Day 4

Morning
So we voted someone off the island today. Part of the group experience is to participate and engage in the class discussions. When a group member comes late all the time it disrupts the group. Even the empty chair is disturbing. I keep thinking “they’re late again”, even when we’ve been talking about this non-stop.

Now we need to learn how to adapt to a lost member. We mourn. We feel sad. We wonder how we’ll do our group presentation! We lost a member and another one is off sick today, so there are actually 2 people missing. Lots of adapting going on. We have to learn how to do this as coaches, so it’s a good experience.

I feel bad for the person not coming back, but glad that the group dynamic may pick up now. It’s hard to feel bad when someone in a group isn’t coming in on time; there’s a lack of respect for the team. Now there may be some very personal reasons that she couldn’t make back on time, but that’s not the point. A major component of the course is participating and that means coming on time. This may have just not been a good time for her to take the course.

We spend the rest of the morning working on leisure. No we don’t laze around for the morning. We discuss the importance of leisure time. We need to identify and address our feelings around leisure time and how we value it.

Again there is the intertwining of other areas we’ve already discussed. Values, disclosure, etc. we use an exercise to identify what we currently do for leisure, what we’d like to do, and how satisfied with our current level.

I’m happy with the amount of leisure time I take. I’ve got much better balance with work and leisure.

Even my theatre time has dropped back to a level where it doesn’t feel like work. There is so much I could do at the theatre that it becomes too much and I don’t enjoy it. So I’m very conscious of how I spend my time there. I feel happier with this choice. Even if others at the theatre feel that I have pulled back a bit. I still give the best I can.

Afternoon
We work on our group presentations for a while after lunch to prepare for the 3 presentations. My team goes last. I’m not sure what to expect. I tried not to lead my team to choose what I wanted for the teach-back. In other courses, I’ve usually ended up writing a skit of some kind. I let the team brainstorm and I piped in too.

We decided to do a game show – the Family Feud. Guess who got elected to be Richard Dawson. With the loss of one of our team members we quickly come up with a new plan. We’ll ask for volunteers from the group to participate as a second team.

The first 2 presentations are great. Each team employs game play in it. Stealing our idea? They use skits, quizzes, cards, and audience participation.

I am genuine impressed by the other teams. I really never expected such creativity. It’s great. I’m having some great fun now. The group is really gelling together. One team plies us with candy. Sorry, rewards us with candy; I’ll be buzzing through our presentation!

After each presentation the group gives feedback to the presenting team. It’s tough for the presenters as they are just to sit and listen to the good feedback. We are to only give feedback on what the team did well in their presentation. Afterwards, the presenting team says how they feel about the feedback. It’s been all positive and they can’t argue the facts – they did really well.

The feedback we received for our team was great. I was thrilled that they got parts that I wasn’t sure would come through in our presentation. I mean I can keep the group entertained, but getting the information across is something different.

I don’t normally enjoyed presentation teach-backs, but with only 3 teams, and they were all good, it was easy to enjoy.

We did a practice test afterwards. I purposely didn’t study last night to see how I’d do on the practice test. The presentations helped a lot in that I could remember segments of the information based on the presentations. It helped reinforce that some parts of the presentations worked really well as a teach tool.

It also highlighted that I need to study for the real test.