Chan Tsz Sum Chloe

19049382D

Leadership Competences

Leadership being a great personality has been deeply affecting our lives in various ways.
According to Croft et al. (2017), both intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies are
substantial to develop strong leadership competences, leading the person to any future
success. It appears that intrapersonal competencies could allow self realisation and gaining
problem solving skills (Noonan et al., 2017), while interpersonal competencies include mainly
communication and relationships to put forward not only self, but others.

Intrapersonal competencies include various factors such as self-awareness, self-

regulation, determination and development of visions and values (Noonan et al., 2017). Self-
awareness is about knowing personal strengths and emotions of others. Throughout the service
learning, I am an extrovert that my strength was establishing the mood and creating a more
relaxed environment for students. Besides, when we were reaching students of different grades,
which lower-grade students were more active and higher-grade students were calmer, I
improved the atmosphere by initiating a topic that both parties were interested in. Following is
self-regulation, which is about controlling and managing constantly. My team had meetings after
teachers’ comments to discuss what could be improved. Although I was poorly self-regulated as
a deadline-fighter, a log kept by our team helped to ensure everything was on track.
Determination is to motivate myself to overcome obstacles. My biggest fear of this service
learning was not being able to hold face-to-face service which has limited my thoughts at first.
Nevertheless, determination encouraged me to impart knowledge to them.

Interpersonal competencies focus on communication and relationship with teammates,

teachers and students. I care about how others feel and often holds back my thoughts to
prevent any conflict. However, during these service experiences, I openly voiced out my
opinions and encouraged my teammates to speak up to allow more creative ideas. I learnt to
communicate rationally and embrace conflicts.

Overall, as a mental health nursing student, leadership competencies are essential to

satisfy the needs for self, patients and whole community in the future, determination and
develop new visions is definitely the most important as intrapersonal competencies since mental
health is a spectrum that has unknown cases everyday where my visions has to be consistent
and grow to prevent myself from giving up at any moment. For interpersonal competencies,
communication is definitely the most important in mental health no matter with patients or
colleagues, being a listener and observer is equally crucial.
Caring disposition

It is agreed that caring disposition is focused on three aspects, listening, empathy and
love (Pai et al., 2013).
Listening is not just hearing what others say but paying attention and understanding the
content. Although it was mostly about presenting, I recognized that non-verbal communication
was as significant as talking, and listening skills were necessary. To execute it, whenever
someone was talking, I would look at their eyes, letting them know I was genuinely listening to
them. I would also observe their facial expressions to better understand their meanings to keep
myself focused. During the virtual presentation, I show my engagement by using different body
languages such as nodding and smiling to make the speaker feel recognized.

Empathy is powerful in social interaction through understanding what others think and
feel (Singer et al., 2014). Throughout the service, I was non-judgemental to all ideas so that
teammates could share their thoughts more willingly. Also, our unique abilities and contributions
were accepted in our team, where some were better at speaking and some were good at
designing templates and handling atmosphere. We got to know about one another more in this
way and could work harmoniously. When chatting with students, empathy was shown by
appreciating their dreams and relationships were built up through exchanging ideas about
career paths.

Love is about giving deep respect and caring for others. During the service, although the
students and I were from different backgrounds, I realized we acquire the same values and
similar targets we want to achieve. Moreover, when they raised questions, our team did not look
down at them, but showed our consideration by giving detailed answers that could tackle their
needs.

Relating to mental health nursing, caring disposition is one of the key aspects to be a
good nurse. Mental health patients are often being stigmatized and discriminated against in this
society where no people actually understand them before judging, and this is where listening,
empathy and love is the best care and treatment for them. Sometimes, patients might just want
someone out there to listen to their stories or feelings, someone out there could accept who
they are and to feel loved by someone. People with mental illnesses might be different but they
are the people we want to love and let them feel accepted and let them value their own abilities
and contribution to society.
Moral Character

Moral character is a person’s beliefs and values that would guide the person to do
virtuous things (Carr, 2018). It could have endless traits but after all, this helps us through all
actions and influences our feelings. To closely link with the traits that I would like to achieve, I
have to develop my character strengths to the maximum and reach a goal that is beyond my
competence. For me, the moral character that counts the most crucial is benevolence and
affection. It is to love all people and have the desire to do nice things even if they have
committed crimes and problems (Martela et al., 2016).

In this service, even if students from the school might not have the same background as
us, it makes no difference for us to offer help and love to them. Through discovering my own
strength as lightening up the mood, I tried to ask all sorts of interesting yet entertaining
questions to grow their knowledge, and also allow myself to transform into a better person with
a sense of purpose of offering pure help and kindness to people.

In this world, people have just become so polarized and agitated that they will try to
demonize those who have their values or opinions contradicting them. With all these, people no
longer listen and think from a balanced perspective since someone will be out showing what you
want to see and telling what you want to hear, this would make people stop valuing tolerance
and things will become further extreme. Relating to mental health nursing, I personally think
benevolence is a huge quality that helps a person to avoid stigmatized attitudes and show love
in the purest way. Sometimes it is inevitable that nurses may be in a state of fear, loneliness
and frustration but take a step back and think of the patients, they have a much stressed
situation, and this is the time that I have to step out of my comfort zone and consider my good
intentions towards them. An example might be when a patient is irritating, even if we don’t know
them deeply, try to look past the top to sense what the person is going through and find
patience to reduce the worries and stress of him or her. My sense of purpose right now is to
make the world a better place because of what is telling me in my own heart.

(1194 words )

References

Carr, D. (2018). Cultivating moral character and virtue in professional practice. Abingdon, Oxon:
Routledge.

Croft, Lucy, & Seemiller, Corey. (2017). Developing Leadership Competencies. New Directions
for Student Leadership, 2017(156), 7-18.
Martela, Frank, & Ryan, Richard M. (2016). The Benefits of Benevolence: Basic Psychological
Needs, Beneficence, and the Enhancement of Well-Being. Journal of Personality, 84(6), 750-
764.

Noonan, Patricia M, & Erickson, Amy S. Gaumer. (2017). The Skills That Matter. Thousand
Oaks: SAGE Publications.

Pai, Hsiang-Chu, Eng, Cheng-Joo, & Ko, Hui-Ling. (2013). Effect of Caring Behavior on
Disposition Toward Critical Thinking of Nursing Students. Journal of Professional Nursing,
29(6), 423-429.

Singer, Tania, & Klimecki, Olga M. (2014). Empathy and compassion. Current Biology, 24(18),
R875-R878.