Based on my experiences from this class, I have decided there is no "definition" of leadership. If there was a definition, everyone would feel as though they had to conform to a certain idea. To me, leadership is all about being yourself and finding how to strengthen yourself through experience. I remember Matt saying in class that being a good leader is not about arriving at a destination, but about continuously learning from others and evolving your own leadership skills. Every blog post in the class will have a different take on leadership and what it means to them. I received a comment from Matt on another blog post that really opened my eyes. He said "not every leader comes from the same mold". I wholeheartedly agree with that because most people see a leader as someone who can grab people's attention and gain followers. After experiencing this class, I realized that I can be a good leader as well and use my personal strengths to lead in my own way since I do not fit this general mold. 

To be an effective and successful leader, I think the most important thing to do is to understand your personal strengths and expand them to make them great. The reason I think this idea is so important is because if you understand yourself, you can understand and work with others much more easily. As humans, it is easy to become frustrated with others if they do not think or act in the same way that you do. In this course especially I think everyone learned that we do not all think or act the same way. This is a simple thought, but sometimes it is easy to forget while we are hard at work on an activity or a project in every day life. As individuals, all we can ever do is control ourselves. And I think that if we understand how we as individuals think and act, we can maneuver how we work with others. With experience after experience, we learn more and more about ourselves and others and we can piece together the leadership puzzle. 

I think a great takeaway I had in this class is my argument with Adrian. As the class knows, I get embarrassed whenever I have to talk about it, but the truth is, it really was a lesson learned. I remember last year in high school I had a similar mini argument with another peer. I connected both of those mini arguments in my head and realized just how similar they were and how I had made an exact same mistake by losing my temper and being too sensitive. I absolutely hate conflict and my top Strengths Quest strength is Harmony, so I want to avoid a situation like that in my future. After thinking about it, I now understand that the only thing I can do to avoid one is control myself and my reactions, and control my sensitivity to diffuse the situation. These are lessons learned for me are now a part of my personal definition of leadership.

My philosophy of leadership differs tremendously from my view of leadership at the beginning of the course. I came into the class thinking I would be at the bottom of the totem pole compared to other students and would need a lot of work in order to gain enough confidence to have that "strong voice" that I mentioned once in a discussion. I knew deep down inside that I would never be that person, but I thought that was the "definition" of a good leader. After experiencing the activities and discussions in this class, I understand that I do not have to fit that mold, and to be my own version of a good leader, I need to understand my own strengths and expand them so that I may work well with other people. With this knowledge under my belt, I am much more confident in my own abilities to be a leader and I hope that everyone else in the class had similar eye-opening experiences.