2 Months Later...

Oops. I guess I didn't keep up very well with my blogging. I can explain...since my last entry, my work responsibilities exploded and I've spent the whole summer trying to pull off near-impossible feats to prepare for an exciting school-based project. Our organization (www.opbi.org) is implementing our social and emotional development programs in classes at 5 local public middle schools for all 6th grade girls and boys. Normally we have after-school programs once per week for about an hour, and only up to 12 sessions long. So this is a pretty intense change, and it included an increase from supervising 0 staff members to 7 all at once! But I was ready for it, and it's actually been a rewarding learning process, despite the challenges.

So things have been smoothing out since school started - slowly but steadily. However, I did have one "huge embarrassing failure" (Tommy Boy) moment. Part of my job is doing community education to parents and youth professionals, so I have to do presentations and trainings every once in a while (believe it or not!). This has always been uncomfortable for me, but I've managed to do pretty well so far. So I volunteered to speak to a group of parents about risk factors by gender for youth. But this happened to be a group of about 100 parents at one of the most prestigious private schools in Tampa, and I invited a new staff member to come along to see the kinds of presentations we do. So about halfway through, I started doubting everything I was saying, and I was sure people were rolling their eyes at me or giving me dirty looks, and so I lost my cool (if I ever had any 'cool') and my voice became shaky and I was cutting my thoughts short, and it sounded like I wasn't breathing because, in fact, I probably wasn't since I had to speak in a microphone and my voice was totally amplified and scary to me and I was afraid people would hear me exhaling into the microphone. Anyways, I basically finished the presentation saying the general things I planned to, but not without people probably thinking "what's wrong with her?!" or taking pity on me.

So as any good supervisor would do, I cried on the way out to the staff member who came along with me (who actually helped me laugh it off), and I was mortified and devastated that night and went home to mope, but not without first picking up a pint of Ben & Jerry's Imagine Whirled Peace ice cream (which I highly recommend!). Miraculously, I was able to move forward the next day and laugh it off and learn from it. Which is ironic, because part of what I was saying in the presentation is that girls need to take more risks so that they can know what it feels like to fail and learn to be resilient. So really I was just showing an example of that ;). It still haunts me from time to time, but hopefully it just put me in a position to do better next time.

Many other things have been going on, so I'm not sure why I chose to write about that, but there it is. Maybe I'll be more consistent from here on out.

Peace.

P.S. Our breadmaker exploded soon after the last post. But have no fear, Super Gabe went out to replace it as soon as he could. So I'm still enjoying homemade bread!