Pono and Pai'ea

Today was a fun day at HYCC!  We had a guest speaker, Kiha, come and talk to us about what it means to be pono and how to keep pono in our teams.  It was very inspirational and I learned a lot of leadership tools!

For example, 'sandwiching' is a technique that involves pointing out a problem or critisism, and sandwiching it with positive reinforment.  Try it, it works!

We then acted out scenarios for when we get our students, like bad things that might happen and how to fix them and make it pono again.  It was an eye-opener to all the issues that may pop up with the students, like what would you do if one of your students decided he or she didn't want to work, or was discriminatory, or decided to play ninja instead of removing invasive species...stuff like that.

Then we got to paddle a canoe!  New Hope Diamond Head's IMUA One Blade Canoe Club was nice enough to allow us to paddle in their canoes to learn the importance of teamwork.  It was so fun!  There were three canoes and we raced!  Our canoe was named Pai'ea, which is a type crab, amost like the a'ama, that you can eat but was also one of the names of Kamehameha I.  I told our #1 seat man that I wanted to win, so we started off strong and went all the way to the finish line and won!  Whoohoo!  I'm so competative!  It almost made me want to join a canoe team!

After that me and another team leader jumped in at Rock Piles for a quick surf session!  Last day of team leader training tomorrow!  Then we meet our students next week!  I've got nine of them!