My Stuff

I went on a great twilight course last night - Interview Skills with Shona Carmichael, Primary Consultation. Basically the aims of the course were to outline how to have a successful interview by having an understanding of what school management are looking for, how to answer questions and how to prepare. I thought this would be a useful course as I seem to have become less confident about interviews the older I get and, on a personal note, since I had my kids!! My friends tell me this is all part of motherhood, who knows?
Anyway, I duly went along not too sure what to expect and I was not disappointed. Shona pointed out that before you even think about applying for a job you need to consider why and examine your emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman in his book “Working with Emotional Intelligence” defined this in five ways: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills. These formed part of a self-analysis questionnaire which we went through. Something that struck me in particular was the debate about strengths and weaknesses. I was lucky enough to see Dr Brian Boyd, co-founder of Tapestry speak at SETT06 on Unlocking Creativity: Teaching Creative Thinking and Learning. One of the points he made is that we must teach children to celebrate failure as this is a necessary part of learning and we must talk about it. I totally get that, both as a teacher and a mum. My 4-year old currently cries every time he loses a game and I am trying to teach him that it is a part of learning!! So when I was on my course last night, someone made the point that in the interview we are hyping ourselves up and therefore, do we really want to talk about our weaknesses? The answer has to be yes so we can move forward and make changes, but that in itself can be a challenge. Shona gave us a list of things easy to spot in others but not so easy to spot in yourself, such as unrealistic goals, power hungry. You can see bits of yourself in all of them which is the scary thing!! What I really liked was the suggestion that you go away and make a list of your strengths and weaknesses and then give it to someone at work, eg. your boss and see if they agree with you. Or if you are feeling really brave, your partner! I don’t think I’d quite manage that one, but it did prompt me to start a conversation with my boss about my strengths today. Haven’t quite got to the weaknesses yet, but c’est la vie!!