Anna Hayward & Greg Mason
Anna and Greg gave a presentation on the amazing time they had at RYLA 2018. The Rotary Young-Person Leadership Award is a week long leadership development programme packed with many activities. Anna and Greg gave their highlights for each of the days.
On the first day there were a number of fun icebreakers to help them get to know the other attendees. They both found the Tetramap personality profiles to be very useful in learning about different leadership styles. They also had a lot of fun building a geodesic dome out of newspaper, sellotape, and staples.
The second day presented them with an amazing opportunity to get hands-on experience with fundraising. They had to promote Emergency Response Kits (ERKs). Anna and Greg had to go out and fundraise to the public in Silverstream. It was a valuable experience as they had to take rejection and advice from other people. Afterwards they went to Parliament and Greg got to introduce Chris Bishop to the attendees.
On the third day they had a talk from Ganesh Cherian about privilege and prejudice. Ganesh has had a number of different hairstyles and talked about how these affected other peoples perceptions of him. This talk was eye-opening. In the evening they had a BBQ dinner and met a number of Rotarians including our own Bev.
The highlight of the fourth day was the adrenaline forest high rope challenge. This was tiring both mentally and physically. One person fell of a platform and was left hanging there, shouting out “I’m going to die!”. Luckily someone manage to jump on a little platform and pick him up. In the evening they listened to previous Rylarians and learnt that “There are no zero days”. Greg has found this useful with learning the guitar and his side projects.
The final day was the pirate themed triathlon. They created a raft with tires and had to perform various activities. On Anna’s raft one tire popped and another went missing. They came last but she didn’t notice since the experience was so positive. Greg’s team performed better but their raft started to fall apart in the last activity.
Overall they had an incredible experience and found it hard to leave. Greg was unsure if he could learn anything new about leadership but he found that there was always more you could learn about leadership. Anna had some useful advice that she shared with us: always be positive, don’t let others define you, express gratitude, exercise and look after yourself, and most importantly: have fun!
Nicholas Duncan
Very-gracious-and-willing-stand-in Club Reporter
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