Once a year we have a team building session when we come together to look at leadership the ability to create a new future together. This is both a personal transformation program and a team building program. As we become a larger team that is working on more and more diverse and specialized areas we tend to work more an more in silos and this offers an opportunity to break these silos. This year I attended RTL session along with my team members over 9 days (spread across 3 months). It was organized as a hybrid session with 50 odd people who joined online from different parts of the country and a few from the world and we attended in the session physically in
Auroville. I noticed this helps break the monotony of only working with the people we always know and get new perspectives and insights. It also helped us connect with Dr. Monica who participated from the US.
In the first session I joined online as a PC to support the online participants. This gave me an opportunity to interact with many people as the workshop is based on peer learning.
Session 2 and 3 I attended onsite
with my team members and other groups from Auroville (Tamarai, Isai ambalam school, Aikiyam School, Last school, Auroville consulting, etc).
The onsite interactions are easier to engage with for some participants staring at a screen the entire day even on a projector was too intense. We attempted different interactions online and onsite e.g. we were together in the mornings to share insights and then did our exercises independently and came together at the end of the day. Having participated both online and Onsight I felt that the richness that had come with sharing insights after each session was missing. I brought this up at our debriefing session and the resource people took this into consideration and found a way to do the exercises independently and yet come together for insights and also process them together.
During these sessions I was able to reflect on my
actions and come up with my own examples of my practice and noticed
where all I need to retain or improve as a person. I learnt that there a
multiple ways of saying no and I need to use the appropriate words when
I decline requests and the other learning is when I was able to relate the
isms with me I was able to find intersectionality and when multiple
isms are interconnected, discrimination and sufferings are high.