For last week’s lecture, Nathan Ward, the Director of Student Leadership, spoke to us on decision-making.  We make hundreds of decisions every day, both in our personal lives and as leaders, and as President Monson has said, “decisions determine destiny.”  Many of these decisions are trivial and won’t have a lasting impact on our lives, but some decisions, like picking a major, really do make a huge difference.  As tempting as it may be to shy away from making these weighty, often difficult decisions, it is always better to make a bad decision than to not make one at all; avoidance never gets you anywhere.  So what makes these decisions so hard to make?  According to Brother Ward, there are five things that make decision-making difficult:

• Limited time
• Limited information
• Fear of consequences
• Disagreement
• Uncertainty 

      I think that in a leadership setting, the thing I worry about is finding a balance between being decisive and bossy.  In most cases, I would be fine with just making the decision myself, unless I am missing vital information, but that’s not what a leader should ideally do.  It’s important to hear everybody’s point of view, consider all of the possible outcomes, review everything that you know, and identify any holes you have in your information.  Like Brother Ward said, decision-making is a process, not an event.  So I think that while in some situations it is crucial to make a quick decision, even if it is uneducated, most of the time it is more beneficial to the group to hash out all of the details and come to an informed consensus.  And sometimes as a leader, when you’ve evaluated your options, you might realize that the best decision for the group is actually the riskiest, or it might involve a few negative (but necessary) consequences, but that is the decision that you must make.  A real leader has to make tough calls.

      In making decisions on a personal level, I think that I have done a good job so far, but then again, I haven’t had to make that many critical decisions.  Obviously, the decision to come here to BYU was life-changing, and even though I have basically known I was coming here since I was three, I still made a chart that evaluated all the different aspects of the different schools I was considering, and when I came to a decision, I brought it to the Lord and I felt a clear confirmation.  However, I know that I have much more complicated decisions ahead of me that are equally important: picking a major and later on, a career, deciding who to marry, how many kids to have, and the list goes on.  It will require me to do much more than a simple pros/cons list. 

      Lately, I have been trying to decide if I really want to be a communications major.  I am trying to become as informed as I can by taking some of the pre-requisites, attending events within the department, and asking lots of questions to the right people.  I have been thinking forward to when I enter the work field and will probably be a wife and mother, and have factored in time commitment, salary, and the likelihood of me actually being successful.  I need to look at other options in greater detail so I can know my alternatives, and I need to further research the requirements within my specific program.  I know that I don’t need to decide quite yet, but it is such an important decision that I need to keep it in mind constantly.  Some of the decisions we make really can determine our destiny, so it is so important that we take the right steps, be informed, and of course, always ask the Lord.

      After only two months of college, I have already identified what I know will be my biggest challenge over the course of these next four years: time management.  With homework constantly piling up around me, exciting social opportunities literally every night of the week, intramural sports, too many different clubs to count, and a time-consuming (yet spiritually rewarding) church calling, I haven’t had a moment to catch my breath since I’ve been here.  This past week, our lecture was about time-management, and our speaker, Tamara Gray, offered some great insight and useful ideas.  She outlined four “to-do list” items that we should focus on in order to make the most of our time and find a healthy balance:

1) Change your attitude: She emphasized that our life should be like an orchestra, and we should strive to find a harmony between all the different aspects of our lives. 

2) Check your motives: This tied in to the lecture from a couple weeks ago about vision and goals—everything that we spend time doing should have a purpose, and should bring you closer to reaching your overarching vision. 

3) Simplify: There are so many “good” uses of our time, but we need to seek only the “better” and “best” uses of our time, and remember “not to get caught in the thick of thin things.”

4) Be intentional and accountable: It’s important to schedule things out and when you make mistakes, instead of finding excuses and avoiding blame, you should honestly reflect on your actions and even pray over your goals.

      One of the ideas that really stuck with me from the lab on Monday is that “it's not the hours you put in your work that counts, it's the work you put in the hours.”  I think that I do a good job at blocking out plenty of time to get my schoolwork done, but I know that I could be more efficient and save myself a lot of time.  First of all, I have a really sporadic sleep schedule; I’ve already pulled a few all-nighters and I procrastinate often, so I’m usually up very late and take naps throughout the day.  I’ll often get so tired when doing homework in the late hours of the night that I take twice as long to read a passage, or I’m not able to write as well as I could if I had lots of energy.  I also get distracted very easily.  And while Facebook is one obvious time-sucking distraction, I get distracted by tons of other things as well, even if t’s just my mind trailing off topic.  I think that to fix this problem, I need to start going to bed earlier and maybe waking up earlier if I have a lot of homework.  I also need to make a solid effort to stay focused, perhaps by setting mini-goals and rewarding myself when I meet them.

      On Monday, we also filled out a worksheet called the “Wheel of Life Reflection”, where we gauged how much time we spend on these categories: friends/social, family, schoolwork, health/exercise, church/spiritual, ourselves, work, and improving our physical environment.  It created a strong visual that represented how we used our time.  Of course, the top use of my time was schoolwork, which is okay for a college student.  However, I realized that while I am spending lots of time on friends and church, I’ve neglected to spend enough time on my family.  My family is more important to me than anything else on that wheel, so I really need to adjust how much of my time I give them.  Time really is the most precious commodity; we can’t create more of it, we can’t slow it down or speed it up, and we can’t control it.  It’s so important to prioritize the uses of your time and consistently evaluate how you’re managing your time so that not a single minute is wasted.

      One of the most important keys to success as a leader is teamwork.  Having been a competitive soccer and basketball player for most of my life, I can really attest to this, so our lecture this past week from Tom Homloe, BYU’s Athletic Director, hit home for me.  He actually played football for BYU and later in the NFL, as well as coached, so he had some interesting stories to share with us.  He told us that there are two kinds of people: firelighters and firefighters.  Firelighters make a visible effort to help you “keep your fire hot”, while firefighters will put out your fire with discouragement and negative ideas.  Behind every successful person is a firelighter.  He also shared with us a very remarkable study: The Encouragement Experiment.  It proved that an average person can tolerate pain for twice as much time when someone is by their side encouraging them.  Being a leader means being that encouragement, it means being a firelighter.

      Last year, my basketball team was filled with talent and potential.  Some of my best friends my senior year were from the team, and I had a really great year.  However, from the get-go, there was something missing from our team.  We never reached our full potential, and game after game we ended up disappointed and discouraged.  I’ve never really been able to pinpoint what exactly went wrong on our team until now.  In talking about teamwork this past week, we learned of the 5 dysfunctions of a team:

      I actually don’t think we had an issue with the first dysfunction, inattention to results.  We set very specific goals for each game, and ran plenty of sets of lines to pay it when we didn’t reach our goals.  Our coach helped us reevaluate our strategy and work ethic in response to our performance, and so we did pay a lot of attention to our results.

      Avoidance of accountability, however, was a definite problem on our team last year.  Some of the girls who got plenty of playing time thought that they didn’t have work as hard in practice, and didn’t take the blame when something went wrong in a game.  Likewise, the girls who only played a few minutes (if any) didn’t feel accountable either because they knew they wouldn’t be playing in the games anyways.  Nobody stepped up as a leader, and we never stepped up as a team; unfortunately, we stayed at mediocre.

      Next comes lack of commitment, which I think was another one of our problems.  We all committed a huge chunk of our time and energy, but mentally, we were not 100% committed to the team.  In basketball, commitment means diving on the floor after a loose ball.  It means when you do a set of lines, you actually touch the line.  You give it everything you have, and you show up to every practice with the intention of making yourself and your teammates better.  I’m not saying that I did this perfectly, but our team as a whole wasn’t always committed to getting better.

      The next level of the triangle is fear of conflict; I really don’t think we had a huge issue with this.  We had an awesome coach who confronted conflict head-on, and we consistently had team meetings to address our problems.  We would sit for hours trying to come up with ways to make our team better and to get everyone on board, and we would usually emerge from meetings reenergized and refocused.  However, it never lasted very long before we sunk back into our old ways.

      At the base of the triangle is absence of trust.  While I hate to talk down about my teammates, I know that this was the basis of our problems as well.  Right at the beginning of the season, we had issues with rumors and gossip, and I think it set the season off on a bad course.  While we all got along on a superficial level and had fun together, there were cliques and with the large amount of time we spent together, we got tired of each other.  I actually think that our avoidance of accountability and lack of commitment were a direct result of our absence of trust.

      While I obviously can’t go back and fix my basketball season, it’s beneficial to reflect on what went wrong because I now know how to recognize these dysfunctions in the future.  As a leader, I need to be a firelighter, encourage others to be firelighters as well, and most importantly, remember that the basis of a successful team is trust.

      For this week’s lecture, Adrian Klemme, the Student Leadership Coordinator, spoke to us about conflict management.  He repeatedly emphasized that conflict was not a negative thing.  In fact, it is inevitable.  The reason that conflict has such a negative connotation is that many of us don’t know how to properly handle it.  But if conflict is approached the right way, it can result in strengthened relationships, growth and understanding, and ideally, an agreement that satisfies everybody’s interests.

       As part of the lesson, we each took a short test to evaluate what strategies we use to manage conflict.

There are five methods of dealing with conflict:

      So what were my results? Competing came in at 17 points, followed by Accommodating and Compromising at 12 points each.  At first, I was a little confused because these traits seem contradictory of each other.  But the more I thought about it, I realized that I use these different methods in different situations. 

       When I really feel strongly about something and it is personal to me, I am competitive.  I hate to say it, but this side of me comes out at home the most, and it has turned many conflicts into more than they needed to be.  However, it’s not always a bad thing.  I’m a natural debater, and it is easy for me to think of and organize counterarguments in my head quickly and defend my position.  But it’s equally important to listen to others’ ideas and opinions and be able to take constructive criticism, so I know I need to work on this.

       When it comes to everyday conflicts and annoyances, I usually try to let things go, so I guess this is where I am accommodating in my conflict management.  I try to pick my battles wisely, so most of the time if a friend or roommate does something to make me mad, I let it go for the sake of the relationship.  While this has benefitted me in many situations, it has also caused a few problems.  For example, in high school I had a few friends whose “teasing” got to the point that it not only annoying me, but was starting to hurting my confidence, but I would laugh with them and tried to act like it was not a big deal.  But the more it built up, the worse it got and when the issue was finally confronted, it was much more difficult to deal with.

       We were told that collaborating was the ideal method of handling conflict, so it was reassuring to realize that I do manage some conflicts well.  I think that I am a great collaborator in more formal situations like committee meetings, within my church calling, for class projects, or in leadership roles—I am a natural problem solver, so I usually can come up with effective ways to reach our overall goal and include everybody’s ideas in some way.  Now what I need to try to is incorporate this into my everyday conflict management.

       In class on Monday, we each came up with an individual conflict management plan. 

My physiological response: I can’t listen to the other person without constantly thinking of counterarguments for every little point they make

My thoughts during a conflict: Frustration, wanting to get my point across without listening to the other person’s.

Steps to manage my thoughts/emotions in a productive way:

• When the other person is talking clear my mind and actually try to understand their perspective.
• Wait my turn to talk and don’t interrupt.
• Don’t shoot down their ideas.  Instead, share mine calmly and if needed, constructively criticize. 
• Find ways to acknowledge the other person and identify common goals/ideas.
• Look for ways that both objectives can be reached and be willing to give up a little.
• Be receptive to the other person’s response to my ideas.

      In doing this, I think I figured out how I can overcome my competitive side and become a better collaborator. This will require me to let down my pride and be open to new ideas, but that’s okay.  One of the quotes shared with us was “define success in real gains, not imaginary losses”, and in this case, letting go of my opinions is definitely an imaginary loss.  It just doesn’t matter in the big scheme of things. The most important goal in a conflict is not to protect my own ideas, but to come up with a solution that is mutually beneficial for everybody.  I’m excited to try this new way of approaching conflict and see the positive sides of conflict when it is managed appropriately.