It is almost one year since I started my fellowship. This month is another amazing month. It went very fast. I just started new semester which will run until the end of the month of August. Learning from travelling and from other leaders has been an amazing learning opportunity for me in addition to my doctorate program. It is very encouraging when you find a number of leaders who are willing to share their leadership experiences.
The other aspect of my leadership development was education. During the past, almost one year, the leadership fellowship gave me the opportunity to travel and learn about creative placemaking efforts. I was able to learn from cultural business district leaders and they shared with me their struggle and how they were able to overcome those struggle. While our struggles are not the same, but it gave me the opportunity to assess and prepare myself for the challenges and work around the strategies.

The other aspect of my leadership development is education. Each semester I was able to learn the theoretical aspect of leadership. For example, last semester, one of my project was creating and evaluating instrument. Through the coursework, I had to do literature review that gave me the opportunity to read a lot of articles and evaluate those articles.
This last semester also I had leadership and experience coursework that gave me the opportunity to learn more about leadership from different perspectives. Part of this coursework, I had the opportunity to do a number of presentations which helped me to practice public speaking. One thing I noticed is that I need to do more practice of public speaking. The final project for this course includes a project on leadership. Some of the highlight for me in this coursework was about the importance of recognizing personal strength and weakness which will help us in succeeding as a leader. During the coursework, I was able to assess my strength and weakness and I decided to focus more on my strength while I just aware my weakness. Also one of the important discussion we had was whether leadership is about experience or born with it. I believe that leadership is about the experience that we gain from our mistake and vulnerability, not born with it.

It seems my leadership development continues to develop. Last month and the past few months I indicated that work, school, and family balance has been continuing as a challenge. This challenge hasn't slowed down and I am learning a lot from these challenges. Also, I reflected in the past about the importance of self-care and promised to myself to do that. However, because of the coursework, I didn't get time to do that and I have been postponing for a while. This week I was reflecting on what I have done this semester and I already earned 21 credit and this amazing. I am hoping to do another 12 credit this coming semester and by the end of my first fellowship, I will have about 33 credit. If I am able to take courses based on this level, I am hoping to finish my doctorate coursework within the fellowship period.
At this point in my leadership fellowship, what standout for me is the opportunity to recognize my strength and weakness. I decided to work on my strength instead of spending time on improving my weakness. Recognizing my weakness will help me to make sure I don't spend time on the thing that I am not good at and this will continue to emerge.