The learning outcome that I will be focusing on in this reflection is ‘Learning Outcome 1: Awareness’. The reason I choose to focus on this outcome is because the primary focus of the first weeks of service have been gaining awareness on our service partners, the aims of our service and of ourselves (strengths & weaknesses).

An experience that is most similar to the work I am currently doing now in the service was my time working with Christian Outreach with the Handicapped, which is a local service that I participated in during my middle school years. Although we have not met the members of our service yet I predict that the interactions and the experiences may be similar although of course it may be completely different. During this process of gaining awareness of ourselves I have pointed out a couple strengths and also weaknesses that I would like to improve. A strength I have is perhaps my resilience. The local partners that we will have to work with are not similar to us in the way that our friends are. Communication, which is a point I would like to improve on in the future, is more difficult and there will be times when directing them through the activities will be hard and our progress through a session may feel very slow. This will require resilience to keep trying to communicate. Communication is a skill that I would like to improve. My ability to interact with people I am not familiar with is not terrible however there is room for improvement. Depending on the activity that may mean finding better ways to teach, finding more topics to discuss, using body signals to communicate ideas when there is a verbal barrier. My leadership skills can be lacking at times. So far in the service we have had to take a certain amount of leadership into our own hands. Staying on top of things and figuring out ideas of what we are actually going to do in our service can be challenging.

As a result of the service in the last 2 months I think that my leadership skills have progressed a bit however I understand that there is limited room for improvement in such a small time frame so I am optimistic that these skills will improve over time. Once we start meeting with the members of our service I am sure that my communication skills will develop along with my resilience and leadership skills. My overall awareness of our group, our service, my qualities has increased which means my self-awareness quality has been utilised.