OK....so the enthusiam I had in the beginning quickly dwindled away.
However, it's new year so I plan on starting afresh.
Decided to sit down towards the end of last year and clean out the odd 500 e-mail messages clogging up my inbox on my computer and came across this speech a good friend of mine wrote.
At a time of the year when I was extreemly hectic with a billion and one things everybody wanted done this kind of put things back into perspective for me.
ENJOY !!!
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When I was asked to come and speak to you today about leadership, a suggested point of reference was to talk about where I come from. There is an obvious answer to this question and I think you're all old enough for me not to have to go down that path, so I though that perhaps a better place to start was when I first seriously got involved in community service. In primary school, I¹d done all the house captain business, but my first real experience was not until Year 10 when I was selected to lead the Junior School Student Rep Council at Frankston High. I decided to do this for several reasons. The main one is that I had several teachers who really felt I could do the job. At the end of the day, for me at least, wanting to be a part of leadership and the community really sprung from a couple of people who believed in me and believed I had the courage to really succeed at a job as hard as this one.
After my ground breaking entrance into school leadership, I decided that I really quite liked the idea of all this and continued across to the Senior School where in Year 11, I was the Secretary of the Student Rep Council. There are three stressful jobs when it comes to committees, and Secretary is right up there on the top of the list. You type up minutes every week that are barely ever read, you handle a lot of correspondence and you have to be able to write at a thousand words a minute and then be able to understand your own handwriting a couple of days later. But it is something that I think everyone interested in pursuing a leadership career outside school should do at least once. It gives you a valuable understanding of the mechanisms of a good committee, and how to be a good president.
It was my understanding of this and my growing passion to add some meaning to my life that encouraged me to become involved with Footprints Forever Incorporated, a project that has been four years in the making and will finally be launched in March next year. You may have heard of this youth depression awareness project before under the name of The Yellow Ribbon Project, and if anyone is interested in finding out more information, don't hesitate to ask, I don't have time to cover it in depth today as the project could be a half hour speech all on its own. Today, I am still President and Spokesperson of this committee of hard working youths seeking to help out other youths all across the Mornington Peninsula.
Over the last four years I have learnt so much about youth leadership. It is hard, we are discriminated against because of our age and there is a stigma attached to us because for some reason people think that we couldn't possibly know what the world is truly like. We may have had to take the long road in establishing this project, but it has been a road of learning, of friendship, of trust and of perseverance. With any luck, a road like this one for you will be much easier today.
Year 12 saw me joint Deputy Senior Student at Frankston High and 1999 Frankston High School Best All Rounder. I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't "popular" in high school. And I¹m sure there were a great deal of people who really despised me. But when people ask me why I pursued leadership in high school in the way that I did, my answer is simple. My school peers may not all have liked me, but on the night of our Valedictory, when I went up to receive that award, they all applauded. Whether they liked me or not became irrelevant - I had earned the respect of every person in that room. I had in one way or another made a positive impact on their lives and for that they were truly grateful.
And that is why I am still, two years later, doing community service. Believe me, my life is not easy. You sacrifice your time, your weekends, your love life, your family time, the time you should be studying, the time you should be sleeping and the time you should be partying. As well as Footprints Forever, I am chairing the Frankston Council Youth Safety Management Team, who are trying to give a youth perspective on safety in Frankston. I go to Uni, I have a boyfriend, I help out on a uni TV station, I hold two jobs, I babysit for the couple up the road, and the list goes on.
Life is all about time management, prioritising and re-prioritising. Every hour, something else will be more important than the thing you were doing in the hour before that. Life is a balancing act, and sometimes you have three balls in the air, but most times you have three hundred. So why do I do it? What's in it for me? If that is the first question that springs to mind, then leadership perhaps is not the right field for you. I don't want to scare you, or make leadership a daunting thing. If you have a passion about an issue, go out and make a difference. Everyone should give it a go at least once. But being a leader and doing community service is not about you and it's not about me. It¹s about a bigger picture - THE bigger picture. It's about a whole. When I leave this world, I want to be remembered. Not like Don Bradman or Princess Diana, but just by some Joe or Jane, who benefited from the work I am doing. I want to be remembered by people who considered me a friend, and that I had an impact on their life through the things I did and the choices I made and that this changed the direction they were heading, made their life different and more positive somehow.
If you have a dream, follow it. If you want to make a difference, do it. If you have a passion, live it. And if you happen to end up a leader of this country one day, don't forget why you wanted to be a leader. Don't forget about the bigger picture. Don't lose your passion. Don't forget the reasons you wanted to make a difference.
