Part III - Emotional Management

Part III - Emotional Management

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”

― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 

Case competitions can be very emotionally intense and stressful. Even after all the public speaking experience I've accumulated over the years, the moment before each presentation is still filled with anxiety. Not only that, but team discussions can become very emotionally charged as you challenge each other ideas and the pressure of time. I typically feel stressed at the beginning of the competition and it only continues to increase over the next few days. Learning how to handle your own emotions is a crucial part of ensuring that you perform at the level you need to win. 

Everyone has their own ways of dealing with emotions and I'll be sharing mine with you.

Part II - Preparing for case competitions; How to learn everything you need to win a case competition

Part II - IT Knowledge for Case Competition

Not understanding IT enough to compete would be the first fear and challenge I needed to overcome. However, this is probably the easiest hurdle to overcome as all you need to develop is a habit of 'continuous professional development'.  You can learn everything you need to know to compete if you give yourself enough time to learn it all. Approaching it like a final exam is the wrong approach for a case competition. In the competition you are supposed to be applying what you know, not learning new concepts.

Ask your coach or professor for material to read and I'm sure they can feed you dozens of great white papers to learn from. What was important though in the deluge of all the reading I was provided with was learning how IT solved business problems. The technical details of how it all works is of secondary importance as you can figure it out through further reading or research. What is important is to learn and memorize how IT can or has been used to solve different business problems. That way when your identifying critical issues in cases your mind will instantly start recalling solutions that have worked for other companies in the past. Knowing that your using a similar solution that worked for a real life previous company can also give you that presentation confidence.

But there is so much to learn !

 To streamline your learning though for competitions I recommend you start with the top 10 trends of the year for what ever area of business you are competing in. For me it was in IT and I refereed to Gartners top 10 CIO Business and Technology Priorities in 2013.

Part III on emotional management can be read here.

Part I - How to win Case competitions

Winning International Case Competitions

Surrey Leader - Kwantlen students place first in global business competition

In total I've competed in four case competitions and this post will be about what I've learned from the experiences.I'll be focusing on what you can do as an individual to prepare as opposed to team. Recently I've managed to win 1st place in my third global IT case competition together with Larisa Gordetsky and Natasha Campbell. Interesting enough I'm majoring in Entrepreneurship and not MIS or any IS program. Regardless we've managed to have a very successful track record

Surrey Youth Entrepreneurial Community

Work on your goals and your goals will work on you

Did you know that 98% of the BC economy is composed of small businesses? Entrepreneurship is the heart of our economy. But why does entrepreneurship matter to me?

If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.
- Jim Rohn

Entrepreneurship helped bring out the best in me and it continues to do so. That’s why the quote by Jim Rohn resounds with me. Entrepreneurship has helped me develop leadership skills, critical thinking skills and most importantly confidence in myself. Even if I don't continue to start more businesses, the skills I have developed will never leave me. I wouldn't be as innovative, creative or hardworking if I never set myself on the entrepreneurial path.

 Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.

-Lydia M. Child

What about Surrey’s Youth?

Over 1/3 of Surrey’s population is under 30 years old. That’s a huge number. But we don’t focus on supporting, encouraging or developing our youth. Throughout my high school experience and all the people I knew at the time, I never heard about any other students starting their own businesses or really taking on any initiative to challenge themselves. To be their best.

They say the people you spend the most time with determine who you become. Over the last few years I've focused on developing my entrepreneurial skills on my own and it was challenging. I started looking around in Surrey recently to see where I can find more youth with a similar mindset to mine and realized that Surrey isn't known for having a youth entrepreneurial community. This is a missed opportunity in our community. I want to change that.

My goal is to provide youth with entrepreneurial opportunities earlier on. To give them the opportunity to take on their own challenges which will help them be more innovative, independent, and hardworking. How am I going to do this? I'm currently working with SEEDS, the Self-Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Society, to accomplish this initiative at the high school level. The members of the SEEDS Youth Entrepreneurial Committee want to make a lasting change in the City of Surrey and see a whole new generation of entrepreneurs emerge. But it starts with the OPPORTUNITY. That’s what we will work to provide our youth. Opportunity.

 

Community Mobilization

Community Mobilization

Expectation setting.Its more than just expectation setting,  its a tool to unite a group and community together. A simple exercise that we all do all the time. Personally, this workshop reminded me of how important it is. 
You can't mobilize a community without a common goal, sounds simple enough but its something that is almost expected and assumed. If the workshop is called Community Mobilization, that must be exactly what the workshop is about right ?I recently attended a workshop hosted by PeerNetBC focused on this very topic.

During the expectation setting portion of the workshop the facilitator passed around two different colored sticky notes to everyone. We would fill out what we were looking to learn on two sticky notes of one color and what we needed to from others to learn on the other color.Afterwards we each would stick it onto the board. I quickly realized that out of the two things I was looking for, only one of them was common to everyone else. All of us were attracted by the title of the workshop, community mobilization, but we were not all looking to learn the exact same things. 

Everyone around the room had experience starting their own initiatives and shared what helped and hindered them when it came to succeeding.  As we talked about expectation setting a girl shared her story about how the organization she was a part of never did expectation setting. Everyone was looking to achieve their own personal agenda and joined thinking that it was the exact same as the organizations goals. Since no one was getting what they wanted, all it did was breed discontent within the organization.  Without expectation setting that night I would have been the same as I would be wondering why we weren't covering everything I was looking for.

When I was recruiting for my student organization at Kwantlen, AIESEC, I thought all of them would be coming to join us because we provide personal development. However, when I really asked them why they joined it would change from "looking for an opportunity to meet new people" to "gaining relevant work experience". 

Not everyone is the same, and not everyone is looking for the same things. 

When trying to unite a community and mobilize it to accomplish a specific goal don't forget to do expectation setting.You will be surprised by all the different reasons people decide to join and support you.