JUMP! Seminar

This weekend, every student in the GISS student leadership team attended a two-and-a-bit day seminar with three facilitators coming from Hong Kong, Paris and Nairobi. they were here to teach us about how to become facilitators during the conference, as we will all be leading groups of approximately 20 students, and as many of us are brand new to this type of public speaking and acting, we needed the help.

Over the two days, we managed to become a real, functioning team that was able to trust and rely on one another. We participated in psychological discussions and activities, played energising games and began to understand how we could be great facilitators, and how we could become a great team.

This training has now prepared us not only for the conference, but also for our futures after school: these tips and tricks for being confident and a good leader have helped us improve ourselves in such a short time period, and the effects of this seminar will stay with us for a very long time.

This awe-inspiring, confidence and trust-inspiring weekend has marked us all, and thanks to it, we will not walk into the conference cold, unsure of what to do, and wary of our partner. No. We will walk into that conference will confidence, happiness and trust in our partner and in ourselves. And we know now that we can be the ones to make a difference, for we re-learned Richard's 20 Global Problems and thought up new and innovative ways of solving them that might one day become a reality.

I do believe that we have become a proper team thanks to this, and that by forcing ourselves to learn how to deal with mistakes and problems that we will face very soon, we have prepared ourselves to overcome these mistakes and problems.

We also found out that the money we paid for this weekend will be put to good use: a large amount of it will go towards doing another seminar just like this one for students who neither have the money or the opportunity to participate in such an event. Hopefully, the seminar will be for the Golden Hearts Scholars just before the GISS conference. I feel as though this is a really good idea, as it will provide the GHS team with trust and a bond before the conference even begins: they will already be empowered.