Communication- From Being Bad At It To Being A Pro.

Something I am not very good at and have never been good at it is communicating with others. It’s not that im scared of speaking or expressing myself, but I’m just not that good at doing it. I am someone that will ignore what a person has said to me that was completely unnecessary, instead of verbally going back and forth with that person. I will also let others figure out for themselves what they have to do instead of telling them because I imagine that everyone is well aware that they have to be independent. However, this is something that I have to work on because as the leader that I am in many areas of my life, I need to be on top of everything that other people have to do. For example, in CAS the first trimester we created the yearbook committee. This was the club in which Melanie and I were in charge of leading these students to help us create a beautiful yearbook. I wasnt that involve along with Melanie when we communicated with them about the creation of the yearbook and even doing the fundraiser. Then, I started to realize that even though Melanie is much better at communicating, as I did not help her as much in this aspect, we were lacking on this as a group. That’s when I realized that I had to get more involved in this process. Whenever we were in the meetings, Melanie would be the one that would talk to them about the things that we had to do and what our future looked liked as the yearbook committee. I was there if there was something that had to be added on to and also to show them how to use Pictavo. So after this, we started the second trimester of this school year and this is when I started to improve my communication skills. What I would do is that each time we had a morning meeting, I would be well aware of any announcements that we had to make and I would always remind Melanie of what we both had to say. At the same time, each week I remembered to talk to the committee and remind them that we had a meeting that week. I would continue to remind them what their task was and when it had to be done by. Regarding the Boston Project, communication was harder as it was mainly with people outside of our community. However, we were very proactive when it came to speaking and having meetings with Willa, Mileidy, Miss. Amy and even Abby. Other than that, communication occurred mainly through emails, text messages and phone calls. We continue to practice this and keep up our communication methods throughout the entire trimester. One of the times when I felt proud of how well we were communicating was during spring break. This is the time when most of the yearbook gets completed. However, it’s a lot of work so we had to be very persistent when having the committee doing their work. Even though we couldn’t directly speak to them, we had a group chat in which we would send them daily reminders to complete the pages that they had to do. We would help them get some of the teachers emails and others to be able to gather pictures. During this break, we spent a very stressful week completing the portrait database, but we were very proud and motivated to see how all the girls helped us and completed their task. This was all thanks to Melanie and I’s daily reminders of the things we had to do and it paid of because once we started the third trimester, the yearbook was more than halfway done, where we were only missing some pages that we couldn’t do until we had photos from a specific event. Then came the complicated time of selling the ads and the yearbooks. This is something where we could’ve done a better job. First, we had a really hard time communicating with the companies that were going to buy an ad. This was hard because the communication was inconsistent as we would send them an email and they wouldn’t answer until a few days or even weeks later, and then a lot was going on in school that we weren’t able to respond right away once they emailed us back. With the Boston project we also had a lack of communication. This happened mainly with Cepia as it was extremely hard to speak to Lauren the director. The exchange of emails was completely inconsistent and from our part we didn’t put a lot of effort to find a solution. Because this was happening, we decided to focus mainly on finishing the process of the yearbook project. What we could’ve done for the Boston project from the beginning was to do something about it such as go directly to Cepia and talk to them or call them, which is something that we did just now. This is where our communication skills faltered and definitely created a negative impact in the progress of this project. However, we are now well aware that we have to continue by ourselves and cant really rely on the director anymore as she won’t be here for the next few months. So what we have decided to do was ask them for the possible girls that will be going with us. Last week we decided to call one of them and talk to her about this trip and that she had been elected to participate. We will now speak to another member from Cepia to give us a name of another girl and that way we can communicate directly with her. Once this is done, we will start meeting with the two girls and their parents to figure out the passport and visa processes as those have to be done beforehand and very carefully. Melanie and I now understand that we do need to do this on our own and not expect Cepia to help us that much because they are a very busy organization and if we keep waiting for them to get back to us, then we might not have enough time to get everything done before the trip. So we will keep emailing, texting and speaking to the girls, to Miss. Amy and Abby to be able to complete many of the tasks that we have to do. We will also be communicating this trimester and the next one with the community as we have to continue with our fundraisers to gather all the money needed to buy the tickets and take to this trip for the girls. To conclude, I will say that communication has definitely been a skill that i have improved this year. We have had our ups and downs but I believe that if we continue to be persistent and communicate with others, then we will be able to provide this beautiful opportunity to these girls from our community and their families.