This post is part of a series of reflecting on the weekly chapters of my LiA experience in Singapore. 

What went well?

It was STEM Fest Week this week! STEM Fest was really successful; we had the most number of registrants and attendees in the event’s history! The booth partners, distinguished guests, floor staff and fellow UWS staff collaborated to put a professional, united front for the girls. My role at STEM Fest was to run UWS’ partner booth, where I was telling parents/children about UWS’ programs and running a hands-on electronics activity. I loved my role because it allowed me to talk to parents and students the whole day.

What could have been done differently?

This week felt picture perfect in a cosmic sense. It wasn’t that every day was perfect, but the events of every day was needed.

What did I learn about myself when working with others?

This week I learned that the way you talk about a task dictates how stressful it is.

If I frame a task as really challenging, then my brain prepares to expect a huge challenge. For example, I came into this week expecting a huge challenge. And even though my team did as well, their stress didn’t present the way my stress did.

The team was so stretched during the height of STEM Fest having to send emails, prep final materials, coordinate amongst attendees and guests, finalize vendors and securing last minute supplies (and the PO’s that caused Programmes Team member Shuen-Li so much pain). But they didn’t “look” busy; they were smiling, joking, going out for lunch. They didn’t let their to-do list subsume them, because they realized their days were more than their tasks. And that, I think, allowed them to be more productive.

I’ve struggled with separating myself from my professional or academic outputs for the entire of my university career. My parents tell me I have a “transparent” face, so they can immediately see if a test hasn’t gone well or an important meeting didn’t go as I’d hoped. They’ll tell me, too, that my actions gave away how I felt. What observing the team this week did is it showed me that our lives have different factions, and that an important productivity tool is categorizing which factions of life I feel I’m doing well or not-so-well in. This piecemeal approach will allow me to not overwhelm all aspects of my life just because one aspect isn’t going so well.

What did I learn about leadership?

Leadership is about knowing when you need to step back to let others talk, having the confidence that you can insert aspects of yourself into the conversation. This builds of what I’ve been learning about being a “quiet leader”.

There’s a book series I was obsessed with as a little girl that I was reminded of this week. The books are called The Rainbow Magic Series, and they follow the story of two human girls who form an alliance with a magical world. Key to this story is the human girls’ necklaces; they are pendants that glow when there is trouble in the magical world. As someone obsessed with the idea of a beautiful parallel world of fairies, I remember thinking about all the time I’d spend in the magical world if I had access to one. The girls in the books seemed to have the same idea as me, because they’d try to look for signs that the magical world needed them. But one of the doctrines of the book was that they “had to let the magic come to them”.

I need you to hear me out now. Isn’t that parallel to quiet leadership? You can choose to either insert yourself into spaces as a leader, or you can wait until you are needed. And I don’t mean this to say that leaders should only act when they are called upon to lead my others, but rather that they should only act when their actions are minimally impairing and when they see they are needed. They don’t just raise their voices or hold a rally or run a workshop just for the heck of being a leader, but they take these actions in response to a need they see.

What do I want to develop or focus on next?

Moving into my last week with UWS, I want to plan for how my contributions – interpersonal and output related - are going to make a lasting impact on my team. I plan on creating a handover sheet with my pending tasks and helping the team debrief after STEM Fest to see what went well and explore areas for strategic growth.