Guest blogger Erin Brown-John is a communications professional, community builder, thereminist and member of the 2017 RADIUS Fellowship in Radical Doing. The following article is a re-post from Erin’s website, eebeejay.com.
On February 4, 2017 my RADIUS 2017 Fellows cohort braved the blizzard to arrive at Camp Alexandra for our program’s opening retreat. This was a chance for us to unplug from our daily lives, get to know eachother and work on setting some personal goals for our time in the Fellows program.
Once we were assembled it didn’t take long for us to skip to the good stuff: who am I? How did I get here? What difficult decisions have I made in my life? Each exercise throughout the weekend was an opportunity to reflect on our experience by sharing it with others.
I really enjoyed getting to know people and appreciated how the tasks we were asked to do were very purposefully meant to get us to explore different ways of telling our stories than many of us are probably used to. The more conversations I had, the more I realized that there are a lot of similarities between us. It might be a bad breakup, or getting fired from a job, or something as random as having a crippled waterfowl as a childhood pet. So rarely in everyday life do we get the chance to focus on other people for long enough to discover the things we have in common.
I was surprised to learn that two thirds of our group identified as introverts. It definitely didn’t feel like it. The lodge was humming with energy and early on we were already having conversations about how well the group gelled and what kinds of wizardry must have taken place in the selection process to make that happen.
But perhaps this was just because we’d spent a long time at the outset coming to a consensus about community guidelines that would enable us to be an open and supportive group. The list we arrived at was rather extensive and emerged out of deep discussions about listening well, showing respect for others’ viewpoints, creating space, expressing radical candour, and hugging consentually.
One of the hardest exercises for me during the retreat was the “super social vision portal” where you have to beam yourself one year into the future and then talk about all of the things that you have accomplished in that time. Being forced to articulate my goals in terms of tangible accomplishments was hard, but it was a good exercise because it forces you to work back from that point to start mapping out how to get there. And more importantly, voicing those goals to another person forces you to think seriously about committing to them.
Perhaps the most pleasant surprise of the retreat was the creative talent in the room. The suggestion on Saturday evening that we should have a talent show was met with near universal awkward rejection, and many in our group opted to try out a rap workshop with Nigel instead. From there things morphed organically into a singalong and Pictionary. There are some seriously talented people in this group.
After the retreat I’m really looking forward to the rest of the program. I’m glad to be part of such a great group of people with so many exciting plans. The retreat was a reminder that though the world has a lot of huge problems that need to be fixed, none of us has the sole responsibility to fix everything. When we are isolated, it is so easy to feel defeated by the enormity of the task. But when you connect with others who are motivated and passionate about what they do, you realize that everyone is doing their bit to make things better. Creating allies lightens the load.