Day Five: Leadership

We had the leadership session today in the afternoon, and it was the general agreement that it was a pretty good session. The session began with a mini workshop on how to introduce yourself to someone you’ve just met – from how to shake hands to what to say and how to say it. I learnt a lot about how to create a good impression, which is an important life skill to start nurturing now.

The professors all pointed out two things from watching us interact during the session. The first was before the leadership race, during this mini workshop: we tended to stick amongst ourselves and not dare go up to the professors to chat. It spoke of our general shyness or lack of confidence, and after this I made an effort to go up to Prof Astrid and introduce myself. She was very warm and friendly, and I am glad I plucked up the courage to talk to her. I think sometimes it’s just our own inhibitions that prevent us from getting to meet new people and personalities. This is a real pity because there is so much to know about others and so many insightful perspectives we could have access to otherwise. I remember writing in my pre-trip reflections that I didn’t want to let any of my own shyness get in the way of gleaning the most I can from this trip. Having the confidence to talk to and befriend people I do not know very well is definitely something on my agenda, and is something I would say I have taken the first step to conquering today.

The second thing the professors pointed out was that after the race when we got into small groups and told each other in pairs about what we did well and what we could have done better during the race, if the pair was a guy-girl pair the male would always speak first. Females tended to be more meek and give in to the guys, who would thus come across as more domineering and self-confident. I didn’t even notice this myself until Sandra pointed this out to us! But once she did I realized that this is largely true. Again this has to do with one’s self-confidence, but this point was driven even closer home to me after this second observation of the professors because of my capacity as a female in the social situation in the room. Why is it females are more passive and yielding? There is no biological reason for this propensity, and yet it has become a social construct so unconsciously ingrained in our minds that we do it without knowing and fail even to notice it happening. I recalled that learning from the first lecture we had at CMU on Monday that historically, Chiang Mai was largely a matriarchal society – women were the first to sit in aeroplanes, a man interested to marry a woman would have to ask permission from his grandmother, and the man would have to move into the woman’s house upon marriage instead of the other way around. Having said that, the men were still given adequate power in society as temples were places where they were in charge and given privileges like being able to sit in the centre to chant or pray while women were relegated to the sides or even the area just outside of the room.

Although it would seem that olden day Chiang Mai is fairer because it advantaged women more, I’m not saying one society is fairer than the other because if we want to be totally fair and transparent and treat males and females exactly the same, we wouldn’t even make a distinction between males and females. They would all just be “people”, or “citizens”. But what I can say is that this was the second time in the trip I could see how gender roles and stereotypes dictate our daily life, whether we’re aware of it or not. I find it interesting that this is true of any time period and of any culture – from the Chiang Mai of a hundred years ago to the Singaporean social context of now. Gender issues are a universal, timeless concern, and something I wish to study further in some of my courses in NTU soon.

The leadership amazing race itself was a success to me – an unconventional success, but still a success in my eyes, and not just because we ended up in second place in the end. We only found one of the three locations given. But what made it a success to me was the way my group responded as a team upon reaching setbacks. We travelled quite a distance after finding the first location, only to be told that we had reached the wrong place. We were lost for a length of time – long enough for Jason, the senior attached to our group as a game facilitator, to have to ask us if we would like to know the next location for a fee of 70 points. We deliberated on this carefully as we hadn’t much time left – even if we found the next location, would we have time to do the task there and travel back to the hotel? Eventually we settled on no, we would not, and we all decided together that we would head back to the hotel straightaway, try to complete as many general tasks as we could, and get early bird bonus points to maximise our total score given our folly with finding the locations.

We eventually completed the tasks and reached the room 14 minutes early. However at that point in time what interested me was not the points, but the way my peers had acted and shown their personalities and qualities during the race. I have always known Jinx to be a confident, good leader, but today I saw just how much of a team player he is too. He would regularly ask if everyone was feeling alright and ask us to drink up. He looked out for his team mates as we were crossing the road. More than anything, Jinx is a natural born leader – he steps up to rally together and organize a team almost without thinking. As Jason later pointed out to us, it helped that we also, without any explicit discussion, fell into roles we could handle. For example, Valerie and Corn were better with maps, while Si Yu and I trusted their directional cues, followed them and focused on finding opportunities to complete the general tasks along the way. Jinx was great because he was not just a stereotypical leader leading the way, but he even knew when to take a step back and “lead” from the back, overseeing and looking out for the group while, for example, Valerie, led us for a while. Valerie, whom I didn’t really know that well before this trip despite the fact that we’re neighbours in hall, is very driven and task-oriented. She has amazing energy and enthusiasm to complete her tasks assigned. Si Yu, too, showed a surprisingly competitive side of her. I was quite shocked to see how she could put so much effort and focus into completing a task. For example, coming up with the leadership quote was difficult, but Si Yu never lost hope of thinking of one or even relented to settling for something that didn’t have that good a ring to it. We eventually came up with “Fantastic leaders do not fantasize, they actualise!” to accompany the orange Fanta drink that Corn had purchased as part of the task. Corn had a unique role in the group, and one that did not occur to me until Jason gave us his feedback later: Corn is funny. He naturally elicits laughter from people, quite effortlessly and naturally. While this may not tell us which direction to go, it keeps spirits high and I think is something just as important as knowing where to go and what to do. I would say Corn has a natural talent in making people laugh, even when we’re hot and sweaty and getting demoralised from being unable to find the next location. It never occurred to me the importance of the role of humour in group work settings until today, but now that I think about it, it is indeed vital.

Something else that made this amazing race interesting was mapping out our experience over the past 2 hours. Most people got busy drawing little buildings they visited, roads they travelled and people they met. Valerie, a visual arts student, made some great simple sketches. This was a fascinating component to me because of how different my “map” was from other people’s. Sorely lacking in the artistic talent area, I am and have always been more comfortable with words. I am also a fairly organised and structured person who likes to stay neat and tidy when it comes to schoolwork especially. Thus while other people were drawing what they had seen, I was drawing a schematic timeline and busily annotating it with different colour codes for when we reached a location, completed a task or faced a setback. Prof Zachary, making his rounds, actually stopped and asked me what course I am from, and when I told him “Linguistics” he looked at my wordy timeline and nodded amusedly and understandingly, saying something like, “ahh, right.” It was at this point I sneaked a peak at my peers’ work and noticed the difference too, something which amused and fascinated me because I hadn’t realized that our backgrounds and ways of thinking would so greatly affect how we perceive our experiences and express them afterwards. We had had, after all, very similar experiences within the group over the past two hours. In linguistics there is something called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which includes the principle of linguistic relativity – the language we use correlates with the way we think about and perceive the world. For example, a speaker of a language with only two distinct words to distinguish all colours would perceive colours differently from a speaker of, say, English. I thought along the same vein could have happened here – the field of study we were interested in could correlate with the way we conceptualise our experiences due to our different habitual modes of thought. It was enlightening to see how our previous experiences can shape the perception of our new experiences – characters and personalities truly are made from the cumulative.

I think the other highlight of the day for me actually occurred sometime past midnight. My group had been secretly filling in a card to present to Son over the past few days. At last we had gotten everyone to write a message and tonight on the last night presented it to him. We gathered in Yingwen’s room, then I called Steph (who was with Son and Joash) to bring them down. He didn’t suspect a thing and we managed to surprise him! I am glad we also thought to buy a pair of Singapore themed shot glasses as a memento and some Bailey’s Irish Cream from Changi Airport’s Duty Free as well. Son was really pleased and happy with our card and gifts, and he kept thanking us. I’ll always remember his gentle smile and appreciation – it was just so sincere and heartfelt, and I felt all the more touched by all the help he has given us and already began to feel nostalgic of the experiences we had shared over the past few days. Haven’t quite left Chiang Mai yet, but I have a feeling I will really miss both the city and its people.