not seem like a big deal at the time, but these complaints add up and create a negative atmosphere around us.  Instead, try to focus on the positives in life and you will make not only yourself, but also everyone around you happier.

“Control the controllables”

The second rule, “Accept and Give Constructive Criticism”, is a life lesson that I think is very valuable.  My volleyball coach in high school focused heavily on this during our practices.  Instead of saying what we shouldn’t do( ex. “Don’t miss this next serve”), she had us verbally say out loud to each other what we WILL do(ex. “I will make my next serve”).  This constructive criticism that we gave ourselves and others allowed us to improve because we focused on improving what we were doing in a positive way.

The last rule, “Don’t Shift Responsibility and Blame”, applies a lot to my core value of integrity.  By not shifting responsibility and blame, you are being accountable for you actions.  In leadership and in life, it is important to admit that you have made mistakes.  This allows you to grow and learn from your mistakes rather than run form them.

The book also mentions the steps to take in order to implement these rules into your life.  It says to focus on one rule at a time, and day by day increase how much you practice the rule in your life.  For example, if you wanted to focus on the rule “Refrain from Idle Complaints” you would focus everyday on slowly saying less complaints and instead making positive remarks.  This is the rule that I plan on focusing on first.  I know that there are a lot of days when I spend way too much time complaining.  Part of this is because I like to talk a lot, and when I don’t have much to say, I fill the empty space with little complaints, such as “I’m tired” or “I don’t want to do this.”  This is a really bad habit of mine but I think if I can cut it out, I will be allowing myself to be much more positive and spread positivity to others.

My group decided to implement these rules by passing out nice cards to people on campus that say nice things and motivate people to do their best!  Overall, I think this project allowed me to see how much little things we do can affect others.  It has made me more conscious of my day to day actions.

Why are we like this?

Another class we have to take for LAS is Intro to Psychology.  I absolutely loved the material that we learned in this class, and it has made me want to minor in Psychology.  I think learning about why people are the way the are is so interesting.  We also learned about how the brain works, and that fascinated me. The human mind and brain is so cool.  I think learning about how we develop and how the mind works allows us to have a greater understanding of others. We also talked a lot about how psychology can affect leadership.  We learned a lot about social psychology, and I think that is extremely applicable to being the leader in a group of people.

I think this class is the class that will benefit my leadership skills the most.  It helped me really understand the driving force of why we react to things the way we do, and why we have the personalities that we do.  Knowing this can make me more aware as a leader, and make me able to relate and understand more people. Also, our professor, Dr. Matthew Prewett, was one of my favorite professors I had this semester. I think he is part of the reason that I enjoyed the material so much!

This class also gave my LAS cohort the opportunity to bond!  We went through a lot of material for the class pretty quickly, so we all relied on each other to help study and learn the material.

My First Step to Becoming the President

Part of our protocol for LAS is taking Introduction to Debate together as a cohort.  We learn the different ways of argumentation and are then asked to debate about topics that assigned to us with groups that we are assigned at the beginning of the semester.  At first I wasn’t too excited about this class because I didn’t know what to expect because I had never formally debated before.  However, I ended up enjoying the debating aspect of the class.

The first two debates we were not allowed to pick our topics.  My group was assigned the topics “All welfare recipients should be drug tested” and “All schools should be single sex schools.”  However, the last debate we were allowed to choose our debate topic.  My group chose the topic “Religion should be taught in schools.”  The last debate was my favorite because I thought it was the most interesting.

This class really helped develop my leadership because it allowed me to learn how to have a productive conversation about an issue even when I disagree with others.  I think this is an important skill to have as not only a leader, but as a person.  I also loved this class because the majority of the class would all go get lunch together afterwards, so it gave us a really great chance to bond!

(LAS)ting Bond

Since I am a Leadership Advancement Scholar, I am given a mentor from the LAS Cohort above me.  Our mentors are there to guide us and help us and be our big siblings away from home! My mentor is Stephanie, AKA the coolest person I have ever met.

Each year the new Mentor/Mentee pairs go on a Mentor/Mentee retreat for a weekend where we do team building exercises and really get to know each other.  Before the weekend I had met Stephanie and got food with her a couple times, but I didn’t really feel like I knew her too well yet.  After the weekend, however, I feel as if I had met my (slightly cooler) twin.

We were asked to each make a giant road map on a poster about our lives, and to bring it with us to the retreat.  When we first got to the retreat we broke off into smaller groups and shared our road maps with each other.  My road map was the outline of a giraffe(my favorite animal) that was filled with all of the things that help make me who I am today.

 After sharing our road maps, each group went off and did different smaller leadership activities or conquered the high ropes course.  That night Steph and I got picked to go on a big group canoe trip that ended up being a memory I will never forget.  The trip started off a little hectic as our bus ride to the river turned out to be a little on the dangerous side.  When we got to the river, we were given our canoe, and it didn’t take long to realize that our canoe had a leak and was taking in water.  We were told to continue on the trip anyways and hope that our canoe would stay afloat.  The first hour was as close to smooth sailing as you can get when you have a sinking canoe.  The view was beautiful and the company was amazing.  After about an hour the sun began to set and our canoe was still filling with water at an alarming rate.  We began to scoop the water out of our canoe as we moved along the river in the dark.  However, scooping the water out of the canoe became pointless because we then were stuck in a giant rain storm in the dark.  We couldn’t see very well and we got stuck on a rock and had to get out and push our canoe to deeper water.  When we finally got out of the river, everyone was soaked and freezing.  The best part of this whole unfortunate trip, however, was that we laughed the entire time.   All of these things were going wrong, but Steph and I kept a smile on our face the whole time because we knew we were making the best memories.

The retreat really helped me bond with not only my mentor, but with my whole cohort.  I loved getting to learn about everyone and learn how amazing and fun my mentor is.  I cannot wait to see what memories I make with everyone throughout the years as a Leadership Advancement Scholar.