My Leadership Development Plan composed in the beginning of the year was consisted of my need for improvement in two aspects: challenging the process and self-awareness. These two complemented each other because my self-awareness made me self-conscious about my ideas and level of intelligence, which prevented me from challenging the process. It is difficult for me to make my ideas more unique because I am too worried about what others will think of it. The pressure of this prevents me from coming up with a solution quicker because I am too focused on the outcome. Some actions I took to improve on this was to give input on ideas that I didn’t believe was good. Although I did improve on this throughout the term, it is still there. Even with my input and opinions, I was still unable to voice my new ideas. Most of this pertained to my group quickly hashing out ideas at a pace that was way too fast for me to keep up with. I did not prepare as much as I could have for group meetings. This made it my efforts to improve on my LDP much more challenging.

In my LDP process, I talked about ways in which I can improve on my problem areas. One of this included not just sitting back and nodding my head, but refuting ideas that I didn’t completely agree with. It did allow me to step out of my comfort zone a little bit, but it also made me very frustrated at times. At times, I would say that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with something and contribute my own ideas, but they would get shot down. Instead of persevering and trying harder to generate something consensual, I gave up. For example, when we were developing the original third phase to our solution, I didn’t feel too happy about this because I thought it was irrelevant and didn’t make the phases of our solution flow well. A team member dismissed my opinion and thought this was necessary, but later we decided to reword phase 3 as a whole. I originally wrote this phase, but abandoned it because I did not know the logistics of it like my team member did. Instead of working on this, I got frustrated and gave up, failing in challenging the process completely.

With all this being said, I still need to improve drastically on challenging the process. I need to focus less on what others think of me and more on the process of how I can improve the task all together. During this course, I did improve on this, but did not accomplish succeeding in it completely. I need to not underestimate my own abilities and believe in myself because I am capable of doing more than I believe I can. I just need to continue what I was doing and not give up on it.

Throughout this course, I learned a lot about leadership that was not mentioned in the articles and models. One thing I learned in particular was that leadership is not only about stepping up and taking initiative, but also about stepping back and seeing the bigger picture. This was seen in a couple of my group members. These members started off being very persistent in getting their voices out there, which prohibited the rest of the team to talk. Throughout the term, they began to step back and enabled others to act by not saying anything. By observing what goes on, it was easier to see the faults and what we could improve on. This benefited the entire group completely.

Ultimately, I can still improve greatly on challenging the process. I do too much of this sitting back and need to do more of stepping up. I understand that there is still a long way to go, but I know I will get there eventually.