Learnings fromTaghayyur fellowship
Joining a four-week long Taghayyur fellowship was firstly a fine decision and then it really proved to be a fantastic period full of learnings, fun, and a sense of belonging. I learnt a slew of things not only from the mentors but also from the fellows. Every person was from a different background encompassing engineering, FSc, mass communication, medical, etc. and there was a great opportunity to do networking with them.
Every person carried a different story and a different pack of knowledge and mindset so had different perspectives towards the world and thus provided me with an opportunity to learn new perspectives on different topics and helped me widen my outlook towards things.
The whole fellowship curriculum was laden with interesting-cum-knowledgeable activities which actually helped me further broaden my knowledge base, my communication skills, and also make myself an even better person than before. I would love to share some of my learnings during the fellowship and those are:
- Beliefs: Our actions are the result of our beliefs, so to produce positive actions, we need to work on our beliefs and create a positive and growth mindset.
- In the success recipe, just belief and action are not enough, rather focus and consistency are must too, because without them we can not achieve success in life. So to gain consistency and focus, we will have to shun all distractions in our lives and plan our next day beforehand utilizing Lee strategy, thus organizing our whole life.
- Pain and Pleasure Concept: If we want to do something, we need to attach some pleasure to that act and on the contrary, if we want to shun some act, we need to attach some pain to that act.
- SMART Goals: Make SMART Goals for every task/project/mission as this will help us be motivated and stress free during the work and let us finish work in an organized manner.
- Self-esteem & Self-confidence: To enhance both self-esteem & self-confidence, we need to be grateful for whatever positive things or skills we have in ourselves, and should further enhance our knowledge, skill and competence with continuous practice and stop comparing ourselves with others.
- Open-mindedness: It states that we should listen to everyone’s opinion actively and patiently and should never be angry when our ideas are challenged rather we should acknowledge the opportunity to learn and improve ourselves further through that hostile situation.
- Communication skills: Only verbal communication doesn’t create the actual impact, the other thing which actually makes up the whole impact of your message is the non verbal communication.
- Conflict Handling: It is important to handle a conflict in sequential steps, out of those most important I thought were the first and the last step i-e, calm down and thanks/forgive. Here is the full sequence viz, calm down, share/listen/check, take responsibility, brainstorm solutions, choose one solution, thanks/forgive.
- Leadership: To be an effective leader, we all need to have skills like, self-directed learning and become a lifelong learner, Creativity, Critical thinking (logical thinking), Decision-making ( a leader must be sharp in making timely and sound decisions), Problem solving, etc.
- Self-Awareness: It is important to have the right direction in our life i-e, the purpose of life by identifying our strengths/weaknesses, talents, traits/qualities, accomplishments, values, passion, our behaviors, emotions, thoughts/beliefs, motivations.
- Ethical elements: We discussed kindness, respect, forgiveness, honesty in detail to not only understand the importance of such positive values but to implement in our lives too.
- Activities: The whole fellowship was packed with activities like, a) picture writing, taking 3 random words from a dictionary and making up the story based on those words, what would happen if… making something out of the raw material nearby us,….to boost our creativity.
b) Plane crash activity to boost our critical thinking, creativity, decision-making and problem solving.
c) Acquiring real knowledge technique steps and activity to boost our ability to study conceptually.
d) Other activities to understand our beliefs, our motivations, growth mindset finding activity, personality test to know about our inclination towards a specific field and so on…
This was just a quick overview of the whole fellowship. Activity based learning is such a powerful technique to empower the students and thus let them bring their own potential out and realize themselves. Creativity related activities I really enjoyed and helped me explore my ability further and by teaching some of the learnings to others, I also found a sense of improvement in myself. Active discussions during the sessions improved my communication skills too. In short, this was really a fruitful period to better myself by making me more positive and would love to recommend others to join this.
