Johari...

The Johari window is an interesting tool to get to better understand your interpersonal awareness. It might be a very interesting tool to find out more about yourself, things you didn't know before and maybe get some things confirmed.

So let's see what I still have to discover about myself :)

Just check the following link: http://kevan.org/johari?name=Kwansu

Personal discovery...

Power-With...

Power-With…

During the last few weeks, I have had some serious problems with some people. I think the problems escalated because of failure to communicate. Taking into account that talking is not necessarily a conversation, I think there was never a meaningful conversation. Rather a waterfall of excuses, and everyone who has seen a powerful waterfall knows that it is very difficult to stop it from pouring water and going against the stream.

But my personality makes me try to swim against it. Some people call it stubborn, I don’t see it that way, I rather see it as making a decision and with that decision changing the destination of the ultimate goal. Because with every decision to act to achieve our initial goal, we change our goals (sounds contradicting?). Well look at it this way: whenever we set goals and based on those goals we decide to act, we make one step to achieve those goals. But as we achieve our initial goal, we have a starting point for new goals and objectives. Thus as soon as we make a decision to act, we already change our current goals and objectives for ones we ar not yet consciously aware of.

So, as soon as the problem occurred, I decided not to act according to expected behaviour instead I took the position of an equal in the situation. For me it would have been easy to accept the problem and try to get out of the situation as soon as possible. But I tried to ask questions, invite for conversations and look for either solutions or underlying reasons.

Just so it happened that today I was reading an article about the concept of Power-With. A concept that tells us that people who are dominated should try and seek ways to level even with the dominator and vica versa. In other words, not to accept Power-Over situations, but as soon as you feel that you’re in a Power-Less situation try and refuse that position, try to transform the situation and the other person until you are in a Power-With situation where both parties can speak on a normal basis where we actually try and find our full human potential. In any situation that is not Power-With there is an unbalance in the relationship and unbalance usually means obstruction of improvement, it creates a situation of power struggle. A person that is in a Power-Over position will find it very hard to maintain that position if approached by the Power-With position.

Just thought it was really interesting to find a theory that kind of describes how I like to go against the stream. Not accepting that Power-Over position of the other party but trying to converge and end up in a situation of Power-With. Now it seems that the problem is almost solved. Hopefully I can keep a balance in Power-With in future situations, I think I’ll dive into this issue to find some more useful information…

Meaningful…

Meaningful…

So, back home in The Netherlands after an interesting week in Lithuania. Art of Hosting Meaningful conversations was the seminar I attended. In total only 16 delegates, but that was actually perfect, for once not too many people present so you can get that closer atmosphere. Besides the seminar was at the same time and place as the International Trainer Conference, in the beautiful small town called Druskininkai.

Nobody knew exactly what the seminar was about, so we were all kind of clueless about what to find, especially since the seminar only took three days and the agenda seemed so “light”. But nevertheless the seminar had something curious and intriguing about its content, it was in fact an experiment by Engage! InterAct since the content was normally not meant for young people but let’s say “business people”.

The seminar turned out to be very useful in many was. It covered some concepts we were already familiar with but it also spread some new light on existing knowledge and concepts as well. I was very satisfied that I applied for the seminar.

But the concept “meaningful conversations” for me already was something that I use frequently. AIESEC conferences usually for me don’t have any meaning just for the content itself. Take International Congress 2005 in India, the fact that it was in India and around 600 people form over 90 countries were there was more exciting than the agenda and the sessions. I can even say they were rather boring, and I don’t think that’ll change for International Congress 2006. The important impact, output, significance or meaning that IC had was purely based on the meaningful conversations I had. Conversations that started out of a random encounters, and could easily last till 6.00 in the morning. That to me is meaning, not the agenda itself. Outputs can always be found on the website, everything that we should know as delegate will be written in a document, but the conversations cannot. You cannot read back a conversation that you never had, it’s something that just happens on the spot, randomly, unexpected and with any person.

Art of Hosting was the same. Soon we will get a CD with outputs, great, useful and I’ll definitely have a look at it. But the conversations I had with some people, people I didn’t know, never met before and I did not plan to have a conversation with, they are meaningful. Random conversations, random topics, random moments, random people.

Now even when the conference is over, the conversations continue with some of them. Some conversations have become a relationship in terms of me being a mentor for some, and others are still ongoing, because there was never an end.

So now I’m looking forward to some post-conferencing, endless conversations, randomly starting with the virtual communication channels we have. And who knows, maybe we can continue them physically at some other random conference.

Random meaning everywhere…