The Most Important Life long Lesson I learned

If I ask myself that what is the single most important lesson I learned from Amal fellowship? Dozens of things come to my mind like time management, hard work, compassion, positive thinking, problem-solving, kindness, gratitude etc.

However, the most important and the long life lesson I learned is

Leadership is not about a title or designation. It’s about impact, influence and inspiration.

This fellowship provided me a number of opportunities to work in teams. From the first #JustStartProject to our mega project of Shaoor, I was working in different teams with different people having different mindsets every week. I realized three things:

1. Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. You can’t be a good leader if you are not learning and using Kaizen principle to improve on a daily basis.

2. A collection of good people does not make a good team if they’re not pushing in the same direction. Constant communication and adjustment are needed.

3. You can’t make excuses you’ve to take responsibility.

I am calling it a life long lesson because a lot of times we have to take responsibility for ourselves and even for others. We can’t wait for a super man to come and save us. We have to take responsibility for our own lives; take the lead and make decisions

Amal fellowship taught me a leader takes a little more share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit.

This fellowship taught me how to lead and gave me the courage to jump in. Through Amal games, activities and video making a sense of realization has awaken in me

I have not only learned the importance of teamwork and collaboration but also the role communication play and the skills that are required to lead a balanced practical life. On many occasions I volunteered and expressed my point of view. At times I was encourages but at some points I was criticized too but that’s what leadership is: staying consistent. And I think I did it by being a passionate, persistent, and consistent fellow throughout the fellowship.

“It made me think that often times, in this journey of life, we ultimately don’t pursue an idea/goal because we think it’s too big or too unrealistic or will require too much work. But if/when we actually decide to do that thing, it’s really not as difficult or as unattainable as we thought. The hardest part, we often discover, was just making up our mind, overcoming our own doubts, and just deciding to decide.” — Benje Williams

The importance of leadership, I came to know when we conducted Shaoor workshop on “anger management” because the impact it created and the success we had in it was just marvelous. Everyone played a leading role and together we made our workshop a success.

I always said “I am an introvert” because coming up-front was very hard for me, I used to jump in only when situations would become muddled or needed my help. It was not until this fellowship that made me think to lead from the start, I realized the importance of teamwork, the experience of handling different situations and above all the humility that we need to succeed in our life.