Blog post #4 - Anaïs

Hi everyone!

It is finally my turn to write about the most fun and exciting position in the Board ;) In this blog post, I will try to give you an image about what it is like to be the Commissioner Communication and Media and how I have experienced this year so far. 

Although I had to wait some time to share my experiences with you, being the last one also has it perks. I feel like I'm in a phase of the year in which I'm able to reflect quite well on my Board year. Why am I talking about a phase? I noticed that all of us went through different phases during this year, concerning motivation, busyness, excitement and realising things. Right now, personally, my motivation is a mixture of on the one hand being excited about training our next Candidate Board but on the other hand the need for a nice vacation. This part of the year is the final stretch, and applying the finishing touches to all the things we started this year can be quite busy. 

With our last General Meeting coming up next week, I realised that my time as Board is coming to an end. The year has flown by, and has often left me wondering where the time went. Throughout the year, I experienced a lot of different things and situations, ranging from having discussions with my Board, to doing stupid dances during meetings, to organising events for over 60 people, to cleaning up other people’s messes, to forming a really close and strong bond with my fellow Board members. Because of all these different things, I learned how to deal with changes, with different expectations from people, I learned how to be flexible, but most importantly, I learned how to let things go. Be it in a discussion in which I am trying to prove my point, be it when I'm making promotion and some stupid detail isn't working out the way I want it too or be it when other people are judging about what I did and didn't do right, I realised that a lot of the times, it is not worth to go on and get worked up about these things. I learned to distinguish the things that will bring me something after fighting for it from the things that most probably won’t. 

Of course, there are also specific things I learned from my position as the C/M. I for example managed to improve my skills in not procrastinating things I am not looking forward to. During the year, there have been multiple moments in which I found myself facing a creative block, or when I was not too excited about checking another batch of committee promotion. In the beginning of the year, as you can probably guess, I often decided to leave these tasks until the last minute. However, after making life hard for myself a few times, I figured out that it is way easier to finish your less exciting tasks first, since at the end of the day, those not-exciting tasks will not have magically solved themselves, sadly enough. Other than that, I also learned to care less about other people’s opinions. Since your main task as the C/M is making and posting promotion, your work is subject to the reviews and judgement of the outside world. At first, I used to have the tendency to take these opinions about my different works of art (;)) personally. I let myself evaluate my work by concentrating on the reactions that other people gave to it. After some time however, I started attaching value to my own process of making the promotion and I started focusing on how I overcame the challenges that sometimes rose from this process. From then onwards, I started appreciating everything that I had made, regardless of other people's reaction to it or judgement about it, because I recognised the work I had put in. 

To finish off, I am certain that there are still a lot of realisations that haven't come to mind yet, but, for now, I am happy with how this year has unfolded itself and the things that I'm going to take home from it.

As one of my favourite predecessors always says,

DOEI DOEI

Anaïs van Schalen