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- BLI announces a new Access Opportunity
- Barger Leadership Institute is moving!
- BLI Announces New Partnership with The London Idea
- Former Jet Blue CEO donates $10 million to Barger Leadership Institute
- BLI Hires a New Assistant Director
- BLI to Co-Host ‘Extreme by Design’ Film Screening, Discussion
- BLI awards Small Grant for Halfway Hijabi event
- BLI Launches New Capstone Experience
- BLI Launches New Fellows Program Structure
- Keep Calm and Lead On
- BLI Fellow Wins Wolverine Tank Pitch Contest
- BLI Congratulates Mya Haynes
- BLI Alumni Receive 2015-2016 Fulbright Honor
- The 2018 London Ideas Project is Announced
- Congrats to BLI partner Sandra Levitsky for being awarded the Golden Apple!
- Congrats to BLI Fellow and Peer Facilitator Elisabeth Benham
- Tales of Leadership: The Advanced Fellows Journey
- Welcome to the 2018 Capstone Cohort!
- BLI welcomes new director!
- BLI Across the Pond
- BLI Hosts Voting Guru Nancy Thomas
- Ram Mahalingam's award winning film to be screened at two film festivals.
- The Capstone Experience with the Migrant Education Initiative
- The Mindful Leader - Becoming an Engaged Leader
- A Weekend of Mindful Leadership
- Introducing the 2019 Capstone Teams
- The Peer Facilitator Experience
- Dinners with...
- BLI Students Start Small and Dream Big in Detroit
- From Freshman to Senior Year -- Four Years of Leadership Learning
- BLI Speaker Series: Food For Thought
- BLI Director, Ram Mahalingam featured in the Record
- Capstone Bootcamp 2019
- In a Distracted World, Solitude is Practice for Tomorrow’s Leaders
- A Conversation on Mindfulness, Bias and Racial Justice — a podcast with Ram Mahalingam
- The Mindful Leaders Retreat — Laying a Foundation
- Being a good leader is knowing when to practice gratitude
- Channeling Mindfulness
- Compassionate Leadership: Creating a Just, Inclusive and Mindful Society with Mirabai Bush
- Dinners With...
- Announcing Capstone 2020 Teams!
- Meet our 2020 Leadership Lab Teams!
- Leading Mindfully
- A Senior's Reflection on Peer Facilitating
- Expect Challenges
- Reflecting Back and Looking Forward
- From Leadership Lab, to Peer Facilitator, to Program Assistant
- Project Healthy Schools Global
- Learning to be an Effective Leader
- Leading Life with Dignity: A Challenge of Our Time
- Pause, Reflect, and Create
- What's Happening in the Lab?
- Capstone 3D Virtual Gallery
- Announcing the Break Away Podcast!
- BLI Advanced Fellow featured in M-LEAD's Leadership Lens Series!
- Two BLI Advanced Fellows Receive the Renowned MLK Spirit Award
- Stand Against Asian Violence
- BLI Hosts Alumni Panel
- Announcing the BLI's 2021 Capstone Cohort
- BLI Offers COVID-19 Hardship Grants
- ALA 175: Foundations in Leadership
- The Peer Facilitator Leadership Experience
- What's Happening in the Lab
- Capstone Boot Camp 2021
- Mindful Leader Reflection
- Learning to Lead with Compassion: A Mindful Leadership Retreat
- Okanagan Charter
- Foundations in Leadership, a Peer Facilitator Perspective
- Heart-Centered Leadership with Rebecca Irby
- Announcing the 2022 Leadership Certificate Cohort!
- Welcome the 2021-22 Mindful Leader Fellowship cohort!
- BLI Peace Leadership Retreat in Detroit
- BLI director awarded the Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award
- Seithur Sanitation Initiative receives the MLK Spirit Award
- The Michigan Difference Student Leadership Awards
- Feedback is Love
- Deepening the Foundations for Equity and Renewal
- Creating Leaders – Being a Peer Facilitator at the BLI
- M-LEAD Leadership Lens Feature: Kaitlyn Colyer
- M-LEAD Leadership Lens Feature: Mya Harris
- What's Happening in the Lab
- The Leadership Certificate at the University of Michigan: Cohort 1
- Color of Care Reflection
- Mindful Leader Retreat Recap
- Social Transformation, a Passionate Community of Scholars
- The Michigan Difference Student Leadership Awards
- Break Away Podcast
- BLI Weekend in Detroit
- Leadership Lens with Olivia O'Connell
- Leadership Lens with Becky Woolf
- Leadership Philosophy Reflection
- Senior Reflection, Renuka Murthi
- Dignity and Well-being in the Workplace: A French Perspective
- BLI – Year One
- Teaching Leadership, a Senior Reflection
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Being part of the BLI has taught me many important lessons—the value of belonging to a genuine community, mindful leadership, soft skills (such as public speaking and conflict resolution), and the importance of giving back, to name a few. However, nothing has resonated with me more than my favorite BLI habit, “start where you are.” All the habits are easy to read and understand, but internalizing them is an entirely different experience. In my case, internalizing “start where you are” felt like finally placing a critical puzzle piece that I’d been missing for all my life.
Before joining the BLI, I was a very impatient person—admittedly, I still kind of am. I was extremely intolerant to failure, and I’d give up on projects extremely easily when I inevitably encountered a roadblock that felt impossible to pass. This led to all of my goals seeming far too daunting to be worth attempting—I reasoned that it would be better not to try at all than to try to prove to myself that I couldn’t succeed. After all, it felt better to tell myself I wasn’t achieving what I want to achieve due to a lack of effort than a lack of ability. I grew complacent with the stagnation of my personal and professional growth, along with telling myself I’d “get around to” achieving all of my goals “eventually.”
Then, I began to engage with the BLI in several ways. First, I worked as a Leadership Teaching Fellow, which entailed teaching a class and mentoring student project teams on how to plan and execute projects. Through this class, I learned about fixed vs. growth mindset in a little more detail. I’d been exposed to the concepts before, but being an LTF made me realize that I was most definitely in a fixed mindset about myself. I’d used all my initial failures to label myself—stumbling over my words made me a “bad public speaker,” failing to resolve a conflict within a group made me a “bad mediator,” and so on. It was through my supervisor’s guidance that I learned that failure-based labels are useless—they stifle growth by casting failure in a negative light. I learned to view my less-than-perfect moments as opportunities for growth, and soon enough, I became more comfortable with failing over and over again because the satisfaction of growing outweighed the disappointment that accompanied messing up. This actually turned me into a good public speaker and mediator, which are two skills I definitely didn’t possess naturally.
As both an LTF and an Applied Leadership Fellow (ALF), the BLI position I filled after four semesters of teaching, I also learned that “failure” is a state people define for themselves, and this definition largely depends on the types of goals they set for themselves. Prior to the BLI, I had been setting quite vague, daunting, insurmountable goals for myself.
“Write a novel.”
“Launch that startup.”
“Learn Clair de Lune on the piano.”
Every time I had trouble figuring out how to phrase a sentence, working out my business plan, or learning a convoluted line of the song, I felt like such a failure—how could I not? I’d set so much distance between where I was at and what I considered “success.” As an LTF and ALF, I learned to set more manageable goals for myself. Building a house sounds daunting, as did the large goals I’d set for myself before, but reframing success in terms of laying a single brick made it so much easier to set myself in motion and actually work towards those goals without labeling myself as a failure for not achieving immediate total success.
In short, my experiences working for the BLI and working on self-development through the Leadership Certificate program taught me to accept, even embrace, failure for its value as a vehicle of growth and improvement. Avoiding failure may have been better for my ego, and it may have been the more comfortable option in the short-term, but swallowing my pride and letting myself experience those failures actually enabled me to get better at skills I’d previously concluded “couldn’t possibly be for me.” I also truly learned to start where I was by reframing success in terms of small steps that lead towards my larger overarching goals. I’m so thankful that the BLI has taught me to shift my views of failure and success because these changes in perspective have made me willing to take the first steps—and actually feel proud of taking those steps—of the many marathons I’d like to run.
— Renuka Murthi is a senior, majoring in business and minoring in statistics. She was involved in the BLI as a Peer Facilitator for four semesters and is now a BLI Applied Leadership Fellow on the grants and funding team. Outside the BLI, she enjoys getting involved in her consulting club, painting, playing piano, and writing. She plans to pursue careers in management consulting and writing fiction.