I had never been on a staff retreat before. When I was an RA, we "retreated" to the University Center for an afternoon. While it was great fun and beneficial, it was nothing like i had experienced in the past few days.
We went to a site in Sacramento, New Mexico. No, not in California.
Day One:
From the moment we got there, we began teambuilding. We played an energizer called, "Gorilla, Man, Net" that I learned from my undergrad. It's like, "Rock, Paper, Scissors," but more involved. Then we began to talk about our strengths from StrengthsQuest. I will talk more about my specific strengths in another post, but I will say that I learned a lot about the commonalities and differences in each person's stengths. And I've always known that every person is largely unique with underlying similarities, but it made me more aware of the fact.
We then participated in a teambuilder that I will call, "Connections." One person started the activity by stating a fact about herself and then whomever related would connect to her and proceed to recite a fact about himself. Then it continued to progress until the last person connected with the first. We did two rounds of it. The first was was pretty superficial and consisted of deeper and highly personal facts. These ranged from illnesses, to traumatic events, and everything else in between. For it being the first day of training and our first in depth activity, I was... floored. To share and hear others share such personal information was wonderful.
Later that night, we participated in a teambuilder of which I will call, "Short Truths." (I'm sorry I don't know what any of these are called.) Basically, we all sat in a circle and the facilitator would ask a question where everyone had to respond to in a short phrase or single word, without any explanation to their answers. The questions started simple like, "What book are you currently reading?" Increased difficulty to, "What's your biggest fear in life?" And rose to questions such as, "Who or what would give your life up for?"
The exercise was intense. In a group of 30+ people, you would expect to hear a plethora of answers, as it's difficult to sum life up into one word. And, I know everyone is different, everyone has experienced life differntly, and everyone perceives life differently, but to hear all of those responses? It was difficult.
Everyone, including myself, opened up so much, and through their responses, even though the words weren't fully descriptive, it was a lot. Empathy is not a strength of mine, but I could feel the conviction, the emotions, the stories, and the experiences of peoples' lives. Including my own, it became very heavy. I was bearing all the weight of so many questions; so many feelings. It took every ounce of strength in me to not either walk out or simply burst into tears. I also fought with wanting to hug everyone. But I stayed put, and I kept it held together, because I had never felt so connected to so many people, in such a short amount of time, and that made me feel amazing beyond belief.
But after that activity, I was so drained, I decided to unwind all of the emotional build-up with a friend by relaxing away from the rest of the group. And for that, I am grateful.
I shall continue tomorrow
I pre-wrote this post on the ride home from the retreat, and it's a total of 5 pages long. I figured it wasn't actually that long because I was writing in a large font.While typing, I realized it was a bit longer than I thought. So, for this reason, I shall post the rest tomorrow.
Enjoy!
<3 Tawny
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