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Personal Narrative: My Personal Goals On Healing

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My personal goals are centered on healing. In this world of decreasing resources and increasing and ever diverse populations, there are unmet needs, confusions, and misunderstandings—the very stuff of conflicts and wars. It has been my experience and observation that what the world (and especially me) needs most is a transformation that involves healing, which I believe can lead to a greater measure of peace. That is to say, I have come from a heritage that is troubled with addictions and the abuse and generational cycles of violence that so often accompany addictions. However, I am a survivor, and I continually strive to go forward healing from this past. In time, I came to acknowledge my need for skills in conflict transformation and peace …show more content…

To that end, I strive to learn in the areas of peace and social justice. This is because I see that I live in a culture that is unhealthy for many individuals, and for this reason I contemplate, often, how I might create a more healthy culture in my own life and circumstances (and hopefully extending beyond). I strongly believe in linguistic relativity; that is, I believe that how we choose to use our words often shapes our reality. I am concerned that when we focus our attention on competition, conflict, and injustice, rather than that which creates the peaceful world in which we wish to live, the outcome is ongoing suffering for many. Believing that the stories we tell ourselves shape our attitudes and actions explains my interest in storytelling as an agent of social change. I am interested in locating and understanding peace stories. For this reason, this “Stories and Creative Leadership” final project focuses on a story designed to shape a healing paradigm. My expectation is that an in-depth examination and analysis of this story will enhance my understanding of how people, by the use of creative storytelling, intentionally go about promoting wellbeing, social justice, and shaping and maintaining peaceful cultures of cooperation and …show more content…

Often, leadership is thought of in terms of individual personality traits or characteristics (e.g. sociable, self-confident leaders), or in terms of social roles (e.g. leaders in the field of criminal justice, education, the church, and health-care), and the skills needed for functioning in such roles (e.g. the ability to control a situation, the ability to develop the capacity of others, the ability to produce followers, the ability to transform a situation), or in terms of leadership style (e.g. laissez faire, authoritarian, authoritative, transformative). However, when thinking in terms of discrete elements of leadership such as traits, roles, skills, and styles, one’s attention is primarily focused on what Whitney McIntyre Miller and Zachary Gabriel Green name in their article titled “An Integral Perspective of Peace Leadership” as “a ‘leadership as person’ model that leaves absent the interrelated importance of other aspects of [leadership] processes.” Thus, McIntyre and Green, after reviewing literature associated with peace leadership, propose an integral model of peace leadership that incorporates unique characteristics of peace leaders, theoretical underpinnings of peace leadership, community presence in peace movements, and group focuses on the influence of larger systems

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