Stressin'

I would like to say that I lead a pretty exciting, or at least busy, life. Granted many times at night or on the weekend you can find me lounging in my sweatpants watching football or just sprawled out on the couch discussing extremely mundane things with my five other housemates. But in general, I would say that I am a pretty busy person.

Last year was the first time when I REALLY became busy. I was elected captain last year and took it upon myself to do everything possible. While that was a good goal to do, that was completely unrealistic. I wound myself extremely thin trying to accomplish everything by myself without asking anyone on my team, let alone my other captain, to help me with things. My relationships suffered and in the end, I was not completely happy with everything. When elected captain again this year, I decided to not do that again.

Yesterday, I found myself stressing out to the max. I realized I was stressing when my roommate for three years came into the kitchen and I found myself extremely annoyed for no reason. Or when I was walking in the house and tripped over our living room rug and got mad at my other housemates. Or when I was getting peeved at KRAFT for making their boxed macaroni and cheese in not a good way. Obviously something else was the matter and it wasn't all of those crazy, ridiculous things.

It was then when I looked at my list of things to do and realized I had too much on there. I was trying to coordinate our Indoor Tournament, find a place to stay for Spring Break, search for plane flights, answer all of my team's emails, brainstorm different fundraisers, and figure out our team budget all while trying to read 123 pages about shipbuilding in the colonies in the 17th century and retain every bit of detail about it. Turns out we have a treasurer to figure out the budget, a fundraising chair to come up with details, my other captain to help with emails, and other members of the team that can look up SB destinations.

I would like to say that I grow as a person each year, especially between last year and this year. No one really wants to say they digressed between two years or stayed the same, so I'm going to say that yes, indeed, I did grow. Last year I would have continued to get mad at my roommate, pissed at my housemates, and might have even written to KRAFT making them aware of my annoyances with them. I would have done all of those while still keeping my task level the same.

This year, however, I am doing things differently. Instead of keeping everything to myself, I delegated tasks among the leadership of the team as well as our rookies as well. After doing so, I found myself a lot less stressed and lot more happy (I mean a decent amount of that could have something to do with my boyfriend getting back from class and making some oh so delicious potatoes... but also from delegating). So I encourage anyone in a leadership position to do just that: DELEGATE. For one, you will learn about your teammates and their strengths and weaknesses. But additionally, you will be putting trust in your teammates which can only make your team stronger. And finally, you will find yourself a lot less stressed so you can deal with things you are supposed to and focus your times to being the leader you were elected to be.

I'm not going to say you will never be stressed - because it WILL happen. You will have delegated every possible task and have aced your last exam, but you will still find yourself wanting to rip your hair out. But no worries. Take a deep breath and relax. This time will pass and when your tasks are accomplished, you will feel great.

(I should try to reread this post about 50 times this season...)