Leadership Workshop: Enhancing Skills and Building Confidence

The purpose of the day was to collaborate and learn from one another, as well as from seasoned professionals who shared their extensive leadership experience. The event featured a combination of lectures, workshops, and team-building exercises, which allowed us to leave with a range of new strategies to enhance our leadership abilities.

To begin with, when we first entered the campus, we were warmly greeted by the Wells Prefect Team and invited to enjoy a selection of pastries and warm drinks. Then we had about fifteen minutes to chat and get to know other prefects, before being ushered into Cedars Hall and invited to sit on separate tables, for an introduction talk by the Headmaster. We then enjoyed a presentation on how to maximise our roles as prefects through encouraging a sense of school community, involving techniques ranging from organising school socials to simply smiling more as you walk down the corridor. Subsequently, we were taught how to effectively chair a meeting with both authority and clarity, highlighting the qualities a chairperson must have, these included emotional intelligence, decisiveness and influence over others. This talk also included preparation we should take in the lead up to a meeting, involving setting up roles and targets to aim towards throughout the meeting.

Following on from that, we were split into two large groups to partake in some team and confidence building activities. The first one was outside on their sports field, where we had to work together is smaller groups to complete small tasks, with one of us acting as the group leader and having to display a specific personality trait, such as being over critical or too passive. This allowed us to identify the qualities of an effective leader and how to apply this to our own roles at school. After a short lunch, we switched activities and were given a brief introduction on how to boost our public speaking skills. In our opinion, this was the most fun part of the day as it involved a workshop on improving eye contact and confidence when public speaking, through a variety of games. One of these included having to walk out into the middle of the room in front of everyone else, pause for five seconds while making eye contact with your crowd, before very slowly saying a song lyric as though it is some profound speech. Although seemingly simple, this technique improved upon many aspects of our own public speaking abilities.

To wrap up the day, we were all gathered into Cedars Hall again for some round table discussions to solve potential problems and inconveniences we may face through our roles in sixth form. After this we had to head back but not before saying goodbye to the friends we had made during the course of the day.

In summary, the day was extremely successful for us, and we both feel noticeably more self-assured of our own skills and look forward to being able to implement these throughout the year.