the takeaway

There are a handful of ideas that I see myself using that I got from this class.  The first is the idea of authentic leadership. I really enjoyed the mindset that this form of leadership gives, not just in a business setting but in our daily lives. The idea of letting your values and beliefs lead your actions for me is a truly freeing experience. I have had time in my life where I have done things that were socially expectable or what society wanted me to do but inside I knew I was betraying my own beliefs. So for me to have cultivated this concept of authentic leadership where I stand by my values regardless of the consequences is truly liberating. The next idea or concept that I came away with was the idea of privilege. Now I don’t think that there is anything wrong with having privilege or that you should be ashamed of it. I’m most cases it’s totally out of your control so for me the exercises that we did in class mainly making a paper linked chain for every identified privilege that we had. Mine dragged on the floor when I was holding it up and that’s saying something since I’m 6 foot, it just really made me appreciate the differences between not just my fellow classmates but also people as a whole were all different with our own struggles, advantages, and disadvantages. The activity also brought to mind something that my girlfriend told me once. That when she was young she would wonder what it was like to be white, she’s Chinese. But it downed on me that I have never had that though I have never wondered about being any other race and I think it comes down to the privileges and the dominant white male cultural view that we have in America, a privilege that I never even considered. The last idea or technique that I will be taking away from this class is how to enhance our listening and communication skills. Now this is a topic that I have run across multiple times before where it is in classics like Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends and Influence people, or some of the more modern books on the subject like Leil Lowndes How to Talk to Anyone. The point is that no matter what field you enter, communication is going to be key to your wellbeing and success. We covered some basic material in class like active listening and the different listening styles that certain people have, we also went over some technical things that one can do to improve their communication skills, like eye contact, matching the other person’s vocal intensity, and mirror the physiological ques of the other person. While none of this was new to me, seeing the material again in a class room setting was very helpful and reinforced the idea the communication is key. All in all, I have a great time in the class and will be using some of the skills and ideas that I learned form it moving forward in my career and life.

teams

my freshman year I was part of the OSU crew team for the first few weeks we were in the pseudo community phase in which we were all relatively nice to each other both it was superficial no one really cared about the others we were all just there, then when boat assignments came out we entered the chaos faces in which everyone was joking for position trying to get into the top slots and in the positions they wanted then we moved into the third stage realizing that at the end of the day we won or lost as a team and we couldn’t continue to fight amongst ourselves. This realization led into the last phase of true community in which we all worked together that’s not to say we all agreed but we were able to put personal feelings aside and work together. Consensus played a key role in the third and fourth stages of is development as a team. It wasn’t until everyone’s voices were heard versus only the loudest that we could finally come to terms and move forwards as a team.

our privileges

white and male are two target identities that I have. these identities are represented and shown to me in a positive way every day from the commercials that I watch, to other social aspects of life. The two go hand in hand both are seen as the dominant forces in America, reinforcing positive beliefs that I have towards myself and my identity. A non – target identity would be that I identify with my German lineage. Which really doesn’t have any problems co-existing with my two target identities. All my identities are positive and none of them contradict each other. I lucked out 

the leadership challenge

After taking the leadership challenge my highest score was a tie between model the way and challenge the process while my lowest score was inspire a shared vision. To me I was a little surprised at how well the scores lined up with my strength finder results. I had more achievement based scores for strength quest and with the leadership challenge I once again scored high in what I would describe as achievement styles areas. I expected my results to be very low in the inspire a shared vision because I was using my current job as a reference to answer the questions, and in my job its very individualized with very little team work so there really isn’t a shared vision. Over all I found the leadership challenge to be interesting but I’m a little hesitant to believe and take action on the results just because of how they can shift depending on what environment you’re looking at. i guys moving on from here i can try and talk with my managers about what are vision is and see if that helps me bring my views in line with that shared company vision.

A random act of kindness

For this post we were asked to do a random act of kindness and document it. Now a random act of kindness isn’t new to any of us. It doesn’t have to be a large thing, it can be the small daily things that we do like holding the door for the person behind us, picking up someone else’s trash, or giving to the homeless. I understand the motive behind random acts of kindness as well. As Martin Seligman “the father of modern positive psychology” put it: the highest level of enduring happiness comes from altruistic activities that are fun and done solely for the benefit of someone else. It gives us a greater sense of self, affecting us for days, and even weeks, after the event.

So why then do I refuse to do this post, and actively go out and do a random act of kindness and document the proof of my good deed? Well in short: because going out and doing a premeditated act of random kindness defeats the purpose. Virtue based ethics tells us the right action isn’t right within itself; it is right because of the reasons we’re doing it. Going out and doing this acts for points and a grade defiles the act itself. It’s no longer random and I hardly think it’s kind if we are doing it solely with the expectation of being rewarded. To back this thought up here’s a definition that was covered in class of authentic leadership. Authentic leaders act in accordance with one’s own values as opposed to acting simply to please others, attain reward, or avoid punishment through acting falsely. This blog asks us to do just that: act falsely in order to attain a reward and avoid punishment.

This class is about leadership and taking action based on our values. In the last blog post that I made I talked about moral mutinous, knowing the right thing but not doing it. My example was getting a false grade on a test that I didn’t deserve but I said nothing and kept the better grad fearing punishment. A fellow class mate called me out saying that she too had done this once, but the pain of being untrue to her wasn’t worth it and that in the future she always did the right thing regardless of the consequences.

That’s why I won’t be posting proof of my random acts of kindness even if it means losing points for me. It isn’t right and I won’t defile the act or myself by going out and doing a premeditated act of self-gratification then documenting my good deeds. Like I said this class is about leadership about knowing your values and living by them.  

Moral Muteness

There are time when we know the right thing to do but we don’t for whatever reason we turn away or walk on by, what do these moments say about use and are values and morality?

For me it’s hard to think of a time that I was morally muteness in the recent past. I truly try to do what I feel is right. However I guess there is one example that I can think of, it’s actually rather close to home as far as moral muteness events go. I got a midterm back from one of my classes this particular class also goes over the midterms in class, to see what you got right and wrong, as we were going over it, I noticed that I had missed 18 points out of a 100 on the paper but my carmen grade for the class states that I got a 87 on the exam. Clearly the points had been entered in wrong and for me the morally right thing to do would be to notify the teacher, I didn’t earn those points and since the class is curved my higher grade would in some small way affect the class curve for that test, but I didn’t I said nothing and kept the grade.

It does bring into question my values I value honest as one of my top three personal values however I didn’t follow through with it, why? For me I think that we hold are values to a certain degree but that values come into question when we are presented with a situation that is self-importance where we will be harmed or helped depending on whether we keep in line with our value.For me in that situation the harm was to great and I compromised my values in order to avoid the harm of losing the points. 

In general I think there are situations that test are values where we abandon them either do to a lack of understanding of the situation in which we don’t realize he have compromised our values. Or a situations where we know we must compromise are values to avoid pain, and are forced to weigh that pain against are value.

my baises

The first bias that I decided to test was my biases around fat individuals and thin. Going into the test I expected that I would have a bias against those that are severely overweight. After completing the test I was given a result of moderate automatic preferences for thin individuals over fat. Looking at my past and some of the ideas that I have around weight support and reinforce this bias, when I was in high school do to my own inactivity and disregard for my body I gained a large amount of weight, at my heaviest I weighed 240 pounds, I hit a point where I had to change and I did, I lost 50 pounds. For me there’s no real excuse for not getting your weight and health under control because it’s totally within your ability to control, I also find thin people to be more sexually attractive, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s natural to select more fit and healthy partners. So as far as my bias against fat individuals I don’t see anything wrong with it as long as I don’t disqualify people based only on their weight.

The next bias test that I took was preference towards gays vs straights, I expected going into this to be neutral do to the fact that I have a number of gay friends and I work down in the short north which has a large number of gay men and women, however after the test I found out that I actually have a slight preference for straight over gay. When looking at these results I guess I can believe that I’m straight I don’t have any gay relatives and didn’t have any gay friends until my 20s so I guess I can still have some unconscious biases from my early childhood.

Finally the last bias that I looked at was race primarily white vs black. My results stated that I have a moderate preference for Caucasian vs African American. I don’t see any surprise in these findings I come from a small rural area that was predominantly white and had a general distrusts and racial stigma against African Americans, I myself didn’t escape that environment without picking up a number of racial biases, those biases do to my focus have been reinforced over time.

In conclusion I found the tests that we conducted on are biases to be very interesting and gave a grate insight into are unconscious minds.