Week2 Is leadership something beyond us?

Since I discovered TED, I see a lot of presentations they provide whenever I have time. TED has great variety of presentations over many topics includes leadership. I found “Everyday leadership” by Drew Dudley is quite unique and useful for my process of learning of good leadership. So I would like to share with you! His presentation really means a lot to me because it made interesting point of how people can take leadership in everyday life. Since I started to learning leadership in our class, I was thinking that leadership might be something beyond me, something that really hard to achieve, and something that only people who have great skills and strength can achieve. However, after I watch this presentation, I changed my mind that good leadership can happen not only at the edge or with special people like Shackelton, but also in our everyday lives and with ourselves. Studying great leadership through looking at successful leaders of course helped me to gain knowledge and sense of good leaderships. Although, we should not forget everyone has an opportunity to become good leader or has chance to gain great leadership skill in a way that make someone’s life happier and better. Therefore, I realized that making sure to connect what we learn and our own life/experience which we always do in Ken’s class, is necessary and important step to learn leadership. Have you ever experienced “lollipop moment” in your life?

Week2 My Vision Statement

As we did not touch our vision statements in the class, I would like to put my one in here. I Moe Yoshino am living at my highest and best passion and integrity. I consider passion is one of the essential things not only for great leadership, but also for everything we do in our lives. Having passion towards what I do will make me think the task more valuable and pleasant for achievement. I have always been passionate about what I do in my life even if the task/situation was laborious. My mother takes a leader position in time to time at work, and she always says that having passion towards work is indispensable to achieve goal with her colleagues as a group. Integrity is also essential element of my life, and will be for great leadership. Good leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Gandhi are of course had powerful strength themselves. However, I think they also have great and industrious people around to achieve goals because of their integrity. To sum up, I think that important elements like passion and integrity for good leadership are also precious parts of human life. Through making personal statement, I realize putting/deciding clear vision is really useful to ensure my personal goal for my life. So I am really interested in hearing other’s vision statements. As you may know, Nelson Mandela took great leadership of huge changes in South Africa terms of peace as a politician and activist. I would like to end my post with his famous quotation. I think this quote effectively shows his integrity and generosity.

Week1 what makes good first impression?

Hi, there!

Winter term started :) First 2 classes of RW with Ken were amazing and fun. Classes were mainly about first impression and a posture we make when we meet people. This includes handshake, eye contact, pose, and smile. I have never study about good handshake, so the key point of "brief, warm, firm" was new to me as many other classmates are also mentioned. Furthermore, how to make good eye contact during your speech in front of people was also interesting to know. Making sure to look every person’s eye for few seconds is actually important element of good presentation. As well as these body movements, posture/pose makes significantly different impressions to people. I was really impressed to see the TED video by one of our classmate and Ken, ”Your body language shapes who you are” by Amy Cuddy. Certainly the contents of her presentation and her strong pose, her presentation skill was remarkable. I wonder great delivery skill might be one of the essential skills in good leadership since it seems that many of contemporary leaders present their ideas and belief nicely.

Finally, I was surprised to know smiling helps not only presenter, but also listener around due to its powerful contagion. As we discussed in a group, watching South West Airline, and even encountering new classmates in the class made me recognizing such influential of smiling. However, I realized my problem of smiling too much perhaps i may seem untrustworthy as a leader. Practicing in a group was useful to know advantage and weakness of my presentation skill. I would like to improve my leadership skill as well as presentation sill with practice through the course, Practice makes perfect J

Self Introduction :)

Hi, everyone :)

My name is Moe Yoshino. This is my first post, so I will start with self introduction!

I was born and raised in Fukuoka which has variety of delicious food and good mixture of both nature and city location!

I studied in New Zealand for 3 years as a high school student. My high school is located near Christchurch (you might notice the name from earthquick happened in 2011), and is called Oxford. Studying New Zealand gave me precious and indispensable experience. I truly loved place and people there :)

My hobby are swimming, playing the instruments( little bit of piano and bass), and reading books. I normally read Japanese books, but since I entered ICU I am trying to read English books as well. So if you have any recommendation, let me know please!

As I told in the class, I have disability with m eyes. Some of you already helped me in the class last week, thank you! I will sometimes ask you a help, and I will really appreciate your support.

Finally, I am very looking forward to getting to know all of you :)

Moe