Taking ICPS home

Written on January 16th, 2007
Last week I’ve been to Slanic Moldova as a facilitator for ICPS. In terms of experience, it was a great one. It was one of those moments when you could actually see the impact you and your team created. It’s very nice to see that a bunch of people, very different from one another in terms of background and life experience, get to share the same thoughts, attitude and dreams after a four-day conference.

It was a rather successful conference: a lot of A-ha moments, a lot of challenges (including an agenda that had its own personality) that were, eventually, overcome, networking all around the place, “fun & pleasure”, key learning points, shock, frustrations and victories - a truly comprehensive learning environment.

What was it for me? First of all, it was a dream come true, as I’ve always fantasized (starting with my LTS) to be faci at a national conference. Second, it was a big challenge that meant placing AIESEC as a top priority and sacrificing some exams and stuff like that. These are the things that I knew even before I left for ICPS. What happened there?

Well, first of all, I slept for four hours (on the way there) only to wake up in the faci pre-meeting. I managed to get over the feeling of a fish on land and, then, I really tried to make my brain cells work. Second day: the delegates are coming! As soon as the Opening Plenary began, I was as Zen as I’ll ever be. I knew that I have to be good.

I know now that the main things that helped me are: being sincere, learning a lot from other people’s experiences and being spontaneous. So, now at the end, how was it?

Yesterday, after the conference finished, I felt rather bad because I didn’t deliver my session due to the lack of delegates. I was really looking forward to it, as one of my key objectives this conference was to improve my ability to receive live feedback from the plenary. That feeling was ameliorated once I remembered some of the other objectives that I had fulfilled. It now became happiness. Happiness that I’ve been there, happiness that I gave my best (and I think it showed), happiness that we (the faci team) realized the impact, happiness that I’ve met some really, really cool people, happiness that I am one experience smarter and, finally (or maybe not), happiness that I got to dream big again.

Food for thought: When you say “yes” but mean “no” or vice-versa, what do you expect others to understand?