The past week I’ve had the opportunity to participate in D4LC here at The Leadership Center. D4LC stands for Disciplines for Leadership Conference. Not only did I get to participate, I also got the chance to lead the service part along with Elizabeth. While it was the best part of my week, it was also the most challenging. 

It was awesome in the aspect of learning more about myself and how to be a better leader. It was the most challenging because I had to dig deep down in my soul to overcome some of my flaws and grow to become a better person. 

The valuable things we all learned were about community, service, status, connect, balance, priorities, getting active, preparing, and moving forward with how to make the world a better place. While these may just be words, they carry a lot of meaning and weight on how to make yourself and the world a better place. All of the activities we participated in helped us become better leaders in our own communities. 

My favorite things included the service and priorities lessons. During the service lesson, everyone got the opportunity to prepare some type of enrichment activity for all the kids at the Summer Food Service Program. We also got to serve and give back to the kids in the community. It was eye opening to see the impact that serving made on everybody. We were all more appreciative of the things we had and carried a humbler heart. Kurt and Maile demonstrated how organizing your priorities can make a tremendous impact on your life by using different sized rocks and sand. Every grain of rock or sand represented the different values each one of us carries. The lesson was to prioritize your values and to make sure you do them first. Next, was the things you have to do, like work and pay some bills. The last thing added to the list were things like, playing video games or scrolling through Facebook. Those are the things you can do once all the other things are completed. 

Overall, D4LC has been such a great learning experience. It challenged everyone in the best way to become better people. I didn’t know I needed this experience and I’m sure glad I got the opportunity to attend D4LC. 

-Abby Williams